The ERA: still a bad idea

While claiming to benefit women, the ERA would actually have taken away some of women's rights. We based our arguments on the writings of pro-ERA law professors, among them current Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The amendment would require women to be drafted into military combat any time men were conscripted, abolish the presumption that the husband should support his wife and take away Social Security benefits for wives and widows. It would also give federal courts and the federal government enormous new powers to reinterpret every law that makes a distinction based on gender, such as those related to marriage, divorce and alimony.

Throughout the 1970s, we presented legislators with our arguments. I testified at 41 state hearings. Meanwhile, the pro-amendment crowd could not show how the ERA would confer any benefit on women, not even in employment, because employment laws were already gender-neutral.

In 1977, ERA advocates realized that they were approaching the seven-year time limit three states short of the 38 needed for ratification, so they persuaded Congress to give them $5 million to stage a conference, called International Women's Year, in Houston. The conference featured virtually every known feminist leader and received massive media coverage. But it backfired. When conference delegates voted for taxpayer funding of abortions and the entire gay rights agenda, Americans discovered the ERA's hidden agenda.

A couple of months later, a reporter asked the governor of Missouri if he was for the ERA. "Do you mean the old ERA or the new ERA?" he replied. "I was for equal pay for equal work, but after those women went down to Houston and got tangled up with the abortionists and the lesbians, I can tell you ERA will never pass in the Show-Me State."

With the expiration clock ticking -- March 22, 1979 -- and ratification uncertain, feminists appealed to Carter and Congress for a time extension and won. The ratification deadline was extended to June 30, 1982.

The American people were so turned off by the extension that no additional state ever passed the ERA. In Idaho vs. Freeman, a federal court ruled that the time extension was unconstitutional and that states could constitutionally withdraw their previous support. Five did.

The Supreme Court subsequently ruled that the lawsuit was "moot" because the ERA had not been ratified by either the original deadline or the extension.

ERA supporters repeatedly tried to revive the amendment, reintroducing it in Congress in 1983. But the House rejected it. They then tried to persuade individual states to pass the ERA as state constitutional amendments. They got nowhere.

The current plan to revive the amendment is so outrageously dishonest -- for instance, backers say both previous time limits can be ignored, that prior court rulings are irrelevant and that the previous state ratifications are still valid -- that it's a wonder anybody could argue it with a straight face. No matter its new name, the same text that has been voted down, again and again, will again be rejected by the American people.