(KFTK) – Inez Stepman, a senior policy analyst at the IWF, joined Randy for to discuss the Equal Rights Amendment, and its recent ratification by Virgina, the 38th state to ratify.
"There are some serious legal issues," says Stepman, "that would prevent it from immediately being inscribed into the Constitution."
The process for the ERA began in the early 70s, which raises a concern, "most of our amendments are not ratified over an extremely long period of time, like 50 years," says Stepman. "In the modern era, we've only had three states ratifiy the ERA, Virgina, Illinois and Nevada. Since 2016 there have been three states, the rest of these are coming from pre-1978."
Congress originally imposed a 1977 deadline for ratification, and then extended that deadline to 1982.
Stepman thinks the meaning of the amendment may have changed to the public between the time the early states ratified the amendment, and the recent states.
"Do the words mean the same thing , when they were ratified by Nevada, Illinois and Virginia as they did 50 years ago?" asks Stepman. "There's of course a big difference in the way that the word 'sex' might be interpreted in the amendment in 2020 vs in 1972."
Read Stepman's piece in The Hill
Read about a recent poll on the popularity of the ERA in The Hill