#era #politics #wartactics
The Equal Rights Amendment, or ERA, was first introduced close to 100 years ago, in 1923. As the name states, its goal is to provide equal rights for everyone and therefore eliminate any “legal” distinction between a man and a woman. At present, there are such legal distinctions in issues such as divorce, property and marriage.
In a recent episode of This Week Tonight, John Oliver discussed the Amendment and the struggle it has been to ratify it. I am all for equal rights, the episode was preaching to the choir. What I found interesting however, was how the bill was stalled by a single person, Phyllis Schlafly.
This is a battle-tested tactic in war, when you want something done, it is much easier if the proposer is one of them. That is what Mrs. Schlafly was in my eyes. A woman, who would have benefited from ERA, fighting against it. Any women that were on the fence, or uneducated about the issues looked at her as one of them. And if one of them told them it was a bad idea, perhaps it was.
In one of the clips she explains that in the current system (then and now), the mother normally got custody of the children. She argued that if ERA was ratified it would mean that upon divorce, each parent would get one child, rather than the woman getting automatic custody of the children. When the interviewer notes that is not what ERA states, Mrs. Schlafly exclaims, “oh yes, it says that you have to interpret things absolutely equally…”. If there were any women watching, and undecided on the amendment, you can imagine such fear mongering worked. I call it fear mongering because in a divorce, the primary care provider is given custody. While it happens to be the women who play this role, then and now, ERA had nothing to do with divorce custody guidelines.
I realize this is not new, as I pointed out in the beginning, this is tried and true. What fascinates me is how effective it is, even when it is this transparent.
