Constitutional Equal Rights – the Time is NOW! with Katherine Spillar

Episode Notes

Transcript

Katherine Spillar:

You cannot have a democracy when half of the population does not have equality spelled out in the Constitution.

Mitch Winick:

That’s today’s guest on SideBar, executive editor of MS Magazine. Kathy Spillar

Jackie Gardina:

SideBar is brought to you by Monterey College of Law, San Luis Obispo College of Law, Kern County College of Law, empire College of Law, located in Santa Rosa and the colleges of Law with campuses in Santa Barbara and Ventura.

Mitch Winick:

Welcome to SideBar discussions with local, state and national experts about protecting our most critical individual and civil rights Co-hosts La Deans Jackie Gardina and Mitch Winick

Jackie Gardina:

Mitch. We have had some wonderful guests to discuss reproductive rights and women’s rights generally, but none of our previous guests have mentioned the Equal Rights Amendment, and I’m embarrassed to say I hadn’t focused on it either. Since the Dobbs decision advocates have taken several paths to address the rise of abortion bans to including seeking to amend state constitutions to insert a right to reproductive healthcare, but the Equal Rights Amendment first introduced in 1923 offers a potential path to reproductive rights and arguably it’s already the 28th amendment of the Constitution because it’s been ratified by 38 states and approved by two thirds of both houses of Congress as required by Article five. I’m excited to delve a little deeper into how the ERA can be a tool to establish women’s true equal rights and autonomy over their healthcare

Mitch Winick:

Jackie. As you point out, 38 states have ratified the Equal Rights Amendment and in theory that is all that’s required to move forward with implementation, but the next steps actually remain surprisingly uncertain. There was an original congressional deadline for ratification of the ERA that was not met, and as you point out, there’s an ongoing debate about whether the deadline actually has an legal effect. In fact, the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suggested in 2020 that it might be more effective to start the process over. Alternatively, a joint bipartisan resolution was introduced in Congress in January of 2021 to clarify this issue, but it has not moved forward either. To confuse matters even more if we can from a public perception standpoint, surveys have indicated that 80% of people in the United States already think that men and women are guaranteed equal rights under the US Constitution. Unfortunately, as we know as lawyers, they are wrong.

Jackie Gardina:

As we’ve recently discussed your own SideBar with law professor and Mary Builder, the original drafters of the US Constitution were all white men. Women were not specifically included as part of we the people they envisioned in the Constitution. And although the Supreme Court subsequently interpreted the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to protect women to an extent, it also created a special category for gender that offers far less protection than other protected categories like race, religion, or national origin. So what’s the bottom line? The fact is there’s still significant work to do legally, legislatively, and through public policy to provide women the equal protection that they deserve. This is abundantly clear through the recent actions of the Supreme Court in returning the regulation of women’s healthcare to the government and essentially to the courts and in the criminalization of reproductive healthcare by an alarming number of state legislatures to help us talk through these complicated issues. As usual, we’ve invited to SideBar someone who has spent more than three decades dedicated to advancing women’s rights and equality.

Mitch Winick:

Kathy Spillar is the executive director of Feminist Majority Foundation and executive editor of MS Magazine. Under her oversight, MS has increased its investigative reporting and today is one of the largest print and online feminist news sites reaching readers from across the globe. Welcome to SideBar, Kathy.

Katherine Spillar:

Thank you. I’m so happy to be here.

Jackie Gardina:

Kathy. I remember when the ERA fight dominated the headlines, but that isn’t the case now and some of our listeners may be unfamiliar with the history behind it. I mentioned earlier that it was first introduced in 1923, but then it kind of languished for 50 years and it was revived during the Women’s Rights Movement in the 1970s. Can you provide just a broad overview of what happened between its introduction into Congress in 1972 and today?

Katherine Spillar:

Yes, in 1972 is when both houses of Congress, the House and the Senate voted to send the equal Rights amendment out to the states for ratification. The Constitution requires a new amendment to clear two hurdles, it has to come out of the Congress with a super majority vote. So two thirds of the house and two thirds of the Senate must vote on the resolution and send that out to the states for ratification. And by the way, in 1972, it was overwhelming the vote in both houses and it was clearly bipartisan. In fact, then minority leader, Gerald Ford, who ultimately became president, was a key strategist and advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment and his wife, Betty Ford, who was First Lady ultimately was very active in the campaign. Congress said a seven year time limit very quickly, many states almost immediately. I think Hawaii was the first state to ratify and it ratified within just a couple of weeks I think of the Congress sending it out to the states for ratification.

It has to be voted on by state legislatures. It’s not something that goes before. The people as 1978 and 79 began to approach only 35 states had voted to ratify and they were running out of time to see the other states actually bring it up in their state legislatures. And of course it had run into real opposition by then opposition that was very much entrenched in these state legislatures. The insurance industry was probably the largest opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment and also the Manufacturer’s Association was opposed. People think that it was really Phyllis Shaley, she was the face of the opposition, but the real opposition were the business interests that had massive lobby campaigns going. They have lobbyists in these state legislatures. The insurance industry was a major opponent and probably still is to this day. The idea at the time then was that the women’s leaders went back to Congress and said, why don’t you extend the timeline? You can do that. And so Congress did vote to extend the timeline by another three years. When that second extension kicked in, Congress refused to further extend it, and only 35 states had ratified by then. So that’s where we ended. I want

Jackie Gardina:

To hit pause right there. We do have more to come, but I want to make sure people understand because I don’t think it’s obvious. Article five of the federal Constitution, which speaks to amending the Constitution, contains no time limits in it, nothing that says once an amendment is proposed, it must be ratified within X amount of time. And when the ERA was originally written, there was absolutely no timeframe inserted into the amendment itself other than once ratified. It would go into effect two years after ratification, but no limit on how long it might take to ratify.

Katherine Spillar:

That’s exactly right.

Jackie Gardina:

It was Congress who inserted in the preamble, not the amendment itself, that time limit. So one of the arguments out there is that the time limit is not part of the constitutional amendment, although people went back and asked Congress to extend it. There’s a question of whether or not that was even necessary.

Katherine Spillar:

You’re right, because constitutional lawyers looking at this will say that the time limit is not binding. It’s not binding because it’s not part of the amendment. As you just explained, it was part of the proposing legislation or the preamble to the ERA. So clearly Congress has changed it once and we’re asking them right now of course, to change it again, I can go into that in more detail. But by June 30th, 1982, when the second time limit triggered by then there was a building opposition predominantly within the Republican party. And if you remember in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was running for president, the Republican party specifically removed support for the ERA from its party platform. And his slogan was he was for the E and the R, but not the A by 19 80, 19 81, 82, and those final efforts to get the other three states so that you could hit 38 states by then Republican Party as a whole had become opposed, strongly opposed. And the anti-abortion movement by then had begun to actively oppose the equal rights Amendment. And so by June 30th of 82 activity to extend the timeline ceased and only 35 of the 38 necessary states had ratified by then.

Mitch Winick:

And you’re talking about 1980. And in 1980, Phyllis Schafly was very outspoken and as part of that effort to get the Republican Party to take that out of their plank, it seems to me that they were arguing at that time the ERA was based on a threat or a perceived threat to traditional family values and conservative religious gender-based roles of the housewife and mother. But let me just for a moment leap forward from that and say, to what extent do you think these same arguments are still substantial barriers in our society and in fact are resurfacing in the women’s healthcare debates surrounding abortion today?

Katherine Spillar:

Well, there’s two separate questions there. First of all, those were bogus excuses that Republican state legislators were using to vote against the Equal Rights Amendment. They used several issues. This was a threat to traditional family values. Well, the American public never saw it as a threat to traditional American values. They also would say, this is going to lead to gay marriage. We have same sex marriage now, but we don’t have an equal rights amendment. So there was another argument that fell aside, although in one of the state RA campaigns to enact a state equal rights amendment, Phyllis Schley would campaign to say that the ERA led to AIDS at the height of the AIDS epidemic was using that as an excuse, but the public never bought any of that. It was used as an excuse by Republican state legislators and in some cases democratic state legislators because remember, the ERA is voted on in state legislatures, not by the general public.

Those were excuses because what they didn’t want to say is that we want to continue the economic discrimination against women by these industries who are opposed to the equal Rights Amendment. And again, that was everyone from the Manufacturer’s Association of America, the insurance industry in particular overcharges women, billions and billions of dollars a year for insurance, and they wanted to keep doing that. And they’re fearful that if the Equal Rights Amendment is added to the Constitution, that will eliminate their ability to economically discriminate on the basis of sex. And so to come out and say, as a state legislator that we don’t want equal pay for women and we don’t want to combat sex discrimination in pricing of insurance or in wages would not be a very popular position to take. And so they had to come up with some excuses.

Mitch Winick:

We are going to take a quick break and when we’ve returned, we’re going to continue our conversation with Kathy Spillar, the executive director of the Feminist Majority Foundation and executive editor of MS Magazine

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Katherine Spillar:

The Equal Rights Amendment has had majority support in this country since the late seventies. The whole campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment really galvanized people who wanted more opportunities for women and for girls. And so by the time all these excuses were pulled out and used to vote against the ERA and the state legislatures, the public was already strongly in support of the Equal Rights Amendment. Now on the abortion issue, that has only become a serious issue since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Really, we really did think for 50 years in this country that there was a fundamental right to privacy incorporated in the Constitution, and that included women’s fundamental right to reproductive autonomy. And clearly that is not the case under this Supreme Court. We all understand, especially women in this country, that this kind of a fundamental right can be ripped away. The importance of having a specific amendment in the Constitution that spells out non-discrimination on the basis of sex could not be more important.

Jackie Gardina:

I just want to allow you to finish the historical piece because we were up to 35 states had ratified, but we haven’t gotten to the 38 that I mentioned in the introduction. So how do we get from 35 to 38 states

Katherine Spillar:

Sometime in the 1990s? I think a theory emerged among law scholars and within the women’s rights community that you know what I mean? If Congress could extend the timeline, it could also get rid of the timeline. And that once a state had voted to ratify, there’s no right of rescission. Now, five states have voted to rescind their support of the Equal Rights Amendment, but every constitutional law scholar will say that’s not provided in the Constitution to rescind. It’s not possible. So then the whole effort to get the additional three states begins. The first big breakthrough is in Nevada in 2016, after the elections, even though Trump wins the presidency, Nevada state legislature flips from Republican control to democratic control. And the feminists in that state legislature, especially Senator Pat s Spearman, who had long been an advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment, decides that Nevada’s going to become the 36 state to ratify. And so after Nevada ratified, then Illinois upped the pressure and by then the leadership had changed, and Illinois then passes by a majority of both the House and the Senate vote. I believe that was in 2019. In 2020, Virginia became the final state to vote to ratify. And what happened there is in 2019 and in the Virginia State legislative races, they had also flipped from Republican to democratic control. Virginia becomes the 38 state to vote to ratify in early 2020,

Jackie Gardina:

Which is the number that’s needed for an amendment to become ratified.

Katherine Spillar:

That’s right. Three quarters of the states, 38 done. Well, actually, there’s one step before that. The next step, once an amendment has been ratified by the required number of states, then the archivist must publish the New Amendment to actually add the amendment to the Constitution. But before the archivist could do that, the Trump Justice Department through the Office of Legal Counsel issued a memo to the archivist saying they were prohibited from publishing the equal Rights Amendment because of this question about the time limit. Now, the archivist could have just published it and it would be part of the Constitution. Theoretically, the archivist could have published it. The archivist in 2020 didn’t. And so now we must get Congress to weigh in to say that notwithstanding the time limit that was in the proposing legislation, that the Equal Rights Amendment has in fact been ratified and must be added to the Constitution takes a simple majority vote in both the House and the Senate for clearing this up through a resolution.

Mitch Winick:

Kathy, I have a bad habit of sometimes making light of very serious things. And at the risk of that, how about another alternative? Why don’t we just get Tom Hanks and Ron Howard to make a movie called The Archivist similar to the DaVinci Code, and I think we would solve the whole thing.

Katherine Spillar:

Although you know what? Both of them are supporters of the Women’s Rights Movement.

Mitch Winick:

I know

Katherine Spillar:

Literally, and they would do it I think in a heartbeat if that would resolve it. But I’ll tell you, these are questions that we’ve got some of the best constitutional legal scholars minds working on this, the ERA joint congressional resolutions, which are in both the Senate and the House that would do exactly this. That is what is pending before this Congress right now,

Jackie Gardina:

Kathy, as we mentioned in the opening, the 14th Amendment is frequently cited as providing women equal rights. And although it was passed in 1868, it was not until over a century later in the 1970s that the Supreme Court began to apply its equal protection clause to cases of sex discrimination. But even that was limited in its 1976 ruling in Craig v Borin. The court found that men and women could be treated differently under the law if such treatment served an important governmental objective. Obviously, this current Supreme Court has determined that determining women’s healthcare for them is now an important government objective. Would the acceptance and enforcement of the ERA have any effect on these decisions?

Katherine Spillar:

I think it would have a major impact. Having a prohibition against sex discrimination in the Constitution is the strongest protection we can get against discrimination on the basis of sex. And that means at the highest level of scrutiny, strict scrutiny is what it’s called, and that means the government would have a hard time proving a compelling reason to discriminate. I can’t think of any instance where it could have a compelling reason to discriminate and we’re seeing that play out in some of these state court decisions. A number of states also have equal rights amendments in their constitutions. For example, in the state of Pennsylvania, which has a state ERA that worded almost identically to the federal ERA, the state Supreme Court, there has just issued a decision that has said that the state law, which prohibits the use of Medicaid funding for abortions for poor women is unconstitutional under the state ERA. Because it is sex discriminatory, the government cannot provide a compelling reason to overcome that. Now, that was a preliminary decision. It has to go back down to an appeals court to be applied to the facts of the case. It will come back to the state Supreme Court, but it was such a strong preliminary decision that we’re feeling very confident it will survive the state of Nevada. A Nevada District Court has just issued essentially the same decision. Nevada has a state equal rights amendment,

Jackie Gardina:

But Kathy, at the same time, Texas and Florida have state eras, and yet they have the most stringent abortion bans in the country. Is the ERA actually a safety valve or It all depends on the court.

Katherine Spillar:

It all depends on the court and who knew that State Supreme Court elections were as important as they are. It’s another office that is elected in many states that you now have to pay attention to, but that’s why we need the Federal Equal Rights Amendment. Your right to bodily autonomy should not depend on what your zip code is.

Jackie Gardina:

If we run into roadblocks at the state level based on state Supreme Courts, why is an ERA in the federal Constitution not going to run into the same roadblock of a conservative Supreme Court?

Katherine Spillar:

It might very well that court’s not going to be there forever. An equal rights amendment would be a permanent protection. We’re going to have to work in elections to get presidents who will appoint justices that recognize fundamental rights, will recognize the equal rights amendment for what it could do, and will apply the law as opposed to their personal perspectives and erroneous histories and arriving at their so-called Decisions. But without a federal ERA, we know for sure we won’t have a chance of overcoming some of these bans.

Mitch Winick:

We are going to take another quick break when we return. We’re going to continue our conversation with Kathy Spillar, the executive director of the Feminist Majority Foundation and executive editor of MS. Magazine.

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Mitch Winick:

Kathy, let me make it even more complicated as if it isn’t complicated enough. Our recent guest, Michelle Goodwin, discussed the concept of fetal personhood, the idea that the fetus has constitutional rights including equal protection under the law. The Alabama Supreme Court explicitly held that that was the case under its state’s constitution. It’s even been raised by, as you’ve mentioned, two Supreme Court justices during recent oral arguments, justice Alito and Justice Amy Cohn Barrett. So does the concept of fetal personhood and its individual constitutional right possibly undermine whatever rights the ERA might recognize related to women’s reproductive healthcare and abortion?

Katherine Spillar:

Well, right now we don’t have recognition of fetal personhood. Not that they haven’t tried. The human life amendment, which the Republicans pushed for years in Congress, never made it out of Congress. It is preposterous to think that an embryo or a fetus should have greater rights than the full grown human being that is carrying the pregnancy. But that is the debate right now before this Supreme Court. I mean, it is shocking that that is the debate when the Tala case was argued before the Supreme Court, you’re right, Alito raised that question after all, if an emergency abortion would stabilize the woman’s health, what about the Fetus’s health? What is that question? A woman is a full grown human being as the solicitor general reminded him, and he sort of was taken aback and had to sort of backtrack a little bit and say, yes, of course the woman is a full grown human being. Yes. If fetal personhood was to become a concept and if it was to actually be included in the Constitution, that would pose a grave, grave danger to women in this country.

Jackie Gardina:

Staying with this idea of the state eras, if the efforts to formally accept the federal ERA continue to stall, and given the current Supreme Court’s purported supportive state’s rights, do you think there’s an argument that the ERA efforts should focus to state constitutional protections and really attack it at the state level?

Katherine Spillar:

Well, that’s actually already happening. For example, New York on its ballot this November will be an amendment to its constitution that is an expanded equality amendment. It’s an equal rights amendment bigger because it specifically includes abortion and reproductive health decisions that should pass. Of course, we’re seeing constitutional amendments to actually designate that decisions about reproductive healthcare is an individual’s right enshrined in state constitution. There are a number of states have state eras. For example, in Utah, there is a state ERA and the reproductive rights community there is suing the state of Utah based on that equal rights amendment over its state abortion restrictions. So we’re going to see how these begin to play out. The more that play out where you have courts that are recognizing that a state amendment that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, and I defy anyone to argue that abortion is not a sex-based, right?

And so if state Supreme Courts increasingly are saying that state equal rights amendments cover bans or restrictions on abortion as sex discriminatory, that eventually will shape the federal decisions. And I’ll tell you, I do think that this Supreme Court heavily regrets its decision in the Dobbs decision right now. They have seen such a backlash in this country where every state, red or blue, where there has been a proposed constitutional amendment to protect access to abortion and birth control, red states and blue states alike have passed those constitutional amendments. We are seeing it determine the outcome of elections. The 2022 midterm elections were driven by this question over abortion. There was supposed to be a massive red wave where Republicans took over the house in huge numbers that was stopped. They barely got to a majority and no Senate seats were lost over it. In fact, a Senate seat was gained over it.

So I do think that this Supreme Court regrets that decision, and I think they’re trying to figure out how to arrive at the decisions in the two cases that are currently before it right now. An abortion one is on the abortion pill availability. Whether you can mail that across country without individual in-person appointments and whether or not the FDA is going to be ordered to take it off the market, which is ludicrous, and then you have this in case on whether or not state bans or restrictions on abortion can stop emergency medical care that includes abortion from being used to stabilize a woman who’s in crisis. I still just can’t get over that. That is the debate that we’re having before the Supreme Court. Can an emergency room at a hospital provide emergency abortion services? If that is the standard of care to stabilize a woman who is hemorrhaging, who is in sepsis, who is ultimately going to die if she doesn’t get that care, that that has to be. The debate right now just shows us how extreme the Republican party has become in this country. They know that if they come out as extreme as they did in the Dobbs decision, that there will be yet a further backlash. And frankly, I think the backlash is ongoing. It hasn’t lost any of its power. It’s going to keep going until we have full rights in this country.

Mitch Winick:

We are going to take one final break and when we return, Jackie and I are going to continue the conversation with Kathy Spillar, the executive director of the Feminist Majority Foundation and executive editor of MS Magazine.

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Mitch Winick:

Kathy. In 2020, the Southern legal counsel found clauses officially declaring equal rights and non-discrimination on the basis of sex in the constitutions of 168 countries. This is not a surprise to us because we had this discussion recently here on SideBar with Professor Julie Suk, author of After Misogyny, how the Law Fails Women and What to Do about It. She also pointed out that the US remains a leader in unequal pay, no pay, inadequate support for childcare, disparate insurance, healthcare and social services, and irregular parental leave policies and protections. You follow all of these issues closely, and I know as the executive editor of ms, you research and write on these issues or your magazine does. Why does it continue to be so hard to get meaningful changes on these type of basic services enacted here in the us?

Katherine Spillar:

I have several one-liners on that. I mean, it pays to discriminate on the basis of sex by those who benefit from the discrimination. If you’re an employer and you are getting away with paying women 80 cents on the dollar or less, and women of color even less, and by the way, the real gender gap in pay and income is probably closer to the old 59 cents still to this day because women tend to work more in part-time jobs without all the benefits that full-time jobs carry, certainly without the bonuses and without the life insurance paid for and so forth. So really when you don’t look at just wages, but you look at pay overall income overall, women are still grossly undercompensated. And of course, we don’t give any monetary value to work inside the home. Childcare, elder care, taking care of sick relatives, keeping a home going, all of the things that society depends on to keep going is not valued at all.

In fact, that’s one of the problems with the social security system, which is sex discriminatory in its construction because when it started, most women did not work outside the home. And so for every year you’re not employed in the labor market, you get a zero on your own record. And so over time, your benefits when you get ready to retire are significantly less than your male counterpart. By the way, the ERA would then be used to challenge the sex discriminatory system of the social security, which would be big. Older women are the poorest in this country there, and so it would be a major benefit for older women. But there’s entrenched interests in continuing the discrimination economic interests for sure, but there’s also called the patriarchy. Women were specifically excluded from the Constitution. It wasn’t because they just didn’t think about it. The wives of some of those founders pleaded with them to not forget the ladies or there would be a rebellion.

Well, the rebellions in full force, we are up against male controlled state legislatures that are voting on these amendments and these laws. Congress is still almost 70% male and certainly the court systems, so women are not at the tables when these votes are taken. We always talk about at the table, but they’re not in the room. They’re not in the room to get to vote on our rights. We’ve been fighting for these changes since the founding of this country, and it’s taken us 250 years to get this far. But we’re on a roll and we’re just determined to get the Equal Rights Amendment and the Constitution and to reestablish the fundamental right for bodily autonomy as key founding principles. And what I will say about many of the other countries that have a provision for non-discrimination on the basis of sex in their constitutions, many of those constitutions are newer. They include that because there has been a worldwide feminist movement. That’s why some of the newer constitutions have these provisions and the United States shame on us. We’ve just got to catch up. If we think of ourselves as a democracy, you cannot have a democracy when half of the population does not have equality spelled out in the Constitution.

Mitch Winick:

Professor Mary Builder who wrote the book on Eliza Harriet, who evidently was there at the time that George Washington was getting ready to go into the constitutional convention, and George and his wife attended her lecture, although it didn’t get women entered into the Constitution, Mary argues that it’s perhaps gender neutral because Washington was affected by Eliza Harriet’s lecture.

Katherine Spillar:

I wish that was true. Women are just not in the Constitution at all. The only amendment is the 19th Amendment, and that again refers to non-discrimination and voting on the basis of sex. It doesn’t talk about women. This is our best hope, I think, for really moving forward.

Jackie Gardina:

Talk about that movement. How is the feminist majority and MS. Magazine, I love that it’s now Ms. Magazine is a not-for-profit, and I think that’s such an important thing in today’s journalistic society to have that. How is it being used to impact the movement in our forward momentum?

Katherine Spillar:

We are part of a national coalition of over 300 groups. The feminist majority is part of the leadership of that group and pushing every which way possible. We know we have massive public support, over 80%, as you said, some polls have it even higher. The key is organizing all of that so that the members of Congress begin to feel some real pressure to pass these resolutions. Senator Lisa Murkowski from Alaska is one of the two co-sponsors of this resolution. Very strong support in the house. We have every Democrat one Republican. We only need a handful of Republicans, four or five, who would see the value of supporting women’s rights in this upcoming election because some of them are in districts, they could lose over the issue of abortion and women’s rights. So we’re so close to getting a majority support in both houses, but we’re up against invisible forces, and by that I mean the business interests that continue to oppose and the religious interests that oppose the equal Rights Amendment. They have huge number of lobbyists in Washington dc. They have tremendous influence with some of these members of the House and the Senate. That’s what we’re up against. And they’re invisible because they don’t go out on the campaign trail and actively say they’re opposed to women’s rights. I mean, even the most conservative Republican will say, oh, no, no, no, they’re for women’s rights. They’re just not for amending the Constitution.

Mitch Winick:

Kathy, one of the things that Jackie and I like to do is as we wrap each episode, we like to talk with our guests about the path forward. Young men and women who are going to live with these decisions for a long time. What would you say to them?

Katherine Spillar:

I think the most important is that we keep reminding voters and young voters who’s elected to public office impacts their lives. And I do think that young women especially understand that because they have watched as a fundamental right, they grew up with has been yanked out from underneath them at a time in their life when they are most likely to need access to abortion services. The outcome of this election will determine so much of the future of their lives because of this most fundamental issue. The way to get involved no matter where you are, is to sign up for this take action list that is at www.signforera.org, SIGN, the number four e.org. We will let you know when your member of Congress needs to hear from you.

Jackie Gardina:

I want to thank you so much for spending time with us today on SideBar.

Mitch Winick:

Kathy, thank you for joining Jackie and I on SideBar today. We appreciate your insight and particularly appreciate the decades of work you’ve done with both the Feminist Majority Foundation and with Ms. Magazine. Thank you for being here today,

Jackie. This was a particularly enjoyable episode for me because it reminded me that I have been discussing these issues in my family since high school as you and Dave our producer. Know, my mom was president of Legal Women Voters of Texas and on the National Board, and so the issues of women’s rights, particularly voting rights, was a discussion that we had in our family as far back as I can remember. So it reminded me with Kathy Spillar continuing to work in those areas, how important these issues are and how much work there still is to do, even though it has been almost four decades.

Jackie Gardina:

Remember, not so much the 1972 part of the ERA being introduced, but certainly the 1982 revival and attempt to get the rest of the votes in it is amazing to me. I know we say this again and again, but that we’re having the exact same conversations in every generation. They’re slightly different, but they’re essentially about the same basic fundamental rights, many of which are missing for so many marginalized people in the United States.

Mitch Winick:

And I think it’s also important to point out that the idea of establishing equal rights has historically been a bipartisan issue and should be a bipartisan issue going forward, as Kathy pointed out in the legislation that’s pending in Congress now.

Jackie Gardina:

Once again, I want to thank everyone who joined us today on SideBar, and as always, Mitch and I would love to know what’s on your mind. You can reach [email protected].

Mitch Winick:

SideBar would not be possible without our producer, David Eakin, who composes and plays all of the music you hear on SideBar. Thank you also to Dina Dowsett who creates and coordinates sidebar’s. Social media marketing.

Jackie Gardina:

Colleges of law and Monterey College of Law are part of a larger organization called California Accredited Law Schools. All of our schools are dedicated to providing access and opportunity to a legal education to marginalized communities.

Mitch Winick:

For more information about the California accredited Law schools, go to ca law schools.org. That’s ca law schools.org.

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