WENDY MURPHY: Democrats weak as court signals reversal on Roe.
Not a single person at the 2017 Women’s March said a word about the Equal Rights Amendment, which would establish women’s basic legal equality under the Constitution for the first time in history.
ERA advocacy groups asked for time to speak, so they could explain how the ERA would ensure that all laws are enforced fully and equally on behalf of women, but the people in charge said no. The huge crowd that gathered to talk about women’s suffering would learn nothing about the fact that the primary cause of that suffering is women’s second-class citizenship.
Telling women they should rally in our nation’s capital “as women” but only if they talk about everybody else’s problems is like telling Black Lives Matter they can have a protest, but not talk only about racism. Or telling the Anti-Defamation League that when they host a public gathering, they cannot focus on anti-Semitism.
No group fighting for basic human rights wants to be told they must water down their message.
By forbidding speakers to talk about the ERA Women’s March revealed itself not as an advocacy group for women but as a proxy for the Democratic Party, which would be fine if the Democrats actually cared about establishing women’s full legal equality, but they don’t.
If they did, the Biden administration would not currently be blocking the ERA and preventing it from being added to the Constitution. The ERA should already be in the Constitution because it became law when the last necessary state ratified it in January 2020, but the Trump administration blocked it.
Women then voted for Biden in droves assuming he would unblock it, but he refused. Yes, the ERA has a purported deadline that expired years ago, but many scholars agree the deadline is invalid, which liberated Biden to use his executive authority to validate it — yet he refused.
Biden is not only blocking the ERA today, he is also fighting against it in DC federal court. The DC court’s ruling is expected any day, and most believe the court will rule against the ERA, in part because the Biden administration is fighting against it.
The Democrats will be delighted if, when the ruling comes down, women are so focused on abortion they don’t notice how Biden helped kill a far more important law.
To be fair, a month and a half ago, Biden’s Supreme Court nominee couldn’t actually provide a definition of the word “woman,” or her opinion of when life begins.