Justice Scalia Revitalizes Equal Rights Amendment Movement

When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia declared in a recent interview with the California Lawyer that the Constitution doesn't protect women against discrimination, I wasn't surprised. And neither were plenty of women's rights advocates. I mean, we've only been fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) for almost a 90 years now for exactly that reason.

I knew that, one day, some powerful person who could jeopardize women's equality was going to come out and say, well, constitutionally, sexism and discrimination is a-okay. That's why Kimberly Voss writes in Women's eNews that ERA supporters should give Scalia "a standing ovation right about now." Because the concerns that women's equality is not protected by the Constitution have regularly been pooh-poohed, undermining the ability of advocates to make progress on the addition of the Equal Rights Amendment. But though many court interpretations have applied the 14th Amendment's equal protections clause (created regarding race) to sex discrimination, we knew that it's just not clearly spelled out enough. Now, Scalia's remarks have proven the point.

And not just proven the point, but galvanized a fresh movement for the ratification of the ERA. On Wednesday, National Organization for Women (NOW) President Terry O'Neill, Feminist Majority President Eleanor Smeal, and other prominent women's rights advocates joined Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) in a press conference to express the vital need for the Equal Rights Amendment. "All modern Constitutions adopted since WWII have explicitly included provisions guaranteeing women equal rights," Smeal pointed out. But the United States remains a beacon of sexism.

The history of the ERA is a lengthy, dragged out, depressing process: introduced to Congress in 1923, finally passed in 1972, then going to its grave three states short of ratification in 1982. In recent years, women's rights advocates have pursued a "three-state strategy" to get those final votes of support from enough of the fifteen delinquent states — even though the time limit imposed by Congress had passed, the 203 years late ratification of the 27th Amendment gave them hope.

Rep. Maloney and Sen. Menendez are the chief sponsors of a new bill to pass the ERA through Congress once again, restart the ratification process, and avoid any legal battles over whether an old piece of legislation can be ratified decades past the deadline. With Scalia's spark, we can expect to see sustained action from women's rights activists and a renewed fervor of organizing around this issue.

The text of the Equal Rights Amendment is — or should be — unobjectionable: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex." Simple, straightforward, and unambiguous. Something Scalia couldn't look at and claim that women's equality is not protected by the Constitution. Something we need today.

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