RFK Jr. Can Put Women in the Constitution
When Roe v. Wade was overturned the Supreme Court literally took pregnant women out of the Constitution. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) will put them back in, as the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled recently in a recent decision where the Court said that the Pennsylvania State Constitution, which has its own Equal Rights Amendment, prohibits abortion restrictions because they deny women equal protection of the laws. The Pennsylvania ERA reads exactly the same as the federal one, so we need the federal ERA to be added to the Constitution so that women around the country will have the same abortion rights as women in Pennsylvania.
This won’t happen if we elect either Joe Biden or Donald Trump because both men blocked the ERA after it was ratified in 2020.
But Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says he’s different. He says he’s better than either Trump or Biden. If true, he needs to promise the American people that if elected, he will support women’s equality by putting the ERA in the Constitution where it belongs.
Until the ERA is in the Constitution, all laws and all rights, when applied to women, are subject to second-class enforcement. Only the ERA can stop all officials in all branches of government, state and federal, from treating women as second-class citizens.
The ERA states that “equality of rights” cannot be denied on the basis of sex. It passed Congress in 1972 and was ratified by the requisite number of states in 2020, but it has not yet been added to the Constitution because the Trump Administration in 2020, and then the Biden Administration in 2021, blocked it. (THIS LINK COVERS BOTH POINTS) Both major parties oppose women’s equality, but RFK Jr. has made clear that he is different from Biden – and Trump, and different is what women need.
RFK Jr. has made many campaign promises that have attracted millions of voters away from the anointed candidates. Women’s equality is another issue that can win him millions more votes because women are tired of watching both parties work against the ERA. Since the dawn of our nation, women have been denied legal equality under the United States Constitution, but the ERA will fix this and all RFK Jr. needs to do is pick up the phone on day one of his administration and direct the United States Archivist to put the ERA in the Constitution as our Twenty-Eighth Amendment. Trump and Biden refused to make the call. RFK Jr. is supposed to be different.
No President has the power to block a constitutional amendment after it has been ratified by three-fourths of the states, and yet the ERA remains blocked, illegally, because Trump and Biden chose to disregard the law. They said the ERA should be blocked because it was not ratified quickly enough after it was passed by Congress in 1972. But this excuse is belied by the fact that both parties supported another amendment that took 203 years to ratify.
The Twenty-Seventh Amendment was ratified by the states in 1992 – though there was a serious disagreement about whether it was valid because it had take. More than two centuries to ratify after passing Congress in 1789. The Archivist Don Wilson published the Twenty-Seventh Amendment in the Constitution ten days after it was ratified because President Bush did nothing to block it and Wilson made clear that it was not his job to settle the dispute about whether the amendment was valid given the long passage of time between congressional passage and final ratification by the states. Wilson was mandated to put the Twenty-Seventh Amendment in the Constitution because federal law said he must. Archivist David Ferriero was similarly mandated by federal law to put the ERA in the Constitution in 2020 but he declined after President Trump and then President Biden directed him not to. RFK Jr. can transcend the corruption on his first day in office and unblock the ERA with a simple phone call to the Archivist.
The unlawful presidential acts that blocked the ERA in 2020 and 2021 sit like a black cloud over the lives and well-being of every woman in America because, without the ERA, every woman is subject to different and worse treatment under all laws, simply because she’s female. From getting a dog license to freedom of speech, child custody laws, and even laws against slavery – every law, as a constitutional matter, can be applied in a manner that treats women differently and worse.
RFK Jr. can stop the madness with a phone call on day one of his presidency. He can tell the Archivist to follow the law and put the ERA in the Constitution because no Archivist in history has ever before refused to follow the law. Now retired Archivist Don Wilson recently said that if he were in office today and the President told him to put the ERA in the Constitution he would do it.
With the ERA in the Constitution, our nation would be greatly improved, and RFK Jr. has made clear that he is deeply concerned about the condition of our democracy. What better way to begin to repair our precious democracy than to elevate half the population out of their enslavement in second-class citizenship?
Women never deserved the inhumane status of second-class citizenship, but in 2024 it is unconscionable, inexcusable, and deeply unAmerican that the world’s leading democracy continues to subjugate women who pay their fair share of taxes and even give their lives in service to their country.
With the ERA in the Constitution, no court will ever again be able to rule that women deserve second-class treatment, as the Supreme Court did not only in Dobbs, but also in many other cases, such as the well-known VMI decision that reaffirmed women’s second-class citizenship while clouding the larger issue of women’s inequality by seeming to give women a victory by allowing them to attend military schools.
The ERA will once and for all establish a foothold in our nation’s foundational document and ensure for the first time in history that women are equal persons, entitled to equal treatment by all government officials and under all laws.
Not since President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation has a President had the opportunity to make such a monumental improvement to American Democracy with such little effort. The ERA is women’s Emancipation Proclamation. All we need is a campaign promise from RFK Jr. that on day one of his administration, he will pick up the phone and put the ERA in the Constitution where it belongs.
One of our country’s most important freedoms is that of free speech.
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