Julia Longoria
speaker
130 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Julia Longoria’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And what you see is this push for something called the Equal Rights Amendment.
But it didn't get the votes in 1975. I hope 1976 will be the year. Or in 1976. A special report on the 1977 National Women's Conference. Or in 1977. And the movement is stalled.
Well, a lot. But much of the credit goes to this woman.
She was a lawyer and a self-described housewife who started a movement called Stop ERA.
Her position was that the Equal Rights Amendment would actually strip women of the special privilege that they have that comes from being a woman.
And she said if this amendment passes, there will be certain unintended consequences.
And that argument? caught on.
It fell three states short. To get a constitutional amendment passed, turns out you need three quarters of state legislatures to say they want it. That is 38 out of 50. They only ever got 35. Dude. So the question is, if you want to get equal rights for women written into the law, what do you do? There's no ERA. The women's lib movement sparked a backlash. Like, what do you do?
Well, enter stage left.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg. RBG can do 20 push-ups and not the so-called girl kind. Now, before she was a Supreme Court justice.
Or a workout sensation.
It's the first time she argued in front of the Supreme Court in 1973.
But we can imagine that it was in one of those long pauses that Ruth Bader Ginsburg rescued some of the key principles behind the ERA, repackaged them, and marched them in through a side door.
So let me walk you through it now because it's beautiful. The ERA fight is underway, and RBG and her colleagues are watching this happen, right? And they're getting worried. What if the ERA doesn't pass? So what are we going to do if that's the case? How are we going to get equal rights for women? So they decided, okay, as an alternate approach, let's go back to the 14th Amendment.
You know, which, as we said, was designed from the beginning to be only about race.
Well, it says the word person, so that... should include women. If they could just get the courts to see it that way, then by default, almost, we would have a sort of ERA.
What does she want the court to say? She wants the court to say that sex would be treated just like race. And here's why that's so important. When the court sees racial discrimination happening, under the 14th Amendment, it takes a really hard line. It looks at it really, really closely, or at least it's supposed to. Whereas other kinds of discrimination, not so much.
Because actually, some discrimination is necessary. The law discriminates. It has to. It discriminates between 18-year-olds and 17-year-olds, between criminals and non-criminals. There would be chaos otherwise, right? But the courts decided that race is going to be a big red flag. They're going to ask governments, legislatures, presidents to have a compelling reason. A compelling state interest.
To do race discrimination. Otherwise, it's going to be unconstitutional. You with me so far?
By the way, the legal name for this test? Oh, God. Strict scrutiny. Ugh. I know they should have called it like, we mean business or something like that. But anyway, the point was that like they took it seriously, which, you know, back in the day, they weren't doing with sex discrimination at all.
Showing 21–40 of 130 · page 2 of 7
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