The Fourteenth Amendment says the government may not “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The degree to which it protects against sex and gender discrimination has long been a subject of hot debate.īecause gender is not explicitly covered under the existing amendments, McClellan said, case law has shown that it is harder to convince a court that unconstitutional sex- and gender-based discrimination has taken place than it is for, say, race-based discrimination or an unlawful freedom-of-speech restriction. “I would argue that gender protections are not in the Fourteenth Amendment, but they are covered in the Civil Rights Act,” says Jennifer McClellan, a Virginia state senator who was one of the lead patrons of her state’s resolution to ratify the federal ERA.
In the year 2022, when discrimination against women is much different than what it was when the ERA was introduced, what would the amendment actually do? There are debates about whether deadlines and rescissions are even valid in constitutional amendments about where such text should be in a proposed amendment for it to be considered valid and a lot of other in-the-weeds legalistic parsing.īut if we pull back from all of this, there is a deeper question I’ve been wondering about. Separately, five of the 38 states have since rescinded their ratification.įrom here, it only gets more complicated. That memo said the amendment is not valid because the deadline had already passed. The archivist of the United States, David Ferriero - the person who generally would be tasked with officially adding the amendment to the Constitution - has refused to add it, based on a memo by the Justice Department under President Donald Trump. Here’s the problem now, though: The original proposed amendment set a ratification deadline of 1979, which was extended until 1982. Now, the number of states is at the required three-quarters threshold. After decades of being stalled, three more states have ratified the amendment in the past few years: Nevada in 2017, Illinois in 2018, and then Virginia in 2020. But by 1977, only 35 states had ratified it.
EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT FULL
Why hasn’t the ERA become the law of the land yet? This is complicated, and full of disagreements at every level, so I’ll give an abridged version.The ERA was approved by Congress in 1972 and then sent to the states, three-quarters of which would need to ratify it to add it to the Constitution (that’s 38 states). His speech reignited debate over the amendment, which has arguably been ratified by the required number of states but has been stuck in legal purgatory since the 1970s.
Last week, President Joe Biden called on Congress to pass a resolution recognizing the ERA, which would prohibit any state from discriminating against a person on the basis of sex. The Equal Rights Amendment might finally become a part of the Constitution. Thanks to Maya Parthasarathy for helping to put together this newsletter.
We want to hear from readers who have had personal experiences with the law and how it changed business and women’s careers in the state. Did this law affect you? If yes, let us know. In 2018, California enacted a law requiring at least one woman on the board of every company based in the state. Happy Friday, rulers! Before we get to the newsletter, we have a request.
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