The new episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast — audio and transcript here (at Podscribe).
This was annoying to listen to for so many reasons, but I will leave it to you to discover most of them. I'll just pick out one glaring problem: The abortion right that was found in Roe and rejected in Dobbs was never based on equality. It was based on substantive due process, sometimes phrased as privacy, found in the Due Process Clause. If the ERA could be a source of a new right to abortion, the Equal Protection Clause is already there to serve the same purpose. One of the reasons the ERA failed back in the 1970s was because many people believed that all the equality rights women needed could be found in the Equal Protection Clause. What good was a new text to puzzle over?
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"(WASHINGTON, D.C., Dec. 16, 2024) — National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) joins Shattering Glass and the League of Women Voters who lead total of 143 organizations and professional associations from across the country in calling on President Biden to instruct the US Archivist (“Archivist”) to publish the Equal Rights Amendment (“ERA”) as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution.
The ERA was originally introduced in Congress on December 10, 1923, passed overwhelming by Congress in 1972, and ratified and became the 28th Amendment on December 27, 2020. However, the ERA has yet to be included in the Constitution."
I guess I missed that action by Congres on 12-27-2020. My recollection is that the states didn't ratify it.
But go right ahead Jill Biden. "Rescue" Joe's legacy and put your husband up for that call. You're the Queen of America!
Abortion is homicide, elective abortion is murder prosecuted under state statutory laws and as a hate crime under Loving. Women have equal rights as men under the Constitution that does not discriminate under the Diversity (e.g. racism, sexism, ageism) umbrella.
If you go back a ways, there was an argument that women are not protected by the post-Civil War amendments in the same way that men are: neither voting nor owning property were automatic. Divorce raised a number of issues, but one of them was that men were likely to come into marriage with more property than women: what did a woman get in the case of divorce?
Then there was: OK, the law is the law for men and women. Always a strong case for community property in divorce: as contentious as this might be, any other attempt at percentages and so on was likely to be worse. But: biology still makes life different for women than men, just as for beautiful as opposed to ugly, strong as opposed to weak, and so on. Those are the breaks. Military careers, especially related to "combat," still raise some issues.
For the woke today: biology must be denied, women and trans people should be free to choose whatever life they want, at least as free as cis males have traditionally been. Equality under law ought to mean contrary to nature, if that is what an individual wants, not accepting the limits of nature. I assume a new version of the ERA would say something about trans people, people who want assisted suicide, people who want to completely transform their bodies, and so on.
Young men came into marriage with few assets but higher earning potential. That was the difference. Historically a wife might even come with a dowry, which the husband could then dissipate.
But mainly women had no rights but for the hard work of feminists getting their property rights into state law. Props.
The SCOTUS is standing Constitutional Convention with 5 members. Seems easier to just pack the court or get 5 libtard judges.
"This was annoying to listen to for so many reasons, but I will leave it to you to discover most of them."
Pass. Thanks for the offer, though.
The best part of a fiat ERA amendment implementation is that it would immediately supersede all the Title IX decisions that made women "more equal' to overcome past discrimination. It is more likely to undo a lot of what Progressives have imposed in the last 50 years than to support it.
And if women are equal, there is no argument to not have them register with Selective Service or be drafted. After all a majority of jobs in the military today are not infantry, or even harms-way combat. And a draft of women would be a way to increase the number of births as an abortion would return the woman to full duty quicker and not be reason for discharge, but pregnancy would mean nearly a year of less than full duty even if the child was given up after birth.
But we do have at least on Supreme Court justice who can't define a woman, so the decisions could be amusing though also a sad comment on the state of American society.
You might want to specify the time period, location and governing religion before making the "mainly women had no rights" statement. In many time periods, the husband was required to maintain the wives property. But it was also true that when wives were dependents of their husband, they were also not liable for criminal acts done at his behest except for murder and treason.
Consider this 140 yr old observation on marriage
"With us, all this has been absolutely changed. The clear and almost effected tendency of to-day is to consider that the marriage relation makes no difference whatever in the status of the two married persons, except to affect the descent of their property after death, and to make it a penal offence for the husband to refuse to support his wife."
--The Ethics of Democracy by F.J. Stimson. Scribner’s Magazine (1887)
A big change was in the 1920s when middle class daughters and maiden aunts left the family home for independent lives and jobs. Slowly this stopped being seen as a reflection on the inability of the father/man to support his female relations.
"The idea of the sheltered lady was of course difficult to maintain in a country in which 20.4 per cent of the female population were engaged in working for a living. This unhappy fact of life caused the moralists of the day deep concern. If there was a steadily increasing number of women working in offices, it was understood that they were victims of unfortunate financial circumstance; their fathers, poor fellows, were unable to support them properly; and it was hoped that their inevitable contacts with rude men of business would not sully their purity."
---Allen, Frederick Lewis. The Big Change: America Transforms Itself, 1900–1950 (1952)
Middle class women gained parity with poor women who were always working at jobs and often living independently. See the "Charity Girls", poor urban shop girls living the city life making frank sexual exchanges for being "treated" to nights out on the town, i.e., dating.
Not happening. At the time, the ERA was seen as the screeching of a lot of crazy women who wanted to be men and the public rejected it.
After this year's performance after the election, most people see that view as validated.
No offense, just callin' 'em like I see 'em.
After the ERA is adopted, and women are "equal", then I assume we will get rid of all of the gender-based diminished physical requirements for live-saving jobs.
Firefighters, military, police, Secret Service should only have one very high physical standard. (For the people in direct physical engagements.)
If 99% of the female recruits cannot pass it, only then we will have truly capable people on the "front lines" and fewer "saveable" people will die.
*** I agree that my comment is sexist. Until there are multiple biological women playing middle linebacker in the NFL, I will prefer that firefighters are strong enough to carry my wife and children out of a fire if I am incapacitated.
Have you noticed that nobody is shooting at Democrats? So of course, they think they can get away with anything ... and do.
J6 proved to the Democrats that getting elected only seems easier. They then have to survive.
Unfortunately, on December 17 the Archives office responded with a big thumbs-down on unilateral action, as the Associated Press reports:
"In a rare joint statement, the archivist and deputy archivist of the United States said Tuesday that the 1970s-era Equal Rights Amendment cannot be certified without further action by Congress or the courts, as Democrats press President Joe Biden to act unilaterally on its ratification before he leaves office next month.
Congress, say the archivists, must retroactively lift the deadline or federal courts must rule them invalid."
so..
If we are going to disregard the text in the proposed amendment that requires an expiration date..
Can't we ALSO disregard OTHER text in the proposed amendment too?
In FACT, doesn't a NEW INTERPRETATION of the proposed amendment state that:
women are NOT equal?
women are NOT citizens?
women are chattel, that belong to their fathers, until Sold to a husband?
I'm just saying, that IF we can disregard text we don't like.. Who decides* want text we DO like?
who decides* Which is WHY the Democrat Party desperately needs to pack the Supreme Court
If the ERA passed wouldn't husbands and lovers have an equal say in abortion decisions made by their mates?
According to Wikipedia, the Supreme Court has already ruled in 1982 that the ERA failed. It did not get 38 States by March 1979. Game Over. I don't know why it's even being discussed forty years later.
"But we do have at least on Supreme Court justice who can't define a woman..."
Oh, I don't know... I think she could have, but then, she would have been abandoned by the left and wouldn't have gotten a position on the SC.
Because, like the PA democrat election official said, nobody follows the law anymore.
I, for one, hope Biden does instruct the archivist to do this- it will be educational for everyone.
Because Democrats cheat, and expect to getaway with it, because they often do so.
The oracular style of 19th-century blowhards is one of the great weaknesses of our Constitution.
In the early 1970s a strong case could be made for the Equal Rights Amendment. I know because I was there. In 1973 I dated a raven-haired beauty who was a graduate student working on a dissertation on the chemistry of radioactive elements. Back in those days women were advised not to show off their intelligence to prospective husbands so we had been dating about four or five months when she allowed as how her graduate level courses in nuclear physics and in quantum mechanics were easy aces because “PDEs are easy.” Ah, honey, I have a BS in math and was working on my own dissertation in computer science, and I did not regard partial differential equations as “easy.” But right then I knew I had to marry this woman if she would have me. (As grad students we married over Christmas break — our fiftieth anniversary will be week after next.)
After four years of working on her Ph.D. she had overheard her dissertation advisor telling another professor that “If you give a Ph.D. to a woman she’ll just take a job away from a man who needs to feed his family.” So right then it became clear why grad students blessed with dicks instead of brains were being moved ahead of her in the queue for time on the cyclotron, and why when she did get time, it was only when the beam was wrong for her experiments. She had to change professors and start over on a new topic.
But that was then. This is fifty years later. It’s been decades since I last had to counsel a male subordinate that his female colleagues and staff were not to be addressed as “dearie” and that they were skilled professionals — same as him. And even before the 1970s turned into the 1980s it became clear that the point of the ERA was to enrich lawyers through frivolous lawsuits initiated by angry women who could not accept that their job performance really does not measure up to reasonable expectations. No thank you! Lawyers are rich enough as they are.
If the ERA could be rephrased so as to prevent men from participating in women's sport under all circumstances, it would pass in a heartbeat.
Full text of the 28th Amendment (Equal Rights Amendment, not Newsome's gun amendment)
“Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
So "Separate but equal facilities" will be outlawed under the Brown decision, right?
I would be for the ERA if I thought it would get women to just STFU about wanting equal but special rights.
I doubt that it will. I don't have a problem with women getting special rights. I just wish I didn't have to listen to all the whinging about equal rights AND special rights.
John Henry
Under the federal constitution women have identical voting rights to men. It is the states, not the Feds who restricted exercise of that right.
19A acknowledges that women have always had the right to vote, it comes from God (natural rights). 19A said the states could not restrict the right.
All of the amendments are of that form. They prevent Congress, states or other from restricting rights to speech, assembly, religion, guns, freedom from search and so forth.
The constitution does not grant anyone any rights. Rights are not government's to grant.
John Henry
I'm all for court packing now. Let's bump the Supremes to 15 in 25.
John Henry
The Federal Archivist was all in when he decided to treat Trump's post presidency different than all of the others, and call an FBI raid on his property to have his wife's panties rummaged, when Joe Biden had public photos of a cardboard box full of classified documents in his garage floating around, for which there was no concern, and before any courts could make any decisions about Trump's right to have the documents.
What happened? The archivist used to be such a stand up guy for our side!
I am old enough to remember when a man was required to support his wife the rest of her life after a divorce. I know a man right now, 93, who is still paying $900 a month to his ex-wife, 28 years after the divorce.
So props for ending that!
Sure as shit, the ERA would be used as a legal cudgel to take away men's rights and add to wymyn's.
Why not 51 now that Canada is about to become a state.
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