‘Equal Rights’ Time Warp
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Last week a group of Democratic leaders and feminist activists announced a campaign to resuscitate the Equal Rights Amendment. While the first campaign to pass this amendment stalled in the 1980s, supporters claim it will sail through in today’s political climate. As Sen. Barbara Boxer told a cheering, mostly female crowd, “Elections have consequences, and isn’t it true those consequences are good right now?” But the ERA would have no good consequences — none — and many terrible ones. The ERA, first introduced in 1923, was passed by Congress and sent to the states for ratification in 1972. It says: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” What could be fairer or more reasonable? But the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment already bans unreasonable state discrimination against women, while the Civil Rights Act and other federal statutes ban unreasonable private discrimination. A robust body of law has developed since 1972 banning sex discrimination in jury selection, unemployment benefits and family property law, and promoting women’s progress in the workplace, sports and other arenas. Anyone who believes the ERA would be applied with common sense has not been paying attention. Its proponents have an entirely different agenda: to ban reasonable forms of discrimination. By changing the constitutional standard from “equal protection” to “equality of rights,” the ERA would hand radical feminist groups such as the National Organization for Women and the National Women’s Law Center a powerful weapon to wage war on what they view as “the gender system.” Consider, for example, what happened in 2004 when the U.S. Department of Education changed its regulations to allow public schools to experiment with single-sex classes. Feminist groups were enraged; NOW compared the new policy to separating children by race, claiming that it “perpetuates sex-stereotyping . . . Girls, as the traditionally subordinated group, are likely to experience a badge of inferiority as a result of being grouped on the basis of sex.” The ERA would constitutionalize this point of view, requiring judges to apply the same “strict scrutiny” they would use to evaluate a law or policy that segregates people by race. I once debated celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred who was suing the Boy Scouts for excluding girls. She accused the Scouts of practicing “gender apartheid.” She lost the case, but the ERA would guarantee its success. Boy Scouts would be forced to “integrate”; sororities and fraternities would be eliminated or required to merge; religious institutes that do not allow ordination of women would lose their tax exempt status. Single-sex schools and summer camps for boys would be phased out. Tolerating them would be tantamount to tolerating separate but equal schools for blacks and whites or tax deductions for segregationist academies or religious cults. More : online.wsj.com |