Patricia Arquette is Right: We Need an ERA

[niyad]

Patricia Arquette is Right: We Need an ERA




At Sunday night’s Academy Awards, Oscar winner Patricia Arquette used her moment at the podium to speak out for women’s equality. Accepting the award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Boyhood, Arquette said,
To every woman who gave birth to every citizen and taxpayer of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights. It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America.

Backstage, Arquette elaborated on her plea:
It is time for women. Equal means equal. It’s inexcusable that we go around the world and we talk about equal rights for women in other countries and we don’t … have equal rights for women in America. … People think we have equal rights; we won’t until we pass … the [Equal Rights Amendment] once and for all.
. . . . .




But Arquette is certainly right: What American women—of every race, class and sexual orientation—need now is Constitutionally enshrined equality, and that means an Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA was first introduced in Congress in 1972 and was approved by the House and Senate. But because Constitutional amendments require ratification by 38 states—and the ERA fell short by three—the amendment never became part of the Constitution. Now, Rep. Jackie Speier (D.-Calif) and Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.) have proposed resolutions that would remove the ratification deadline, creating an opportunity for three more states to ratify the ERA and reach the 38-state threshold. Also, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) have authored bills that mirror the language of the original ERA. Theirs would require Congress to pass the ERA again and send it to the states for ratification (in other words, start the process over).

Feminists support both proposals—how we get the ERA doesn’t matter, but enshrining gender equality in the Constitution does. It’s the beginning of a strategy to untangle the intersectional web of oppression that ensnares so many Americans. Equal pay doesn’t just affect the upper echelons of Hollywood—low-wage workers, disproportionately women of color, deserve fair wages.

http://msmagazine.com/blog/2015/02/23/patricia-arquette-is-right-we-need-an-era/

[onehandle]

1. Sit down, ladies. The GOP holds the Congress and the majority of Governorships/state houses/senates.

Darn it all to heck!

[niyad]

2. you are far more restrained than I about this dreadful situation.

[marym625]

5. I have been working to get the ERA passed since I was 11

I'm 51. I'm pissed. My first door to door was when I was 11. First time speaking to state Reps I was 12. First time with NOW in malls, etc I was 15. And I haven't stopped.

I'm right there with you. This is just misogyny and nothing else.

[sheshe2]

3. KnR!

[marym625]

4. I don't understand why

SJ15 and HJ113 haven't been introduced yet. I would think there are enough sponsors. Though with all the new Republicans, we might have waited too long

[freshwest]

6. Let's see if they can overcome... whatever it is that's wrong now. Of course,

Schafly, Coulter, Ryan, Paul, the Birchers, and the rest are still around. The the GOP 'replacement' for the ACA guts all the provisions for women that Obama put into it.

Now is the time for those who are still Democrats to get on board and see it to the finish line. I really thought it'd pass back in the seventies, yet we did not get through the states. Some states did pass their own versions of the ERA.

The same opponents that were against it then, have doubled down. I wonder if a poll at DU would give an indication of the level of support to bridge the equality gap?

[Jim Lane]

7. It's a tactical mistake to pitch the ERA based on wage inequality.

Sex discrimination in employment is already illegal, and the ERA wouldn't affect private-sector discrimination anyway.

The Ms. magazine article partially recognizes this, by describing the ERA as "the beginning of a strategy" (my emphasis). Still, the rest of the paragraph is all about wages, and the connection with ERA isn't explained. Consequences are that the argument for the ERA is unnecessarily weak (at least in the eyes of any state legislator who happens to know the basics of current EEO law) and that ERA supporters will get their hopes too high, thinking that ratification would do more about the wage issue than it actually would.