Equal Rights Amendment

[SingingAnalyst]

TUESDAY, JANUARY 18, 1977-- Indiana becomes the 38th state to ratify the ERA, making it the law of the land.

Efforts to rescind ratification in NE, TN, ID, and KY had all failed. Close votes in both houses in FL, IL, and LA provided the necessary cushion, with IN the last state needed to ratify for the Amendment for it to become part of the U.S. Constitution.

Outgoing President Gerald R. Ford stated "Today's vote is an historic event and a huge step forward for the 110 million women of America. Future generations of girls will know that no law will stand in their way of pursuing their dreams, whether they be to become doctor, firefighter, or the pilot of the next ship into space."

President-elect Jimmy Carter stated "I want to thank my wife and your incoming first lady Rosalynn for her efforts to finalize the ratification of this essential Amendment."

Well.... what next?

Do separate bathrooms continue to exist under a "separate but equal" understanding, or do bathrooms become unisex, or are there "bathroom battles" much like those IRL of 2015-17?

Does the nation elect a woman President by 2017? Elizabeth Dole, perhaps?

What is Ronald Reagan's take on all this? Does the 1980 GOP platform call for amendments to the Amendment? Does the rise of the religious right take the same form? How is the Supreme Court affected? Is Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) decided differently?

Discuss.

[Kingpoleon]

Oh, Carter would never issue such a statement. He never talked issues in the 1976 campaign to the camera - he talked issues to people, and would oppose it in one state and advocate for it in the next.

[MarkD]

TUESDAY, JANUARY 18, 1977-- Indiana becomes the 38th state to ratify the ERA, making it the law of the land.

.....

1. Do separate bathrooms continue to exist under a "separate but equal" understanding, or do bathrooms become unisex, or are there "bathroom battles" much like those IRL of 2015-17?

2. Does the nation elect a woman President by 2017? Elizabeth Dole, perhaps?

3.(a) What is Ronald Reagan's take on all this? (b) Does the 1980 GOP platform call for amendments to the Amendment? (c) Does the rise of the religious right take the same form? (d) How is the Supreme Court affected? (e) Is Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) decided differently?

Discuss.

1. Yes, no, and yes. The latter will only change in terms of what legal authority is being cited as the basis for the battles, because it will be constitutional instead of statutory, but the battle will be the same.
2. I can't see it will make any difference. The choices that the voters will make would be no different.
3.(a) Probably no different.
(b) Who the heck cares what is in the party platforms? I mean besides the people who write the platforms? In the U.S., each individual candidate runs on a platform of their own; there is no way to force all members of the GOP to support every plank in the party platform, and the same goes for the Democrats. Ignore the platforms, because they're nothing but masturbation for the platform writers.
(c) Yes.
(d) The ERA, ostensibly, would require the Court to raise its level of "scrutiny" one notch, from "heightened scrutiny" to "strict scrutiny." I don't think there's a LOT of difference between the two legal standards, but it might have resulted in the Court making a different decision in Rotsker v. Goldberg, which is to say that the draft would include women, not just men. But Michael M v. Superior Court of Sonoma County might not have been decided differently. But all in all not very much would have changed.
(e) No difference at all. There was nothing "discriminatory" about the Georgia law that banned "sodomy." The law, in the way it was written, affected opposite-sex couples the exact same way as it affected same-sex couples -- "sodomy" was equally banned for everyone. Michael Hardwick and his lawyers made no effort to collect evidence of whether the police treat heterosexuals who engage in "sodomy" any differently than the way they treat gay people, so there was no "equal protection" issue argued in the case. Even Lawrence v. Texas should not be decided any differently because of passage of the ERA, in terms of equal protection analysis. The Texas law that banned same-sex "sodomy" without banning opposite-sex "sodomy" does not treat women worse than men or vice versa. It treats gay people worse than heterosexuals, but that would not be prohibited by the ERA.

[Kingpoleon]

MarkD, are you unfamiliar with the butterfly effect?

[MarkD]

MarkD, are you unfamiliar with the butterfly effect?

I had only a small, passing familiarity with it before you asked. Now I've read a little bit more about it, and I don't think it affects my point. Developments in law are more linear and have a greater degree of predictability than the science of chaos theory that affects a nonlinear system. Therefore, like I said above, the differences between the legal standard that the Supreme Court had already been articulating and using by 1977 and the standard which the ERA would have required were not great. The lines in the law's linear system are so close and so parallel that the outcomes would not be drastically different.