Stuff You Should Know - Why is the Equal Rights Amendment still not ratified?

Episode Date: March 4, 2021

The United States is one of only 28 countries in the world that doesn’t have equal protection for women under the law enshrined in its constitution. There was a moment in the 70s where it came very close, but then the conservative movement was born. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Brian over there and Jerry's over there, the three amigos, equal in every single way, shape, and form.

And that makes this, of course, Stuff You Should Know, which is basically its own sovereign nation of equality. Oh, yeah, man. Come on, give me a break. I always thought Jerry had more power than we did. No, not a drop more, nor a drop less. Nary a drop less, Charles. I love it. Yeah, I do too. It's a nice place to be. It's a nice state to live in, you know, mentally and physically. Agreed. I think here at the beginning we're going to do a rare, we're not going to read a listener mail, but a rare front-loaded listener mail alert that we got. First of all, a couple of years ago, a woman named Durain Bailey suggested the topic of the Equal Rights Amendment. And at the time pointed out the difference between the

word suffragette and suffragist, I clearly did not read that email close enough because it took an email last week after one of us said suffragette in a recent episode. And a woman named Mary Malanoskas emailed and said, hey, by the way, look it up. I mean, she wasn't mean. She was very nice. That sounded like I was being not too nice. She's very nice about it. She said, you know, look it up. There's a suffragette is sort of a disparaging term rather than suffragist. And it was tagged by, you know, reporters in the early 1900s, I think in Britain, to mock people fighting for the women's right to vote. And I didn't know that until then. So I'm glad to know. So thank you, Mary, Durain. Yeah. Once you hear that, it makes total sense, you know? Well, of course. I just,

I don't know. I never knew that. Never thought about it. I didn't either. This is how people learn stuff. I just assumed you were making a Bowie reference in the episode. I thought it was you that said it. I'm pretty sure it's you. All right. Well, either way, now we know. Let's go with you. Okay. Okay. We probably both did. Or more to the point, it probably was me. But either way, that was a, I think it hats off to you, buddy, for coming up with that one. Well, I'll not say it again. You won't say it anymore? No, of course not. Okay. I thought you said, well, and I'll say it again. I think that's the opposite of what you were just saying. No, I won't. So we're talking today about the Equal Rights Amendment, which is, it represents a really,

like discouragingly long swath of American history. But if you set, if you look at the whole thing just from a historian's eye or even an anthropologist's eye, it's really, really interesting the history of this, the Equal Rights Amendment. If you kind of look at it much more subjectively and empathetically, empathetically, it's a lot harder to swallow, but it's still interesting nonetheless. Totally agree. Yeah. So the Equal Rights Amendment is a constitutional amendment, a proposed constitutional amendment that would give women equal protection under the law to men that you couldn't make a law that discriminated on the basis of sex. And I'll bet there's a lot of people out there, Chuck, that say, well, that's already in the

Constitution, isn't it? Because there was a poll that the AP conducted in 2020 that found that about 72% of the people they contacted thought that there was already equal protection for women in the Constitution. That's just not the case. But that same poll found 75% of those respondents were in favor of enshrining that protection in the Constitution. So it's kind of weird that it's not in there. If people think it's already in there, and then when they find out it's not, they're in favor of it overwhelmingly. Yeah. We just happen to live in a country where 90% of the American public could be in favor of certain legislation, and it could very possibly fall on deaf ears when it comes to our politicians.

Yeah. Yes. Because bipartisan support has been defined in recent times as what the houses of Congress agree to, not necessarily what the public agrees to, which is a different form of bipartisanship. And to me, if you ask me, the more important one, like if the public generally agrees on something, go with that. It seems like since they're elected representatives in Congress, they should kind of go with that. Josh, 2022. Yes. I can't wait. There's going to be a lot of big changes around here, everybody. Yeah. So should we kind of go back to the beginnings? Yes, we should. Because I associate the ERA with the 70s and the women's movement as we'll see, but it goes back a lot further than that. Yeah, it does. And it's crazy to think that

since the early 1920s, they've been trying to get this enshrined in the Constitution, and it still isn't in the year 2021, but that is the case. The first versions of the Equal Rights Amendment were written up in the early 20s by a suffragist named Alice Paul, some other women, notably one Crystal Eastman, also helped out a lot. And they also helped get the 19th Amendment passed, which gave women the right to vote in 1920. And they got together and said, you know, I think the next step obviously should be just to go ahead and put this in the Constitution that women have equal rights like men in all facets of life. It's worth pointing out here that Paul was a Quaker and a leader of the National Women's Party for like 50 years or something. And the

reason I mentioned she was a Quaker because she actually named the amendment the Lucretia Mott amendment after another Quaker woman from the 19th century who was also a suffragist as well as an abolitionist. Yeah, if you peel back, you know, the layer of early 20th century or 19th century progressive, there's about a 100% chance they were a Quaker. Quakers did all sorts of good stuff during this time. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, it really is. We should do one on the Quakers for sure. Yeah, I have a friend who's a Quaker and she talks about Quaker meetings and Quaker weddings and stuff, and it all just seems so chill and peaceful. It's very appealing. Right, sure. But so Lucretia Mott apparently was among what's considered the beginning of the first wave

of feminism, which was, you know, not only do women need the right to vote, and this is like the 1830s, 1840s, I think, is when she was really beginning to be active. Not only should women have the right to vote, but these people were also very frequently also abolitionists, right? So when Congress started passing laws that protected the rights that enshrined the rights of African Americans into the Constitution, into the law of the land saying you cannot discriminate against people based on their, because they're African American or based on their race, women said, well, hey, just add sex in there. Add sex. Like, let's put that into the 14th Amendment. And that didn't make it. It didn't make it into any of the amendments. And that was a, I don't

think it caused a rift or anything like that, but I think it was extremely disappointing to the suffragists who had also worked for abolition as well, that the two things couldn't go hand in hand. So African Americans started to gain civil rights decades before women did, women gained the right to vote, and women just kind of had to carry on. The suffragist movement continued on even after the abolitionist movement was successful. Yeah. And then in 1943, Alice Paul said, well, here's what we'll do. We'll reword this amendment that we've written. So it sounds more constitutional, I guess. And so it sounds a little more like the 14th Amendment. And the new version basically said equal rights, I'm sorry, equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the

United States or by any state on account of sex. And, you know, once again, this was proposed in, you know, for about 30 years in most sessions, I think every session of Congress. Every single one. And didn't get a lot of support. And, you know, it's not to say that all men in politics were against it, but it certainly was not their legislative priority, clearly. And if you have a run from 1922 to 1970 with only 10 women serving in the Senate, never more than two at a time, then the writings on the wall that the ERA is not just, it's just not going to be a top priority. I know, but that's sad writing. You know what I mean? Like the fact that there weren't women

in Congress certainly doesn't let men off the hook. Like they can't do that. They can't pass this, can't possibly take up legislation that guarantees the equal rights to women because we're moon, you know, like that's very bothersome. But there's something else in there, Chuck. So from 1920, 1923, when Alice Paul first introduced that, all the way through to 1970, it was taken up in every session of Congress and it failed. And one of the things that stuck out to me was that there was a guy who oversaw the House, I think the House Judiciary Committee, and he was a Democrat from New York and he put the kibosh on it. Emmanuel Seller? Yeah. So he put the kibosh on it. He would not let it get to a vote. And I was like, why, this guy was a Democrat in New York. What was

his problem? And it turns out that the opposition to the ERA, which is now very clearly among, like it's liberals are for it, progressives are for it, conservatives are typically against it. It used to be flip-flopped, where the liberals, especially New Deal liberals like Eleanor Roosevelt were against the Equal Rights Amendment and conservatives like Eisenhower conservatives were typically in favor of it. Isn't that bizarre? Yeah, it is. I mean, Roosevelt, she had her reasons. She wasn't just like, oh, I don't think women should have rights. I think she said, you know, she thought it would undermine workplace protections. She was a part of Kennedy's commission. She chaired the commission, the president's commission on the status of women,

which I think the result was released posthumously that said it wasn't, the ERA wasn't necessary. And she kind of came around a little bit. She never gave a full-throated endorsement, but she kind of stopped talking out against it, I think at a certain point. Yeah. She used to debate Alice Paul. Like publicly, they would, you know, have back and forth debates over, you know, whether the ERA was needed and how helpful it was going to be. So, I mean, you don't, like, I know that Eleanor Roosevelt is frequently criticized as not outright feminist enough in a lot of ways, but she also clearly seems to have been a feminist in her own way, for sure. Yeah. And we should point out too that Emmanuel Seller in 1972, in a very big upset, lost

to a woman, an attorney named Elizabeth Holtzman, largely due to his opposition to the ERA. So, yeah. Okay. So, finally, by the early 70s, you're getting more and more women who are starting to show up in Congress, like Bella Asbug and Shirley Chisholm. And they basically said, like, this is our priority. We're going to get this Equal Rights Amendment finally passed through Congress. And I don't know if it just happened to be like an era of kind of bipartisan sentiment or what the deal was, but everybody finally came together and that thing got passed. Like, if a piece of legislation's ever gotten passed, it was this one in a bipartisan manner. Yeah. And you know what? We'll get to how that passed, but a really big reason is because it

started becoming a big deal in the media with this second wave, like you mentioned, of the women's lib movement. And no small part by a woman named Betty Friedan, who wrote a book called The Feminine Mystique that in 1964, sold a million copies. And she probably gets at least a short stuff all on her own. She was really interesting. The reason she wrote this book is because she did a survey for a college reunion for her former classmates, learned that many of her former female classmates were not super happy about being homemakers and not being able to work and centered down a research rabbit hole on this, kind of became her passion project, because she wanted to write a magazine article, like a really in-depth one. No one wanted it.

So she ended up publishing it as a book called The Feminine Mystique, which kind of rocked the world of America in the early to mid-60s. Yeah, because like in this book, she's basically saying like this whole thing we're all going along with, this idea that the highest ideal a woman can aspire to is to be the best wife and mother she possibly can be, and that that's her identity. It's as someone's wife, as someone's mother, that she doesn't have her own identity, that's independent of all that. That is a crushing way to live for a lot of women, not all women as we'll see, but a lot of women, and she spoke up for a lot of them. And I believe that this was kind of, it was already kind of out there in pieces, like people were talking about this, but Betty Friedan like put it all

together and put it on the map and got everyone talking from what I've ever seen like almost single-handedly started the second wave of feminism. Yeah, and she put a pin in this little miniseries. She was played by Tracy Oman in a miniseries last year called Mrs. America that we're going to get to a little more in depth in a second. Yeah, so Betty Friedan publishes The Feminine Mystique, like I said, just totally rocked everybody's world for better or worse, depending on your ideas about what The Feminine Mystique was about and saying. But yeah, like you're saying, like that really laid the groundwork to this bipartisan passing in Congress of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972, I believe, right? Yeah, so it passes in a big way. I think you said

93%, 93.4% in the House, 91.3% in the Senate. But I can't wrap my head around that. How did one-third of a senator, but is that Senator Cross section of New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Michigan? Here's the deal, though. If you want something enshrined in the Constitution, that's a big deal in this country. They don't do it willy-nilly, nor should they. But you need not only, like once it passes that, it's not automatic. Then the state legislatures have to ratify it by a two-thirds margin, which means at least 38 states have to ratify it. And the ERA had a stipulation that said, if that isn't done in seven years, then you got to go back to the drawing board. And that was not in the actual ERA. That was not in

the constitutional amendment that was passed, and that's going to become very important later. But it was in the legislation where that ERA, the amendment, was sent to the states for ratification. It said, do this in seven years. Right. Okay. That's just like that little slight distinction makes a big difference down the road. Oh yeah. I mean, the people pushing for the ERA certainly would not have wanted an expiration date. No. And there's, as far as I could tell, they haven't ever attached an expiration date to an amendment to be ratified before. It was just, and it was also an arbitrary period of time too. So just chew on that. Put that wadded-up piece of gum in the back of your cheek and save it for

later. I wonder in the debate if they're like, well, I mean, how many years? Oh, seven. Seven. Sounds good. Poor the Scotch. So within one year, 30 of the 38 states needed ratified it, which was super fast. And everyone was like, you know, proponents were like, this is great, man. It looks like this thing is going to sail right into the constitution. And then a woman popped up named Phyllis Schlaefle. And we're going to take a break here and we'll talk about Phyllis right after this. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in

this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, then let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to

father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And I guess, depending on where your views are, Chuck, we should have introduced Phyllis Schaeffli with the Darth Vader theme song when she first makes her appear. It's exactly right. Did you watch any of these interviews and debates? Yes, dude. It's really interesting. If you have your wits about you, you could despise everything that ever came out of Phyllis Schaeffli's mouth. It's very, very easy to do.

She equates gay people, which I guess, in the fashion of the time, she calls homosexuals. She calls them perverts. She says that they should not have any rights afforded to married men and women. They shouldn't be able to adopt children. She says, really despicable. I didn't hear that one. She says a lot of very despicable stuff. And her whole viewpoint is despicable to a lot of people. But there are very few people walking around out there who have the poise and self-possession to go into the lion's den and speak for whatever she was convinced of was right. She has to be credited to at least that degree. No matter what you think about her mind, she had a lot of poise, I guess you could say. And it's really kind of something

to watch. Because I saw this one. Did you see the good morning American debate from 1976 between her and Ferdinand? Yeah, man. And it's really clear what a skilled debater she was and how rattled she could get somebody. I mean, she clearly, I felt bad for Ferdinand. She was doing a good job. But she was getting pissed off. And you could tell that she just liked to get under people's skin while she just remained perfectly erect in her seat with perfect posture. And that Mrs. America series, which was on our list, and I'm going to bump it back up to next in line now to watch, but she was played really, really well, judging from just the accent and the mannerisms by Cate Blanchett, who can do no wrong. Yeah, I want to see that series too. But yeah, she, so if you

see those two debating, it's like a study in contrasts where Phyllis Shafley is basically sitting there at tea time at the country club before the polo match. And Betty Ferdinand, if you put like a beret and sunglasses in a French cigarette in her mouth, she's like sitting at the Beatnik Cafe, like listening to a poetry jam or something. It's pretty funny. Just these two totally contrasting personalities via Shafley debated her under the table. And it's not like Betty Ferdinand was an intellectual slouch by any measure, but it's just Phyllis Shlafly could rattle anybody. Anybody, she could rattle Santa Claus. I'm just going to say it. Yeah, I mean, she kind of made herself out to be just this homemaker. She would, when she introduced herself

at engagement, she would thank her husband for letting her come there. But when you kind of peek behind the curtain, she had a master's in political science. She had a law degree. She ran for Congress when she was 27 years old and lost. And she was sort of pre 1980s, a big part in at the very least, I don't even think they called it the Christian right at the time, but kind of organizing what would later become the Christian right movement. Yeah, you can make a really good case that Phyllis Shlafly laid the groundwork for the current Republican party in every way from Reagan onward to today. And yeah, she basically said like I'm just a housewife from St. Louis, proud housewife, wife and mother of six from St. Louis.

And in a lot of ways she was like, she made reference to law school during her debate to Betty Friedan. And she sounded like she was in law school then. So it seems like she was just a woman who said, I don't agree with this and I'm going to put a stop to it and stood in front of this unstoppable tidal wave and stopped it. She stopped it. She stopped the ERA from being ratified by the states right at the 11th and a half hour before it was ever passed and ratified by the 38 states. You said they got 30 states in the first year. By 1977, they were up to 35 states. They just needed three more, three more states. And the whole thing was going to become the law of the land and Phyllis Shlafly got in the way of that,

almost single-handedly at first. Yeah. And she launched her group was called Stop ERA, which we obsess about acronyms. It's sort of annoying when the first letter of an acronym is the actual acronym. Yeah. But Stop ERA stood for Stop Taking Our Privileges. And her argument, she was like, and she used this to her advantage in those debates, like see how angry these feminists are. She kind of coined that term, I think, about the angry women's live movement, these angry feminists. They just want to throw down everything that makes us female and everything that makes us women. And they want to just set fire to it. And before you know it, women are going to be able to be drafted in the armed forces.

Never happen. They're not going to be separate bathrooms or locker rooms anymore from this point on. Not true. That started to happen more in recent years. Wrapped up same-sex marriage. I mean, we'll get to that, how she kind of co-opted gay rights and reproductive rights into all this just to sort of coalesce that movement and said, women are going to lose her right to alimony and child support. Never happened. And just the life as we know it and the family as we know it, and this is something 50 years on, all this stuff is still so relevant, like the dissolution of what people think was the perfect family in 1950, basically. Yeah. Because I mean, so she was a troll, like a proto troll, but like the kind where you didn't

do it online, you did it in person. But her points were coherent and understandable to people who agreed with her. And they were like, yeah, like the man's role is to provide for and take care of the woman. And the woman provides like the domestic labor. And that's just the division of labor between the sexes. And if we have the CRA, that's going to go away. And then there's going to be all this other horrible stuff that's going to break down the fabric of society. And do we really want that? And so by taking the argument away from the idea of whether women have a fundamental human right to equal protection under the law as men, which is, who disagrees with that? Nobody disagrees with that. And mixing it up with

all these other what ifs and potential social outcomes and the ruin of the family, gay men teaching your children at school, that is what consolidated people into a movement behind fellow Schlafly. And it was really underhanded, but it worked really, really well. And it still works today. She came up with that from what I can tell. Yeah. In 73, when Roe v. Wade passed, she was, again, savvy enough to say, well, here's something else I can seize on. And I can wrap this up. There's a really large block of voters who are conservative Christians who, you know, we've never really intermingled politics like that before. And so let's wrap this up in pro-choice. Let's wrap it up with gay rights, big culture war issues of the time,

to kind of rally, and like I said, coalesce this group together in order to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment. And like you said, it worked in a big, big way. And I can't wait to watch that TV show. I can't either. And I don't want to suck all the oxygen away from Betty Friedan and the other feminists, but I was saying that Phyllis Schlafly was a troll, a proto-troll. And if you read some of the stuff that she said in public, sometimes she sounds like a spokesperson for the Taliban. She said things like that sexual harassment on the job was not a problem for virtuous women. Exactly. And that the atom bomb was a marvelous gift that was given to our country by a wise God. Just things that would drive any liberal or progressive, especially a feminist up the wall.

And in fact, Betty Friedan in this very famous debate from three years before that Good Morning America appearance that you and I saw, she said, you should be burned at the stake for betraying your gender, basically. Yeah, she didn't do her so many favors with stuff like that, because that just allowed Schlafly to say, see there, she had angry they all are. That's exactly right. But she could just get under your skin like that. So fast forward many, many years to kind of now almost. In 2017, after about 40 years of not much movement, Nevada became the first new state to ratify the ERA, thanks in no small part to state Senator Pat Spearman. And she said this bill is about a quality period.

2018, just a few years ago, Illinois came aboard as well. And now it's back up to 37. Did we mention that five of the states de-ratified or rescinded their ratification? I don't think we did. We did not. And I think that's an important point here. Yeah, Nebraska, Tennessee, Idaho, Kentucky and South Dakota. You can all be very proud of your legislatures. After 1977, they de-ratified or de-certified, not de-certified, they rescinded it. They didn't. They said this is based on, there's actually precedents for that. Ohio and New Jersey both rescinded their support for the 14th Amendment once their legislatures changed control to white supremacists basically in the 19th century. They said, we take back our vote for

the 14th Amendment. It also said a precedent, though, that Congress ignored that and still counted Ohio and New Jersey as having ratified the 14th Amendment because they did officially. Right. So it goes back up to 35. Then in 2018, Illinois made it 37. In January of last year, it's crazy that it took this long. Virginia finally became the 38th state. And so proponents of the ERA said, all right, we got there. That's the 38th. This thing should have never had an expiration date to begin with. That's dumb. Whoever said seven years and then Port of Scotch, they should be burned at the stake. And they said, let's just get this thing done. And they said, you know what? Back in 1798, the 27th Amendment was passed but not ratified until 200 years later,

202 years. So like there's precedent there. And that was about prohibiting the law raising or lowering taxes for congressional salaries from taking effect until their next term, like big, big stuff. Not knocking it. It's important, I guess. But they said, you know, that was done. So this thing shouldn't have had an expiration date to begin with. Right. Opponents say, well, no, there was an expiration date. So we have to honor it. And that's, you know, that's the deal. Sorry. And there was even a three year extension that brought it up to 1982. And by the time that extension was running out, and it did not look like anything was going to move or happen, or no more states were going to move to ratify it, even the national organization for women and

other feminist groups basically threw in the towel and said, it's done. The ERA lost this time. It's not gone forever. But this amazing, immense, again, tidal wave, this with just the momentum of a freight train running through the country is now dead just a few years after, which is just nuts that that happened. It's just crazy. But that's the fact that now 38 states have officially voted in favor of ratifying it, set off a flurry of lawsuits here in the United States when Virginia became the last one in 2020. And basically, everybody and anyone suing the National Archives and Records Administration to either certify and put it into the National Archives or the National Record that this is now a part of the Constitution or to not do that. And it's

totally up in the air of what that's going to be. But apparently, a lot of people, not everyone, because there's plenty of people who are like, it's official now. Take all the BS away. And this is an official law of the land. There are plenty of people who are proponents of the Equal Rights Amendment who say, we need to start over again. And one of those people was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who said it needs to be voted on again. We need to pick up again basically from square one. Yeah. And I think, and we'll talk about all this stuff, but I think there have been so many laws enacted since then that do protect so many of these rights. I think people like RBG were like, you know what, let's start over. Let's rewrite it for the modern times,

making sure everything is in there that we still need. And yeah, and re-vote on it. And you know, I think that's reasonable. So do that. So let's take a break. And then we'll come back and talk about those questions like, do we need the ERA? And what would happen if we did pass the ERA? How about that? Sounds good. And my favorite boy bands give me in this situation. If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different

hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been

trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, Chuck. So you made mention of a lot of laws that have been created since the ERA was passed, I guess, by Congress. And even before then, that protect women as a form of what's called a protective class. In the United States, their protective classes that include races, religions, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity is becoming a protected class. And if you remember of a protected class, it means that if there's a law that excludes you from something, whether intentionally or not, that law is considered discriminatory and you can file a lawsuit against it. And then the courts have to apply different tests to it to see just how discriminatory it is, or if it's discriminatory at all, and whether or not it should be struck down

or overruled. And the reason that sex is a protected class, even without the Equal Rights Amendment, is thanks very much largely to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is an absolute legal pioneer in figuring out how to get women the protections under the law that they were looking for without the Equal Rights Amendment being part of the Constitution. Yeah, I mean, I think people that say that we don't need the ERA. And it's a very fine line between saying I'm against the ERA and saying I don't think we need the ERA. It all falls under the same banner ultimately. But people that say we don't need the ERA say, you know, we got the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, you can't hire and fire people based on that. That applies to

pay and benefits too. There's also the Equal Pay Act of 1963 that say there should be equal pay for equal work. That's didn't, you know, in practice hasn't worked out that way because there's still a wage gap. We did a good episode on that back in 2016. Yeah, that was a good one. Violence Against Women Act of 1994, saying here are federal resources for domestic and sexual violence, and you like prevention and prosecution of that, counseling. And this one, however, and you know, put a pin in this one, because this is one that is used also for people that say we do need the ERA because that one expired and is still hung up and has not gotten congressional reauthorization since 2019 because of politics. The Violence Against Women Act.

Yeah, and then Title IX is the last one in 1972. Title IX is the one you hear about mostly in college athletics that says, I mean, it says a lot of things, but in terms of college athletics, I have the biggest impact saying you got to have the same amount of women's sports as men's sports in the same like accommodations and scholarships and all that stuff. And then so it's like, we don't need the ERA because we have all these things. So yeah, so you have law and then you also have case law too that basically hinges on the 14th Amendment, which says that a citizen of the United States can't be discriminated against or is due equal protection under the law by the states and by the U.S. And that was written in the past, in the 14th Amendment,

in the wake of slavery. It was meant to basically make recently freed African Americans full citizens of the United States, but it doesn't specify on the basis of race or on the basis of religion. It just says if you're a U.S. citizen, you get equal protection under the law. And so Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the reasons she's such a legal pioneer in this respect is because she's the one who figured out how to argue that the 14th Amendment applies to sex as well. And the whole thing about legal stuff, and this is all new to me, but it's really kind of interesting, is that depending on how enshrined classes a protected group is in law, the more protected it is, the stricter the scrutiny that judges are going to apply to determining whether

a law is discriminatory or not. And the most scrutiny you can apply to something is called strict scrutiny, and that's typically reserved for things that are protected by the Constitution. And that means that if you have a law that even remotely steps on the right to one of those protected classes, it's probably an illegal discriminatory law. Yeah. How does that work in practice? Does that mean they just spend more time? Or what does that even mean? So I think what it means is that if you pass a law, and let's say that I pass a law and it accidentally discriminates against your ability to get your hands on oatmeal. I can get all the

oatmeal I want, but you can't. Let's say in the Constitution, Chuck is specifically protected under the law. That means that this law that prevents you from getting oatmeal, that's a discriminatory law. And so it's going to be really easy for you to bring a lawsuit and for a judge to say, like, there's even a little bit of discrimination here. This law is illegal because it's discriminating against Chuck. And it says in the Constitution, you can't discriminate against Chuck. It just means that the standards for that law to stand, everyone else on the planet, basically, has to benefit from you not getting oatmeal for some reason. And that that's just not how laws work. So it would be really easy for you to bring a lawsuit and get that law overturned

because it discriminates against you because you're a protected class. Now, if it's just like, everybody likes Chuck, but it doesn't say in the Constitution that you can't be discriminated against, they're going to use a slightly less strict test to determine whether the thing is a discriminatory law or not. And so maybe, yeah, it generally promotes oatmeal use among other people, among all people, but there's some other people who don't get it too. That doesn't really matter because, you know, it's not enshrined in the Constitution. So it's almost like degrees. And once you're in the Constitution as a protected class, like it is really difficult to discriminate against you. And that's one reason why people say, no, we need this. We need this in the

Constitution because women and sex and gender even should be a protected class. You should not be able to discriminate against somebody based on that. Yeah. I mean, that's the main argument for proponents of the ERA is saying, no, let's make this the real deal. There, you know, cases can be overturned, laws can be reversed, executive actions can have devastating impacts. And only being enshrined in the Constitution will make this, like you said, just so locked down and protected that people can't mess with it anymore. I think we've seen in recent years that, you know, precedent can be argued and laws can be overturned. And it's like, sure, we have all these laws that passed since the ERA first came, was ratified, you know, in the

1970s. But it doesn't take much, you know, especially when you look at a very imbalanced Supreme Court, when for people to kind of worry that these things can be taken away. Yeah. And I mean, like there was a famous quote from Antonin Scalia when he was alive in a justice on the Supreme Court, basically saying like, no, the Constitution most decidedly does not protect against discrimination on the basis of sex. And, you know, when you hear Supreme Court justice saying that, it's like, well, you know, how many cases is it going to take before he rules? Like, no, you can totally discriminate against somebody on the basis of sex. If it's in the Constitution, it doesn't matter what Antonin Scalia or any other justice thinks,

it's in the Constitution. So that level of protection, like you were saying, would be, it's just a totally different level of protection than, you know, customarily, we don't discriminate. It's no, you can't discriminate. That's the difference between those two things. Yeah. And not just reversing laws, but passing new laws that maybe violate that equal treatment under the law. And, you know, some other things that constitutionally could come into play, could come into play if it were to go through is something like the pink tax. I don't think we've ever done a show on the pink tax. I don't think so either. But this is, you know, this is the notion that like, you know, from everything that like similar products for men and women,

they charge women more than they do for men for these products to stuff like, you know, menstrual equality or equity, basically, you know, tampons, pads, other menstruation products should not be taxed anymore. They should be like treated like any other essential item. Yeah. And then so, so there are a lot of things, a lot of protections that it would afford. One thing that frequently is cited as protecting women against is like violence, like say domestic violence. From what I read, it probably wouldn't because it protects against being discriminated against by the law. It doesn't necessarily afford protection from like an individual person or something like that. Right. Not necessarily a company, although being enshrined in the constitution,

you could really sue a company's pants off for discriminating against you. But there are, there are some things that would do some things that wouldn't do. And then there's some things up in the air. And one of the reasons why this is still such a cultural flashpoint still today in 2020 is because now more than ever, it has become equated with a taxpayer funded abortion. And the reasoning behind people who oppose the ERA because they think it's basically tantamount to just completely repealing any restrictions on abortion, abortion from that point on is is only women can get abortions. And so if there's a law against abortion, there's a law that's discriminating against women, therefore you can't have laws regulating

abortions. And so that's why, especially with the Christian right, it's still such a flashpoint today. And that's why starting from scratch again is going to be no easier than it was back in 1972. Yeah. Now you're probably right. It's pretty frustrating though to get to that 38 state threshold. And because of some dumb arbitrary expiration date placed on it, it's still being held up in the year 2021. Yeah, in the year 2021. And then also the United States has an obligation as like basically the leader of the free world to join the rest of the Western nations in in enshrining equal protection and the law for by sex. I guess the United States is one of only 28 countries in the world that doesn't guarantee gender equality. One of 28 Chuck and 100% of the

countries that have written their constitution since 1950 have included some guarantee of gender equality in those constitutions. So it's kind of sad that we don't have that still to this day. Yeah. And if you look around the country, this, you know, Dave Ruiz helped us out with this article. And he points out stuff like, you know, if you go to Nepal, their Supreme Court struck down a law exempting marital rape from criminal prosecution because of its ERA clause in Tanzania. The Court of Appeals struck down a law that allowed a 15 year old girls to be married without parental consent while boys only had to be at 18. So, you know, when you look at countries around the world that are seemingly ahead of the USA in terms of

equal protection, it's just, it's baffling and disappointing. Baffling is right, yeah. You got anything else? I got nothing else. It's good stuff. I have one more thing if you'll give me another second. You ready? Sure. So, when I was researching this, my head was just spinning again and again and again. And it reminded me of something that I read recently. And that is that it's really easy to get bounced around from one outrage to another to one thing to care about this issue.

And then, oh wait, what about this issue? And I saw some advice somewhere. I don't remember where. But it was, if you want to effect change, pick one issue and dedicate yourself to it. And that doesn't mean that you don't care about all the other issues that you do care about. It's just that this one issue is your specialty. You're an expert in it. And you're probably going to get further going like that. You're probably going to be able to see more change doing that than you would just kind of bouncing from issue to issue to issue. So, I mean, if this really got to you and you really want to do something about it, make getting the ERA past your specialty, you know?

Totally. Okay. Thanks for letting me stand on the soapbox for a second. And since I'm getting off of my soapbox and Chuck is putting it up in the soapbox caddy that we keep here in the studio, that means it's time for Listener Man. I'm going to call this a Ninja in the Connecticut Forest. Nice. Did you read this one? No, I haven't.

This is kind of crazy. It's long, but it's worth it. Okay. Hey guys, when I was about seven, my mom married the man I called dad and we promptly moved from Texas to Connecticut, where we used to go camping a lot. On one trip, we're all out in the woods, midnight rolls around and go to bed. About an hour later, I heard my tent unzipping and my dad started shaking my foot saying, come out here. There's an effing ninja. So I throw on some slippers in my jacket begrudgingly trudged out to see, I kid you not, a ninja sitting next to the fire pit. I remember actually shaking my head

in disbelief to reaffirm this wasn't some very strange dream. And now when I say there was a ninja, I mean full black garb with a slit to see through. This dude had twin swords on his back, throwing stars, tiger claws for climbing, grapple hooks, all the tools. Apparently, my dad saw him rolling out of a bush and had to see what was going on. The story behind this guy was he was a national guardsman and also ran a Jukendo and Ninjutsu Dojo in Rhode Island as his main gig. We sit for the next couple of hours and this guy is just showing us stuff like how fast he can climb a tree or how to throw a star. The night progresses and he asked if we were familiar

with Bruce Lee as an avid fan of Enter the Dragon from around eight. I said yes and he asked if I'd ever seen his one inch punch. Excitedly, I said sure I have and then his name was Brian, the ninja. He said Brian then asked if he could demonstrate it on me, a pudgy 12-year-old. I said no thanks, I'm good and I explicitly did not want to fly backwards with any force. And he said no no, I'll do it with an open palm so it doesn't hurt. I give in, he positions me safely away from the fire pit with my back facing the tent about seven feet away from anything. Never trust anyone by the way whose instruction is okay, now just stand there while I hit you. He inhales deeply, does the flat hand against my sternum,

just like can kill Bill. Then in an instant, I saw his muscles tense up as he audibly exhaled sharply and hit my chest open-handed. I go airborne and hit my tailbone next on a tent stake seven feet behind me and can't really walk without crutches for a couple of weeks. Kids at school never believe me when prodding about why I was on crutches because who would believe a kid that says I had a run-in with a ninja in the middle of the woods. That is from Drew Carroll and Cheyenne Wyoming. Cheyenne Wyoming. Cheyenne Wyoming. That is a great, great story. That was a magnificent listener mail. I mean hats off for that one, thank you. And if you're Brian and you're out there, I want to hear what happened to you.

Yeah, he's probably, he's like I've been doing a 10-year bid for beating a kid up in the woods, but the kid said I could hit him. Oh boy. Well, if you want to get in touch with this like Drew and try to top Drew's listener mail, Drew by the way is the current listener mail champion, we want to see if you can do it. You can send us an email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.