(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Today the Equal Rights Amendment Project at Columbia Law School and VoteEqualityUS have released a pocket version of the Constitution. You probably haven’t thought about your pocket Constitution since law school, but this new version is way better than that old one — that’s because this one contains a 28th Amendment, the Equal Rights Amendment.
The push for the ERA has taken on new life since Virginia became the 38th and final state needed to ratify the ERA. The battle for the ERA has been ongoing for 100 years, and though the number of states needed for ratification has been met, Congress imposed a time limit, which means there’s legal wrangling necessary before we see an official 28th Amendment. And as Ting Ting Cheng, Director of the ERA Project, notes, we really need to get on it already, “The United States is the only modern democracy that does not have explicit sex equality protections in its constitution. Having an ERA enshrined in the Constitution will inspire a new generation of leaders to revisit and modernize the constitutional ideal of equality for all, rather than settling for a broken system.”
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Kati Hornung, Director of VoteEqualityUS, reminds us that the version of the Constitution you’re most familiar with “purposefully excluded the majority of Americans. Since then, updates have brought us closer to equality for all, but we still lack gender equality in our founding document. The residual impact of this historical exclusion has never been clearer than in past months. We urgently need constitutional gender equality. All needs to mean all.”
And as one of my personal favorite law school professors, Katherine Franke, who is the Founding Faculty Director of the ERA Project, says:
“The ERA has the potential to inaugurate a society-wide effort to repair systemic sex based inequality and dismantle structural gender discrimination, far beyond what the 14th Amendment has accomplished. Adding the ERA to the U.S. Constitution makes sex-based equality part of our country’s DNA, just like right to free speech, due process, and religious liberty.”
Spokesperson for VoteEqualityUSA Liza Mickens, who is the great granddaughter of Maggie Walker, says formalizing the 28th Amendment is “important to dismantle the barriers to equality, to establish a more equal and just society. Through the Equal Rights Amendment, we can begin to live up our nations’ creed of liberty and justice for all.”
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