The idea of the ERA in America is now 98 years old.
After all this time, it’s still alive as an idea. Cheers!
But it’s still just an idea. Tears.
Terry Van Duyn, former NC State Senator, brought the ERA to life for me when she spoke on Zoom to the Transylvania County Democratic Women on June 28.
She began with, “Why do we need an ERA?” The answers:
Now, the only right the U. S. Constitution guarantees to women is the right to vote.
Now, laws protecting women (such as Title IX, Equal Pay, the Violence Against Women Act) can be overturned or not renewed.
It would provide a constitutional basis for claims of gender violence.
It would recognize women as historically subject to discrimination.
The ERA would have obligated companies like Hobby Lobby to consider the discriminatory impact of their claim to religious freedom on the women in their company.
Maybe all this, above, is why Sam Ervin, Jr., below, is sputtering against NC support for the ERA, with his finger waving in the air. He won.
Our need for an ERA hasn’t changed much since 1977. Did you know the gender pay gap in North Carolina actually grows with more education?
In the 1940’s when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a teenager, her mother was marching in suffragette parades in New York City. In 2020 Ginsburg said in an interview that “suffragettes had to sell votes for women to an all-male audience [in Congress] and that was no easy task.”
During her professional years, Ginsburg kept ERA values visible and centered for the nation. She said,
Every constitution in the world written since 1950 has the equivalent of an equal right amendment, and we don’t. I would like to show my granddaughters that the equal citizenship stature of men and women is a fundamental human right.
Last month in her talk to us about the need for an ERA, Terry Van Duyn had one more point. I say, need there be another?
The ERA would establish the U. S. as a global leader on women’s rights.