Remember the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)? It’s back, and Old Joe Biden, trying to do as much damage to the nation as he can before he slouches off to his taxpayer-funded Delaware beach house for good on Monday, now says that it’s the law of the land. What’s that? You didn’t notice that we suddenly have a new Constitutional amendment? Well, we may not, but on Friday, Old Joe’s joyful announcement that the amendment was a done deal added an eggbeater to already troubled waters.
The ERA was a central preoccupation of the 1970s when the outgoing figurehead was just beginning his storied career as a leftist prevaricator, character assassin (see Clarence Thomas for details), and premier corruptocrat in the United States Senate. Feminists bombarded Americans with propaganda slogans including “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” and “A woman’s place is in the House… and the Senate.”
But when Congress approved the ERA on March 22, 1972, it set a deadline of seven years for the necessary three-fourths of the states to approve it. That deadline came and went on March 22, 1979, with only 35 states approving of the amendment. Thirty-eight were needed, so that was that. In 2017, however, as the #MeToo movement was cresting, Nevada became the 36th state to approve the ERA, with Illinois following in 2018 and Virginia in 2020.
So the amendment was over the line, with just one problem: the seven-year deadline had passed over forty years before Virginia ratified the thing. Even before Virginia ratified the ERA, Alabama, Louisiana, and South Dakota tried to head off its post-deadline passage, filing a federal lawsuit in 2019 to stop any other states from ratifying the amendment.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, demonstrating an admirable and rare degree of common sense, explained: “The people had seven years to consider the ERA, and they rejected it. To sneak it into the Constitution through this illegal process would undermine the very basis for our constitutional order.”
But when the man who sicced the corrupt and politicized justice system on his principal political opponent hears about something that would undermine our constitutional order, all he says is, Hold my beer. And so on Friday, Old Joe issued a statement:
On January 27, 2020, the Commonwealth of Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. The American Bar Association (ABA) has recognized that the Equal Rights Amendment has cleared all necessary hurdles to be formally added to the Constitution as the 28th Amendment. I agree with the ABA and with leading legal constitutional scholars that the Equal Rights Amendment has become part of our Constitution.
Well, of course, you do, Joe, but it ain’t necessarily so. The president of the United States, even one as arrogant, self-righteous, and authoritarian as Old Joe, cannot simply declare that something has become part of the Constitution. The validity of the post-deadline ratifications still has to be hashed out.
Also, if Virginia’s ratification made the ERA part of the Constitution, why did Old Joe wait until nearly four years after that ratification to declare that the amendment was now a done deal? Could it have anything to do with the fact that going back all the way to 1972, objections to the ERA have noted that the amendment would subject women to being drafted, as the formidable ERA opponent Phyllis Schlafly noted? The nation has just been treated to the spectacle of feminist harridans in the Senate harassing Pete Hegseth over his opposition to putting women in combat roles; if the ERA really does become a part of the Constitution, Hegseth’s efforts to end that harmful fantasy-based policy will be hamstrung.
Related: Old Joe Biden Reminds Us Yet Again That Leftists Live in a World of Pure Fantasy
Schlafly also warned that if the amendment were passed, sex-segregated restrooms would become illegal. Defenders of the ERA have insisted for over fifty years now that this isn’t true, but their insistences began to ring hollow when men who claimed that they were women started invading women’s spaces and charged that efforts to keep them out of those spaces were discriminatory.
One analyst of the amendment explained that it “would likely prohibit government from acting ‘on account of sex’ and, therefore, from acting on account of or in response to sex inequality. Put simply, government would have to ignore sex, including sex inequality.” That’s music to gender fantasists’ ears.
Are Old Joe and his henchmen trying to tie Hegseth’s hands and at the same time give a parting gift to the transgender movement by proclaiming that the ERA is the law of the land? Well, what else? Disingenuous partisan skullduggery and vicious culture war propagandizing are two golden threads running through Old Joe’s shameful career in what is still piously called “the public service.” His proclamation that the ERA is now law is just more of the same.
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