January 16, 2009 “In the Year of our Lord”
Dear Legislator,
Welcome to the Legislature as the people’s representative! Thank you for your willingness to represent and serve the people of Nevada.
The ERA has been introduced in the Nevada Legislature as BDR 793. I am the former State Chairman of STOP ERA, so I wanted to give you some background on the issue.
Thirty-six years ago, the “so called” Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed Federal Constitutional Amendment passed the U.S. Congress with a seven-year time limit. When they failed to get the required 38 states to ratify ERA, Congress passed an unprecedented 2-year extension. Even with the time extension they failed to gain any additional states, and in fact five states rescinded their original ratifications.
In 1978, ERA was on the Nevada ballot and the people defeated it by a 68% vote, the largest percentage against ERA anywhere in the nation.
Now, thirty years later the ERA has surfaced again. The proponents are pretending there was no time limit on the original ERA. We all believe in equal pay for equal work, which is already the law. But, the reality of ERA goes far beyond that, and will open a can of worms of contentious and controversial issues, whipping up heated public debate.
ERA will insure that there can be no recognition in law that men and women are different. That means:
1) Section 2 of ERA would transfer enormous areas of law from state legislatures to the Federal Government including marriage, divorce, family property laws, adoptions, abortions, alimony, some criminal laws, public and private schools, prison regulations and insurance rates. Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr., a recognized constitutional authority, said: “If this Equal Rights Amendment is adopted, it will virtually reduce the States of this Nation to meaningless zeroes on the Nation’s map.”
2) ERA will overturn our Protection of Marriage Amendment, which passed with a 70% favorable vote. It will also overturn DOMA, the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which protects individual states. This is because these laws use gender specific language such as “man” and “woman”.
3) Federally, it will nullify the homemaker’s Social Security benefit based on a husband’s earnings. Although most women are working now, this will deny Social Security benefits to our mothers and grandmothers further impoverishing them. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg makes it clear in her book that ERA would eliminate the Social Security benefits of wives, widows, mothers and grandmothers. See the enclosed flier. More information is available about the consequences of ERA at www.stopera.com
With the financial crisis facing our state, now is not the time to fight a huge battle over something that died thirty years ago.
Sincerely,
Janine Hansen, State President