Beginning Of an ERA?

When a Republican congressman endorses the Democrats on women's issues, you know the national GOP has gone off the deep end. Representative Richard Hanna (R-NY), an opponent of President Obama's health care reform bill and environmental regulation, suggested that any woman who wants to protect her rights should donate to the Democratic party - an acknowledgement of his party's failure to understand women. (News flash: Gene Simmons understands women better than the Republicans.)

Hanna is a more moderate Republican, supporting legalized abortion as well as supporting National Public Radio and Planned Parenthood. He wants the Republicans to hold the House in November, and in order to demonstrate the fact the GOP needs women's votes to do that, he told women at a rally that they should give money to those politicians who speak for them - even though that means contributing to Democrats.

"I think these are very precarious times for women, it seems," the upstate New York congressman said. "So many of your rights are under assault . . .. I'll tell you this: Contribute your money to people who speak out on your behalf, because the other side - my side - has a lot of it. And you need to send your own message. You need to remind people that you vote, you matter, and that they can’t succeed without your help."

And here's the kicker: "If equality had been enshrined in the Constitution . . . I wonder if we would still be hearing today from right-wing presidential contenders that women should not serve in combat . . . that women should not use birth control, and that women who do are called names that are not fit to repeat here."

This wasn't a wake-up call to his party. This was shock treatment.

Oh yeah, the rally Hanna spoke at was for that old 1970s cause célèbre, the Equal Rights Amendment. Another member of the New York House delegation, Democrat Carolyn Maloney, recently re-introduced it in Congress in the hope of giving it another shot for ratification to add to the Constitution; Hanna is a co-sponsor. I admire their gumption, but with Hanna, as a pro-ERA Republican, is a minority within a majority - a minority of one, no doubt - and Maloney must be realistic about getting this bill pushed through a Congress in which Republicans see the ERA as a relic of a time of radical feminism aimed (as they see it) at legally refusing to acknowledge gender differences. And even if it did get through Congress, would three states ratify it after 35 had already done so before its 1982 ratification deadline? Or would the states have to start all over? Either way, sending it to state legislatures largely under Republican control these days doesn't sound like a profile in courage; it seems more like an exercise in futility.

The ERA, which once had bipartisan support, became anathema to the Republicans once Ronald Reagan became President and moved the party and the country farther to the right. When Reagan is described as a transformational President, this is one of those examples of how he transformed the country - he rendered the idea of prohibiting the denial of equality on the basis of sex to an artifact of a more liberal America that no longer exists. Before Maloney and Hanna, the last politician I heard support the Equal Rights Amendment was Lloyd Bentsen, the late U.S. Senator from Texas, when he was Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis's vice presidential running mate in 1988. "I support the REA!" he proudly declared at a campaign rally in speaking up for women's rights, leaving many in the crowd wondering how supporting the Rural Electrification Administration ensured gender equality. Yes, he couldn't even get the acronym right.

But that didn't matter, since the ERA was a dead issue by the end of Reagan's Presidency. The voters made that clear in 1988 by electing the senior George Bush, who was for the ERA before he was against it, to succeed Reagan in the White House.

But you see, Republicans are pretty much stuck in the 1950s. Why else would Mitt Romney call post-Soviet Russia our largest geopolitical enemy, despite the fact that the Cold War ended twenty years ago and the fact that the Russians recognize the value of a partnership with the Americans to control nuclear proliferation? Someone should tell him about Elvis. Or, in light of women's rights, Aretha.