Editorial from the Los Angeles Times editorial board
Last Monday was International Women’s Day, a pseudo-holiday to highlight the global achievements of women — as well as the myriad ways in which they still don’t enjoy the same rights and opportunities as men.
To mark the occasion, President Joe Biden announced the creation of the White House Gender Policy Council, which will report directly to him on strategies to advance gender equality and equity domestically and abroad. The council will coordinate federal efforts to combat gender-based discrimination, systemic biases and structural barriers, among other issues.
Great. Women have been waiting for equal rights under the law for, well, forever.
It’s been nearly 100 years since the amendment explicitly outlawing sex discrimination was drafted, and 49 years since a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress voted to send it to the states for ratification. Thirty-five states did so within the seven-year deadline that Congress also imposed, and there things stood for four decades until the Nevada Legislature unexpectedly voted to ratify in 2017. Illinois followed suit in 2018.
In January 2020, the Virginia Legislature became the 38th state to ratify, finally giving the ERA approvals in three-fourths of the states — the constitutional requirement for enactment. But because the original deadline set by Congress had lapsed, the national archivist declined to recognize the amendment.
There is a bill that would restart the entire ratification process, but that would be a giant step backward. More promising is bipartisan legislation in Congress to retroactively lift the lapsed deadline, which is expected to get a vote in the House next week. A similar bill passed the House last year, but it was stalled in the Republican-controlled Senate.
That shouldn’t stop Congress or the president from doing the right thing — and soon.
