Hello from Baehr and Curadh, a podcast from the Land of Awes Information Services.
[Music]
I love you, Curadh.
I love you, Baehr.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
This is episode 136 of the Baehr and Curadh podcast.
We're going to talk about the Equal Rights Amendment.
President Biden on Friday declared that he considers equal rights amendment to the Constitution
the law of the land.
What does that mean?
Absolutely nothing.
This was an action that Biden did.
I think, among many, to stick his big middle finger up to Trump on his inauguration day.
You think so?
Okay.
Kind of like the whole thing with the hostage exchange.
That's taking place in order to cease fire, yeah, I think so too.
Well, Trump's trying to take all the merit for it or the credit and the credit for it, yes,
I'm sorry.
Yeah, he's trying to take all the credit for it, which he always does anyway.
Of course, yeah, so, but the difference is that people are going to fall for it.
His people will fall for it.
Well, sadly, that's the majority of Americans at this point, sadly, this way.
I have to remind myself it's just a slim majority.
Yeah, but it's still a majority, unfortunately, so that means most of the morons that we
run into in the street are going to be supporters of the Idiot.
My mantra for the next four years is you people voted for this.
Yeah.
Mine's F-A-F-O.
⊧⋃⋤⋉ around and find out and that's pretty much what we're going to have to do.
Play stupid games and win stupid prizes.
That's what I half of America did, more than half of America did.
So.
The Equal Rights Amendment is the law of the land now.
Biden said in a speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, it's the 28th Amendment to the Constitution
now.
This is almost like something Trump would do, just saying it doesn't make it so.
No, it's not supposed to, but sadly, a lot of politicians believe that's the way it
works nowadays.
So, I mean, if you think about it and then falls to the public opinion and people make it
real.
Yeah.
Remember the whole pandemic, I mean, it's not you.
It's a, it's a, inject some bleach into our bodies and clearly, you know, COVID is out and
out.
So.
But yeah, the amendment would need to be formally certified by the natural archivist Colin
Shogan to take effect.
And she has said she will not do that.
Really?
Uh-huh.
Okay.
And in his announcement, um, Biden did not order her to do that.
Really?
Um, it, when it comes to constitutional amendments, the president really isn't involved at all.
Oh, okay.
The executive branch doesn't have, there's no veto of it.
Okay.
No, is it mostly Congress then?
It's the States.
The States are.
Okay.
Well, we'll get into it.
I think.
Okay.
The first draft of the ERA written by suffragist Alice Paul was introduced in Congress by Senator
Charles Curtis, a Kansas Republican in 1923.
Once again, Kansas kind of becomes the turning point in some kind of a national thing.
Yeah.
Come like we're doing the whole abortion and civil war.
Mm-hmm.
It's kind of interesting, isn't it?
Mm-hmm.
Little plain, flat Kansas, isn't it?
That's funny.
Oh, that's, that's important, so.
Mm-hmm.
Paul's original amendment next text stated, "Men and women shall have equal rights throughout
the United States in a every subject to its jurisdiction."
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
And boy, did that go through a lot of changes before it was settled on.
Didn't it?
Yeah.
So equal rights amendment now states, "Equality of rights under the law shall be deemed, shall
be not denied nor abridged by the United States or by any state or an account of sex."
Which is, I think, legally quite different.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
And for some people out there, I think we have to remind them that saying an account of sex
does not mean quietness.
Yeah.
That means whether you're male or female, your gender.
Mm-hmm.
Well, gender is a different thing, but maybe we should talk about that.
Sex is your biological plumbing.
You know, whether you can impregnate someone or whether you can carry a child.
Gender is a social construct.
Okay.
You can have -- someone can be biologically male, but they're expressed their gender as
female.
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
So, they're different things.
Okay.
That makes sense.
See I'm learning every day.
Congress set a deadline of 1979 for ratification.
It was later extended to 1982.
Hmm.
Okay.
I believe that was the first and only time an amendment was given a time limit.
Okay.
And I'd be interested to know what the story was on that.
I haven't found anything about why they decided to do that.
Okay.
For an amendment to go into effect and officially become part of the Constitution,
recorders of the state, legislatures, or 38 of the 50 states need to ratify it.
Once again, the executive branch, the president, Congress has nothing to do with it.
It's all done by the people.
Okay.
In 2020, Virginia became the 30th state to do so.
So why hasn't it been ratified into the --
Well, let's read on.
Okay.
Only 35 states had ratified the ERA by the time the deadline that was set by Congress in 1982.
They were three states short.
Okay.
That was in 1982, they were still three states short.
The Virginia didn't ratify theirs until 2020.
Okay.
It's even more interesting.
Five states who ratified had subsequently voted before the deadline to rescind their
ratifications due to pressure by conservatives.
I can feel the rage inside me is starting to brew.
How could anybody -- how could anybody disagree with -- equal rights?
Yeah.
Equal rights.
Well, apparently on Monday, our future president is going to deport millions of people to.
I mean, he can treat them like --
Yeah.
I kind of doubt that they'll be deported.
They'll probably be put in camps.
They'll probably work camps.
They're going to be put in camps, because you need people to do the things that they do that
we do.
Generally polite society won't do.
And we're in a world of hurt -- I was talking to a coworker of mine the other day, and she thought it would be -- she's
being very facetious.
And coy about it.
Not wanting this to happen, but she thought it'd be hilarious if these Trump came in and said,
"You know, since he doesn't believe in veterans and all that stuff, took away veterans'
benefits."
Boom.
Just voted.
Well, you know, took him away and seeing how people would lose their freaking minds if he
did that.
Everyone knew.
Everyone -- he keeps saying things and people are like, "Oh, he's just saying that.
He's just saying that."
Well, those things become real, and you can't discount just how he's saying that.
He's saying that.
Because after a while, some of those things that he's just saying fall through the holes
and actually happen, and they get kind of pushed to the side and next thing, you know, you
have a fascist dictatorship going on, and we use a society to lost all our rights.
You know what I mean, and I hate comparing this to World War II Nazi Germany, but I
mean Hitler did the same thing.
That's okay.
He just did that.
It'll stop soon.
Okay.
That will stop.
And, I mean, just as nonsense that he's talking about with the Panama Canal and Greenland
and everything like that.
I mean, that was different things that he's threatening to do.
The Holocaust did not happen overnight.
It was a case of -- we'll push a little here.
We'll push a little there and move the border further and further to -- and --
Keep extending the finish line.
Yeah.
Lowering the bar.
Lowering the bar, exactly.
And that's what's going to happen, and it's sad, and people vote it for this, and it just
goes back to, you know, what we keep saying, which we're going to find out.
And hopefully, it's only four years.
That's my biggest fear, is that we lose our democracy.
This does not become -- this is no longer a democracy.
This is not cool.
He's just grooming his family to become the next hierarchy.
So --
Could be like Star Wars, where Darth Vader says, "Don't listen to the Senate any longer
because the emperor has disbanded that organization."
Exactly.
And, you know what I mean, the next -- he was just talking about that, you know, it's -- where
I'm just freaking -- we have nowhere to go, so I'm just going to go without a battle for
time.
But all right.
I'll get a point.
So, Parkinson?
Democracy is way overdue because the last democracy, Rome, didn't even last 200 years.
Yeah.
They said democracies -- our democracy is in the air at the end of its life span, so, hopefully
not.
There is debate on whether states can actually rescind approval of constitutional amendments,
because there is nothing in our laws -- there's no -- there's no process for rescinding an
amendment.
Okay.
So, how can they do that if it's not in the law, or you can do that?
Yeah.
So, that's where those five states -- it's kind of a shaky ground.
That's why the Equal Rights Amendment has not been passed, because there's just too many
-- what ifs --
Okay.
I don't know.
It has long been taken for granted that the deadline killed the ERA, but a technical argument
is that deadlines are not part of the constitutional ratification.
That's another thing.
In the process, there's nothing about having a deadline to ratify an amendment.
So, when Congress put that in there, that probably is unconstitutional.
Okay.
Yeah.
So, when you take the fact that five states can't rescind their -- and --
It should have passed.
And there can't be a deadline in 2020 that the ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment, should
have become part of the Constitution then.
So, it should be -- I'm surprised there's not a constitutional lawyer out there having
a field day with this.
There's no money in it.
Well, not that so much, but lawyers like definitive rules in here we're dealing with exceptions
and exceptions.
This could be like an argument for -- I mean --
This all should have happened four years ago, back in 2020 when it was passed.
If Biden had made that announcement, then, this is now law of the land.
Somebody could have done something to test it, and somebody could have sued, it would have
gone to the Supreme Court, and it would have -- it would have been decided.
And it would have failed because of the conservativeship of the Supreme Court right now.
Well, this was when Trump was -- this was when Trump's first term in 2020.
Okay.
Um, the Supreme Court didn't have a conservative majority at that time.
Okay.
Um, I don't know why Biden waited so long.
He waited until just a few days before he wasn't president anymore to do this.
Like you said, to get a middle finger to Trump, he knew -- he knew there was no ground
to stand on.
Mm-hmm.
So, you know what I mean?
Just to annoy him.
You know, so much better.
And Trump is not going to take up this.
I'm -- I mean, his people, although he's famous for saying one thing and doing another, and
not caring, with the people who put him in office think.
That's true.
Yeah.
He just does whatever he wants.
And everyone just follows and tows the line.
Yeah.
And in his previous administration, a lot of bad things didn't happen because the people
working for him simply did not do that.
Yeah.
But this time, he's got a bunch of --
Sycophants.
Yeah.
Yes, men.
Mm-hmm.
Um, so who knows what -- will befall us?
Mm-hmm.
That's what's scary.
All right.
Well, yeah.
If Biden had actually been serious about fighting and trying to win a legal battle to make
the amendment go into effect, he should have done this years ago.
That sounds familiar.
Did I say that?
That's what you just said.
And then here we go again.
The Trump administration is very unlikely to take up this cause.
And then we have --
Even if a legal challenge were to work its way up to the Supreme Court, the current court's
makeup is exceedingly conservative.
We just covered all of this, so covered all of it before we needed it, though.
Yeah.
It's kind of screwed now, if it actually does go.
And it's a shame -- well, why did you take this long?
How could there even be any controversy about equal rights?
500 years.
Yeah.
Because the country is run by a white, white, straight men who want to keep their power.
Yep.
Exactly.
Sad.
Mm-hmm.
Does that happen?
Is that it? Are we done?
That was it.
What is your joke?
If Conn is the opposite of Pro, then what is the opposite of progress?
Congress.
Yes.
I got it.
Haha.
I'm not a complete idiot.
There we go.
We hope you liked episode 136 of the Baehr and Curadh Podcast.
This is Baehr.
This is Curadh.
Goodbye.
You have been listening to the Baehr and Curadh podcast, a production of the Land of Awes
Information Services. We can be contacted via email using the address podcast@awes.com
and Awes is spelled A-W-E-S.
[Music]
[BLANK_AUDIO]
This show is part of the Pride48 Network.
Find all the best shows under the rainbow at Pride48.com.
[BLANK_AUDIO]