Wednesday night, the Illinois House of Representatives resurrected the previously expired Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), ratifying it by a vote of 72 to 45. This vote follows an earlier vote on April 11, 2018, in which the Illinois Senate ratified the amendment by a vote of 42 to 12.
As a result of Wednesday’s vote in the Illinois House, Illinois is being touted as the 37th state to pass the ERA. Only one more state is needed to add the ERA to the Constitution, or so the Deep State-controlled media and ERA proponents would have you believe.
Ramifications of the ERA
The full text of the ERA that Illinois ratified reads:
Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.
Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.
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Earlier this past week, on a Facebook post, Anne Schlafly Cori — the chairwoman of Eagle Forum and daughter of Phyllis Schlafly — released a statement, which read in part:
ERA would not put “women” in the Constitution; it would put “sex” in the Constitution. Sex is both a noun and a verb with a lot of definitions and unintended consequences. Do we really want to give the federal government the enormous power to eliminate and prohibit all distinctions based on sex — including schools, prisons, military and social welfare programs? Under ERA, taxpayers would be forced to pay for abortions.
Nothing in ERA will give any woman a pay raise or stop a man from sexually harassing a woman.
Cori shares her mother’s view that the ERA would destroy traditional womanhood and the family. In addition to the Eagle Forum’s tremendous efforts in stopping the ERA in the 1970s, The John Birch Society also played a cruticial role, devoting much of its time and resources to stopping ratification efforts of the would-be harmful ERA. Had it not been for The John Birch Society’s efforts in the months following Congress’ passage of the ERA, it is quite possible that the required 38 states would have ratified the ERA within the first one or two years. Robert Welch, founder of The John Birch Society, emphasized this in a 1973 issue of The John Birch Society’s monthly Bulletin, writing:
It was our organization, with the know-how and experience of our members and our staff, which during just the past twelve months was mainly responsible for stopping the Equal Rights Amendment from defiling our Constitution.
In fact, despite the claims of proponents that the ERA would somehow “put women in the Constitution,” the text of the ERA doesn’t even mention women. Instead, it uses the word “sex,” found in section one of the proposed amendment. In this era of LGBT, the “#MeToo” movement, and “fluid gender” identification, imagine how current or future Courts would interpret the meaning of just that one word alone.
In actuality, the ERA threatens women by requiring them to have equal treatment in the military, from combat roles to a possible draft. Furthermore, as in the case of New Mexico’s own ERA, it would require taxpayer funding of abortion. Dare anyone ask what of the rights of those unborn women?
The ERA would virtually turn the 10th Amendment on its head by transferring the jurisdiction and powers of laws that relate to the family — such as marriage, divorce, adoption, abortion, alimony, public and private education, even restroom and dressing facilities — away from state and local governments over to the federal government. This underscores the threat of the ERA to the U.S. Constitution and the Republic.
ERA Background and History
The late Congresswoman Martha Griffiths introduced the ERA in Congress in 1971. On October 12 of that year, the House of Representatives passed the ERA and on March 22, 1972, the U.S. Senate passed the amendment. Shortly thereafter, the ERA was submitted to the states for ratification by three-fourths thereof in accordance to Article V of the Constitution.
Congress stipulated a ratification deadline for the ERA by March 22, 1979, which ERA proponents originally held to. Between 1972 and 1977, only 35 of the needed 38 states ratified the amendment.
At the time, William E. Dunham wrote the following about the ERA in the July 1976 JBS Bulletin:
Within a few months of congressional approval, twenty-two states climbed on the ratification bandwagon. But by January of 1973 even the New York Times reluctantly reported that “ratification of the equal rights amendment to the Constitution no longer looks like a sure thing.” The reason for that doubt was the well-organized, growing opposition to the amendment which was making itself felt. Since 1972 the energetic and articulate Phyllis Schlafly has provided outstanding leadership against this amendment. Further, over the last four years a number of national organizations have taken official positions against the subversive ERA.
But the most effective, best organized, and most sustained opposition to this
enormously radical amendment has come from The John Birch Society, as friends and foes admit.
As previosuly noted, The John Birch Society played a huge role in preventing additional states from ratifying the amendment and most especially working to get states that had been duped into ratifying it earlier to rescind their ratifications, prior to the 1979 deadline. Writing in the April 1977 issue of the JBS Bulletin, Robert Welch said of the JBS’s anti-ERA successes:
The defeat of ERA up to now reveals better, perhaps, than any other experience of recent years, the unmistakable necessity and value of plain hard work at the long process of education. For there is plenty of evidence to show that five years ago the Insiders were quite confident of pushing this Amendment into our Constitution without any serious delay…. But what went wrong with these far advanced plans for reducing civilized American men and women to the level of lower animals was the very education we have been talking about concerning the significance of the whole ERA scheme. For this education, when properly carried out extensively enough, developed legislative opponents of ERA who could not be shaken out of their opposition by all of the prestige and persistence of the President of the United States.
With the success of both The John Birch Society and Phylis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum in substantially slowing down the progress of the ERA’s ratification, propopents of the amendment began to panic, understandably so. With deadline quickly approaching, ERA proponents lobbied Congress to pass a ratification extension, which it did by simple majority vote. It was subsequently signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1978. The new deadline was set to June 30, 1982. However, no additional states ratified the ERA during that three-year extension.
Prior to the original 1979 deadline, the legislatures of four of the 35 states that had ratified the ERA — Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, and Tennessee — passed resolutions rescinding their past ratifications of the ERA.
Furthermore, on March 1, 1979, 21 days prior to the original ratification deadline, the South Dakota Legislature adopted Senate Joint Resolution No. 2, which stipulated that South Dakota’s prior ratification would expire on the date of the original deadline. Unless the South Dakota Legislature was to pass a new ratification afterwards, South Dakota’s original ratification is no longer valid toward the adoption of the ERA to the Constitution.
This means that by the time of the second and final deadline, on June 30, 1982, that the number of states with ”live” or active ratifications of the ERA was 30 — not 35, which would in turn make Nevada’s ERA ratification last year (in 2017) the 31st live ratification and Illinois’ 2018 ratification the 32nd live ratification.
ERA Now
However ERA proponents desperately contend that both the past deadlines (1979 and 1982) and rescissions (along with South Dakota’s 1979 resolution that sunset their previous ratification) no longer matter and are invalid, respectively.
In fact, a recent article about Illinois’ ERA ratification published by the liberal screed Vox makes no mentions of the past rescissions, as if they never happened. And that they never happened is exactly what Deep State-controlled media and pro-ERA politicians would like you to believe as they push the “fake news” narrative that Illinois is the 37th state and that only “one more state” is needed.
Take for instance President Obama’s local rag, the longtime insider-controlled Chicago Tribune. The first sentence of its news article about the Illinois ERA ratification reads: “The Illinois House voted Wednesday night to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment more than 45 years after it was approved by Congress, putting it one state away from possible enshrinement in the U.S. Constitution amid potential legal questions.” (Emphasis added.)
The largely discredited CNN was even bolder than the Chicago Tribune. CNN’s online headline read, “Only one more state needs to pass the Equal Rights Amendment to finally get it ratified. Here are the 13 that haven’t.”
CNN showcased its own version of a map, mirroring that on the Equal Rights Amendment website, of which states have and have not ratified the amendment. The map does not take into considering the rescissions or South Dakota’s 1979 resolution. Scrolling down CNN’s dishonest article that likewise omits any mentions of the rescissions, the article states:
Recently, with the rise of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, there has been renewed interest in passing the Equal Rights Amendment. The vote in Illinois now brings the tally to 37 states — just one shy of the 38 needed to add the amendment to the Constitution. [Emphasis added].
It’s precisely because of this type of news omission that CNN is regarded as unreliable and often cited by President Trump as being nothing more than “fake news.” Yet with CNN, Vox, NPR, and so many other establishment media parroting the ERA advocate’s “one state away from enshrinement in the Constitution” narrative, the ability of the Deep State to perpetuate and sustain its lie should not be underestimated.
One way to determine whether or not recessions matter, and are thus valid, is to observe whether ERA advocacy groups such as the Alice Paul Institute and the National Council of Women’s Organizations’ ERA Task Force will work to oppose the passage of any possible future rescissions of a state’s previous ratification of the ERA.
If the rescissions are invalid and don’t matter, then logically they have nothing to worry about if more are introduced and passed in state legislatures. Not withstanding the fact that the final deadline already passed 36 years ago.
Image: Screenshot from EqualRightsAmendment.org
