President Biden, you vowed to add ratified ERA to our Constitution. Time's up. | Opinion
More than 165 international constitutions include gender equality, and ours should, too.
In January 2020, Virginia ratified the Equal Rights Amendment, becoming the final state needed to add about 170 million women and girls to our Constitution.
All constitutional requirements have been met, according to the American Bar Association.
And yet.
For the past four years, America has been in a constitutional crisis. In 2020, for the first time in our nation’s history, publication of a fully ratified amendment was stopped by the executive branch.
Why is the ratified ERA still not added to the Constitution?
The VAratifyERA campaign expected that with Virginia’s ratification, the fully ratified 28th Amendment would be published in the Federal Register.The Trump administration's Office of Legal Counsel, claiming a deadline had passed, stopped the national archivist from publishing, retaining the right to discriminate on the basis of sex.
In 2020, presidential candidate Joe Biden campaigned on fixing this mistake, but now his time is running out.
Article V states an amendment “shall be valid to all intents and purposes” after three-fourths of the states have ratified. Shall means shall. Ask any lawyer. It does not mean maybe.
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If this is not a constitutional crisis, I don’t know what is.
Opinion:There's no deadline on women's equality. Add the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.
Congress approved the ERA in 1972. The amendment 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.”
Until we add this amendment, our Constitution’s equality gap is the size of 170 million women and girls. It was written at a time when women and girls were considered the property of the men in their lives. Coverture, a demure-sounding word, assigned adult women the same legal status as children. Under coverture, women could neither sign a contract nor keep their earned wages.
Unless we close this historical equality gap, girls will continue learning that men designed America’s legal system with themselves in charge and women as property. They will sit in classrooms disappointed in the many generations of adults who have been unable to, or chosen not to, correct this legal legacy of oppression.
In class, they will also learn about American judges reading our Constitution as if nothing has changed since George Washington was president.
As such interpretations become more commonplace ‒ and without updating our founding document to reflect today’s expectations ‒ these girls will remain vulnerable to political whims.
President Biden, let the national archivist do her job
For more than 100 years, powerful men have held back our nation with procedural hurdles, such as extra-constitutional timelines and filibusters. Nobody knows which child will be the next great inventor or who will provide creative solutions to our biggest challenges. When we leave an equality gap this large, we suppress the future of our nation.
It is time to demand deeds, not words, from a sitting president who celebrates his legacy of championing and protecting women while lazily pointing a finger in other directions ‒ rather than instructing our national archivist, Colleen Shogan, to do her job.
This final step ‒ publication ‒ will certify our Constitution’s newest amendment and provide all Americans, especially women and the LGBTQ+ community, their long-awaited constitutional guarantee against sex discrimination by their government.
President Biden has the rarest of opportunities to cement his legacy of equity and equality into the Constitution. He simply has to instruct our national archivist to publish equality in the Constitution. That's it.
Legal historians, like professors David Pozen and Thomas Schmidt, remind us that almost every constitutional amendment had a messy path until we the people collectively believed that an amendment was final. Let us believe the American Bar Association, representing more than 400,000 attorneys, when they say the process is complete.
Just as the Women’s March brought solidarity to the streets and #MeToo lit up our social feeds, American women must come together immediately to demand tangible, indelible results.
Time is up.
Women are mobilizing, and VoteEquality has moved our headquarters to Washington, D.C. Let us come together in honor of the millions of women who dreamed of gender equality but did not live to see it added to our Constitution.
Help us ensure the entire nation understands we are so close to closing our constitutional gender equality gap. Bring visibility by wearing all black on Black Friday or until publication.
Raise this issue in the streets and in your social feeds. Productively engage friends and neighbors. Calls to government officials are not visible and are too easily ignored. It is time to champion equality publicly, loudly enough for the president to hear.
Ask leaders everywhere what they will do to close our constitutional equality gap in the next two months.
Gender equality feels more fragile than ever before. It has never been more important for our government to follow the simple process outlined in Article V of our Constitution.
History is watching. President Biden, take action before it is too late.
Kati Hornung ran the successful VAratifyERA campaign in Virginia and is now the executive director of VoteEquality, a national, nonpartisan, grassroots campaign promoting equal rights for all Americans. She credits her children for reigniting her passion for equality and fairness in our Constitution, and invites all gender-equality advocates to observe Black Friday as a day to honor those who worked for gender equality and did not live to see our constitutional equality gap closed. We will be in front of the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
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