I have a unisex bathroom in my house.

It's nice. I like the tile.

Excellent news! Time to start writing to Washington and Raleigh.

Ugh, what a horrid old hag. You know, it's kind of hypocritical of her to have a law degree and all that when she thinks the wimmens are only good at babymaking and shitty diaper cleaning. Too bad idiots like that don't die away along with their old,tired ideas.

It took us 144 years to give women the right to vote. Now, after 87 more years, the Women's Equality Amendment is controversial.

Pathetic.

Any state legislator or federal representative that votes against this should have to apologize to every female relative and friend they have (and every woman they ever introduce themselves to, besides).

and deny Social Security benefits for housewives and widows.

How's that work? I was utterly unaware that Social Security benefits were denied for househusbands and widowers.

Thats odd. The 21st century and we still find equal rights a subject of debate?

This should be a non conversation in my book.

I think anyone even debating this should merit a very close look into his/her political career and personal life. Do we even want these people debating equal rights, as well as many other very important issues?

How some of these people even get close to the 51% vote is beyond me.

I for one, think it is owed to the female population - as a bare minimum to answer for the almost 200 years of oppression.

i love how Schlafly decided that, as a white woman of means, with the appropriate social status and politcal affliation, she gets to dictate what the rest of us baby-machines get...cow

Here is a shameless plug. Chapter 4 of the book titled "The Angry Right" (9781591024637) is a critique of Phyllis Schafly's own retro views.

Does anyone other than a few pathetic IWF cronies even pay attention to Phyllis Schafly anymore? If the anti-amendment crowd wants to make any real impact, they need to get a new spokesperson because Schafly is just too easy to pick apart.

Does anyone other than a few pathetic IWF cronies even pay attention to Phyllis Schafly anymore?

Well...apparently she works the College Republican circuit pretty hard with the anti-feminist and anti-immigrant talks.

I saw her a couple of years ago, and she replied to a question by saying that "feminism had never done anything for her". It was so infuriatingly ignorant, that she actually thinks she can live her life in society today and completely deny every women's rights movement in history helped her.

I can't wait until that dried-up old bitch kills over.

Fuckin'.

When she finally does, I propose chartering a bus and sponsoring a feminist fieldtrip to spit on her grave. ;)

Everyone should be thrilled to pass the ERA now! MRAs and other anti-feminists have long feared that women have become more powerful in our society than men and boys. But now the ERA will solve all those problems by guaranteeing men equality under the law!

Oh, Happy Feminist, if for no other reason, I love you for that brilliant analysis.

In the 1970s, Schlafly and others argued that the ERA would lead to women being drafted by the military and to public unisex bathrooms. Today, she warns lawmakers that its passage would compel courts to approve same-sex marriages and deny Social Security benefits for housewives and widows.

I love the mix of slippery-slopes here.

You have things that are utterly fair like "women being drafted into the military [if men are]" and "approve same sex marriages" -- and if it takes the ERA to finally bring this fairness about, let's get the ERA passed already -- being bandied about as if they are horrific, potentially un-intended, consequences of the ERA.

You have things that ya gotta wonder how they could happen even with the ERA (as Jeff points out, do we deny social security to househusbands and widowers? of course, if we do, allowing them benefits the same as housewives and widows would also satisfy the ERA -- so wouldn't the ERA be a good thing?).

And you have things up about which I frankly cannot work myself, so to speak -- unisex bathrooms? I guess some have pointed out a safety issue involved, which might need to be addressed -- but most people tend to freak out about the privacy aspect. Meanwhile, some of us guys have "piss anxiety" even without unisex bathrooms -- I use a stall when I can anyway, so why should I care if there's wimins in the bathroom with me?

So what's the problem with the ERA? Sounds like a good idea to me.

I posted this one another board and the biggest question I've been getting is "why?"

They've cited the 14th Amendment: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Now I have to admit, I don't see why this law, or many other laws we have actually, are necessary when it says here in plain english that every citizen is entitled to equal protection of the laws.

However, I don't believe the people behind the ERA thought, even with the 14th in place, that the ERA was redundant, so, can someone help me here? Why is it necessary?

Why do we need the ERA if we have the "equal protection" clause of the 14th Amendment?

The 14th Amendment was ratified after the Civil War, in 1868, in order to deal with race discrimination. (Ironically, it added the word "male" to the Constitution for the first time in referring to the electorate.) It was first applied to prohibit sex discrimination in 1971, in the Supreme Court decision Reed v. Reed, but it still allowed legal differentiation by sex to stand in many cases. Several subsequent Supreme Court decisions (Craig v. Boren in 1976, United States v. Commonwealth of Virginia in 1996) have raised the standard of protection against sex discrimination under the 14th Amendment, but sex discrimination claims still do not get the highest level of judicial scrutiny ("strict scrutiny") that race discrimination claims get. If ERA opponents believe that women already have the full protection of the Constitution through the 14th Amendment, they should have no objection to clarifying that guarantee through the specific wording of the ERA.

Why is the ERA needed?

The Equal Rights Amendment affirms that both women and men hold equally all of the rights guaranteed by the U. S. Constitution. It would provide a remedy for sex discrimination for both women and men, and give equal legal status to women for the first time in our country’s history.

The most important effect of the ERA would be to clarify the status of sex discrimination for the courts, whose decisions still show confusion about how to deal with such claims. For the first time, “sex� would be a suspect classification like race. It would require the same high level of “strict scrutiny� and have to meet the same high level of justification – a “necessary� relation to a “compelling� state interest – as the classification of race.

Even shorter: if the 14th was intended to apply to gender, you wouldn't have needed the 19th Amendment.

It's absolutely nuts the ERA hasn't been passed yet.