a Constitutional amd. Any laws that grant women equal rights can be recinded and/or ignored. In Griswald vs CT, the pill became legal. We now have many religious groups fighting against not only insurance coverage, but actually outlawing many birth control measures. These bills are being introduced in states across the country. Some are passing. How can a woman ever have equal protection and rights under the law if her body parts are up for votes.

Guns are a constitutionally protected right. Women's rights aren't. It is impossible to get any legislation to curb gun violence. Yet look how long it took to pass VAWA. Look at all the bills in states across the country limiting women's rights. If women's rights were constitutionally protected like guns, we would not see bills introduced to limit what a woman can and can not talk to her Dr about, with such ease.

Some people will say it is not needed anymore. Like I said, any law can be recinded, Constitutional rights can't be. It really is that simple. If republicans ever get control of the 3 branches again, progress that women have made will be turned back. I can see a repub president signing an executive order nullifying the Lily Leadbetter act. I can see Vawa being de-funded. I can see birth control being labeled as a dangerous drug and outlawed. I can see a law that will force rape victims to give birth to their rapists baby. I can see a law, that unless a woman was beaten to a pulp during a rape, she wasn't really raped.

For example, when you think of the difficulty of getting equal pay for equal work, it falls under this. The culturally persistent lowered pay for women suggests an attitude of belief of some intrinsic benefit to having men do the work, even though the work is defined as equal. The work is equal, so there must be some kind of intrinsic superiority to the person doing it. It is only a different degree of the situation in which we pay people to do some kinds of work on assembly lines in some places, but we don't pay robots anything to do the same work on other assembly lines.

The other explanation for the pay differential is that there is no percieved benefit for having men do the work, but rather we have an intrinsic power structure that allows those holding power to continue to hold power by giving their members more benefits than non-members. Though women have taken some of the power, the scales still tilt toward men, so they can continue to bestow an outsized benefit to their members. I don't really think this is it, though. This assumes some kind of conspiracy, and I think it's just an unconscious cultural idiocy.

Whichever of these situations it is, the ERA will allow for a legal argument to end these situations.

Another benefit that would be important to me: I see creeping fundamentalism taking away the rights of women all over the globe, and the movement is getting closer and closer to me. The passage of the ERA would shore up my rights against that creep, and allow me to keep the rights we have already fought for and won.

I think under the ERA a case could be made for the fact that, since there is no situation where men can be made to use their bodies for purposes other than ones they agree to, likewise women have the right to refuse the use of their bodies for purposes they don't agree to.i.e. giving birth involuntarily. (Obviously, someone will say we send men to war, but there is no draft, so right now we only send those who volunteer to war. In a future time, if the rights of women to refuse the use of their bodies against their will is legally upheld under the ERA, THAT decision could be used to fight agains the draft.)

What would be a more progressive counter plan?

Found this old one