Viewpoint: L. Phillips Runyon III – It's time for the ERA

During the last few weeks of President Joe Biden’s administration, we’ve seen the president protect his son and many others whom he has felt deserved pardons. He has also tried to build a moat around other accomplishments of his term, so they can’t be undone by the next administration, which has made it pretty clear it wants to mount an assault of epic proportions.

There’s one more step the president could take, however, and I’m certainly not alone in making this fervent recommendation. He could and should order certification of what would be the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – the one proposed many times since 1921 and known since 1972 as the Equal Rights Amendment. The necessary three quarters of the states have now ratified it, with Virginia having finally come on board in 2020, and there will never be a better chance – perhaps any chance at all – to take this historic action.

You don’t have to be a political scientist to know that women’s rights have been under serious assault since the repeal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, which the next administration believes was justified because the states should make their own decisions about issues like women’s health care. Well, the states have now spoken and this president should respect their decision – because you can be sure the next administration won’t because it doesn’t really mean what it has said about the issue. It figures that if it leaves decisions about women’s rights to each state, it can fight those rights in a piecemeal manner and prevent them from being recognized in as many places as possible.

But what were/are the real objections to adoption of the ERA? If the ERA passed, women would have to be paid as much as men, they might no longer be satisfied with homemaking and child-rearing and they would become competitors with men in the marketplace. Oh, and like men, they might have complete autonomy over their own bodies and health care. Can you imagine all that – and the audacity of it all? Didn’t they understand why “Mad Men” was so popular? And wasn’t getting the right to vote enough for at least another 100 years or so? Oh, right, that was 105 years ago at this point. Time certainly flies.

So, let’s see what Biden still has in himself and let’s make his administration truly memorable. After all, who’s really going to remember the infrastructure and inflation reduction initiatives if they get overturned soon after Jan. 20? Sure, the challenges to certification of the ERA will abound, but that’s a debate worth having again, in the press, in the courts and in kitchens and living rooms all over America.

L. Phillips Runyon III has practiced law in Peterborough for 50 years and was the presiding justice of the 8th Circuit Court for 27 years.