Mary Anne Case: The Supreme Court Has Delivered on Many of the Equal Rights Amendment's Promises

The Supreme Court Has Delivered on Many of the E.R.A.'s Promises

I wonder how Phyllis Schlafly felt when she realized that everything she had warned the Equal Rights Amendment would legalize – women in combat and on high school sports teams, same sex-­marriage and adoption of children by gay couples, mothers paying child support to fathers who did child care, even unisex toilets –­­ had come to pass anyway.

Indeed, the current constitutional law of sex discrimination is almost exactly what E.R.A. supporters in the 1970s hoped for from the E.R.A. and what Schlafly feared. This is in no small measure thanks to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, now a Supreme Court Justice but in the 1970s a litigator for the American Civil Liberties Union Women’s Rights Project. Ginsburg won her first Supreme Court case striking down sex distinctions in law at just about the same time as Schlafly began her anti­-E.R.A. campaign.

Over the last four decades, the Supreme Court has followed Ginsburg’s lead and consistently interpreted the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause to hold unconstitutional any sex distinctions in law or in government action based on what Ginsburg was to call “overbroad generalizations about the different talents, capacities, or preferences of males and females,” the very sorts of stereotypes Phyllis Schlafly spent a lifetime unsuccessfully trying to enshrine in the law.

Read more at The New York Times