Fresno writer: Roe decision, ERA’s failure show how women are second class in America

I have been on this Earth nearly 70 years, and yet it wasn’t until the morning of May 3, 2022, that I learned I was a second-class citizen.

On that day I belatedly realized that in the eyes of the United States Constitution, I had, as our U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in 1857, referring to a different second-class set of humans, “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

May 3, of course, was the morning after publication of current Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s memo regarding the potential SCOTUS rejection of its own 1973 decision in Roe v Wade. Yes, Friday, June 24, 2022, is the day the court made that rejection real. But this is like the optometrist slipping the next lens over your eye and asking, “this one, or this one?” Sure, the contrast is sharper, but the effect is the same.

For me, 1973 does not seem all that long ago. It is the year I graduated from college. Apparently back then I was more focused on my career than I was on women’s rights. But you see, women’s rights were something I already took for granted. Believe it or not, a 20-year-old was just as liable a half century ago to take her rights for granted as a 20-year-old today. Stuff had been decided, rights had been established, we could all move on with our lives.

This is why I was in shock on May 3, 2022.

Because it had never even occurred to me to ask this fundamental question: Do women in fact have equal rights under U.S. law?

I started googling frantically. And what in mere seconds I discovered, to my shock but somehow not my surprise, was that we do not.

As it turns out, the Equal Rights Amendment we heard so much about in my day, and that many of us learned about again in the television series “Mrs. America,” with Cate Blanchett as ERA opponent Phyllis Schlafly, was never passed into U.S. law.

Pause for reflection.

The proposed wording of the never-finally-ratified Equal Rights Amendment sounds vague enough to satisfy anyone: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”

Can you see anything there to take issue with? Given the terminology available at the time? I really cannot. But be that as it may, the amendment, passed by Congress in 1972, needed to be ratified by at least three quarters, or 38, of the 50 states. And that did not happen by the original deadline of March 22, 1979. It did not happen by the extended deadline of June 30, 1982. So the ERA expired.

But wait — there’s more.

States kept on ratifying as the decades passed. And amazingly, in early 2020, the ERA briefly revived when state number 38, Virginia, finally signed on. The validity of these later ratifications has been questioned, including by U.S. Archivist David Ferriero, who refused to certify the document within a two-year deadline. Thus Jan. 27, 2022 — two years after the Virginia ratification — passed with zero fanfare, and the amendment sank into oblivion.

All of this to say that, officially, under U.S. law, women do not have the same rights as men.

The upshot in today’s world is that lawmakers — now emboldened by the reversal of Roe — can pass any laws whatsoever, anything they can possibly dream up, to discriminate against women and their bodies ... and nothing about that is illegal. There is no recourse when state governments create such laws, put them on the books, and set out to govern via those same laws. And those laws can apply across state lines. Still nothing illegal is going on. Nothing an ordinary citizen can fight against.

Because, remember, women are not now and never have been deemed full ordinary citizens of this country.

So welcome to my world, which is the world of 51 percent of the U.S. population, none of whom are accorded full rights under the law.

Here’s my question for all of us: What are we going to do about it?