The Green Party of California calls for action on the Equal Rights Amendment

August 12, 2024 - The Green Party of California demands the Biden-Harris administration demonstrate genuine support for the Equal Rights Amendment, stop blocking its completion, and explicitly instruct the Archivist to publish it onto the U.S. Constitution.

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), first proposed in 1923, is an amendment to the United States Constitution that guarantees equality of rights under the law for all persons regardless of sex.  Legal scholars argue that, while women have made great strides since the 1920s to achieve more rights than they may have possessed then, there is still quite a way to go before we achieve true equality for women in the United States. 

For example, abortion rights and birth control are increasingly under attack, risking women’s health and very lives. Moreover, women in the US, on average, earn $0.78 to every dollar earned by men. Single women and mothers with children are the two fastest-growing groups of people experiencing homelessness in the United States.

Women in every state report injustice in their family law cases, especially battered mothers trying to protect their children from abusive fathers who aggressively litigate against them, using family court to stalk, harass, punish, and impoverish their former partners and children.  This doesn’t even begin to get at the many ways in which women are disproportionately vulnerable to crime, physical violence, including sexual violence and domestic violence, economic predation, and other forms of abuse by individuals, corporations, and even our hallowed government institutions.

As of January 27, 2020, the ERA had satisfied the requirements of Article V of the Constitution for ratification (passage by two-thirds of each house of Congress and approval by three-fourths of the states).  All that remains is for the Archivist of the United States to publish the now-ratified ERA onto the U.S. Constitution.

The final ministerial, but official, step of publishing the ERA to the Constitution would create consistency among the patchwork of laws that currently regulate the ways gender and economic inequity are addressed under our legal system.  It would also empower lawmakers to develop a formal social framework to dismantle the built-in biases that work against women.

Despite a deadline for ratification of the ERA by the states that was imposed and extended briefly by Congress in the 1970s, many leading constitutional scholars agree that the ERA is now part of the Constitution. Because of issues raised about the deadline imposed by Congress, however, first the Trump-Pence and now the Biden-Harris Administrations have engaged in unconstitutional obstruction and interference with its publication.  As a result, the Archivist of the United States has been prevented from publishing the ERA in the Federal Register with certification of its ratification as the 28th Amendment. This can easily be reversed by the Biden-Harris Administration.

The Green Party of California urges everyone to take action to call for the Biden-Harris Administration to instruct the Archivist to publish the Equal Rights Amendment as the 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution today!

- CALL the White House Comment Line 202-456-1111 (Tues - Thurs 8-12 PDT, 11-3 EST) 

- EMAIL the White House and TEXT Harris at 310-861-2977 and Biden at 302-404-0800

- Urge Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on social media and share this message with them:
"Jill Stein has pledged to instruct the Archivist to publish the Equal Rights Amendment onto the U.S. Constitution on her 1st day in office. What are you waiting for? MAKE THE CALL!"

- Use X (formerly Twitter) accounts: @JoeBiden or @POTUS / @KamalaHarris or @VP

- Use hashtags: #ERA #EqualRightsAmendment #ERANow! Tag @DrJillStein

- Write/call/tweet to Senators and Congressional representatives that we don’t need the deadline extended, we just need Biden to stop obstructing and call the Archivist and direct her to publish. 

The Green Party of California supports publication of the ratified Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution. The goals of this decades-long campaign for equal rights for women is precisely aligned with numerous California Green Party values, including one of our 10 Key Values, Feminism.  
In fact, with respect to Women’s Rights, the Green Party of California Platform calls for equal gender rights, including the adoption of “a constitutional protection of equality for women, such as the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).”  In addition, the GP-US platform has endorsed the strategy challenging the legitimacy of the deadline. 

Resources: 
Watch a video of an ERA Panel featuring attorney, ERA advocate and professor of sexual violence law, Wendy Murphy, as well as Dr. Jill Stein and others offering extensive information on the ERA.
See the ERA's history and timeline HERE.