Penna Dexter

In one of his final lawless acts, just three days before leaving office, President Biden proclaimed that the Equal Rights Amendment is “the law of the land.” Congress passed this amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1972 and gave it seven years to achieve ratification by three fourths of the states.

Proponents claimed the ERA would protect women’s rights by prohibiting discrimination based on sex.

Thirty-five states ratified. In a constitutionally questionable move, Congress extended the deadline three more years. Still the amendment failed to garner the necessary support of 38 states. Five states rescinded their ratifications. The ERA expired. It’s dead.

The ERA would not protect women’s rights. Over a decade of consideration, it became clear it would severely undermine many commonsense protections for women and could be used to end even modest restrictions on abortion.

According to Kristin Waggoner, President of Alliance Defending Freedom, the ERA is worse today than it was in the 70’s. She points out: “The word ‘woman’ never appears in the ERA. Instead,” she writes, “the amendment focuses on ‘sex’ — a word increasingly in danger of becoming meaningless as ideologues push to disassociate the term from biology and replace it with ‘gender identity.’”

Under state and local ERA-type policies, women and girls are already seeing their physical privacy, their athletic opportunities, even their physical safety compromised.

In a misguided attempt to revive the ERA, Nevada and Illinois passed bills to “ratify” the amendment. Virginia did so in 2020. Supporters claimed victory. But, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Council, twice, declared the ERA “expired.” So did the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Archivist of the United States would be the person responsible for the amendment’s publication. Dr. Colleen Shogan and her deputy declared, just last month, that the ERA “cannot be certified as part of the Constitution due to established legal, judicial, and procedural decisions.”

Someone must kill the Zombie ERA.