If Afghanistan can have it, why not the US, argues Streep.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: All 535 members of Congress received a surprise in the mail from legendary actress Meryl Streep, who reached out on Tuesday to them with a personal letter and a book.
The letter explicitly called for members of the House and Senate to resuscitate the Equal Rights Amendment of 1972 and amend the Constitution to include equal rights for women.
The proposed amendment states, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
“The ERA is not just a women’s rights issue,” wrote Streep, according to ERA Coalition, a campaign to get the amendment ratified, “it will have a meaningful benefit for the whole human family.” She added that the United States has encouraged other countries such as Afghanistan to write equal rights for women into their own constitutions and that it is to time that the U.S. “have it in our own.”
Written in 1920, the amendment was unsuccessfully introduced during every legislative year in Congress from 1923 until it was finally passed in 1972, according to the Christian Science Monitor.
Over the next decade, 35 states ratified it, three short of the 38 needed to add it to the Constitution. Conservative opposition is credited with halting its momentum, leaving the the ERA to languish in the backwaters of U.S. policy-making.
“The time is ripe to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment,” Rep. Jackie Speier of California told the New York Post. “Seventy percent of people polled think that we already have an ERA in the Constitution and they’re shocked to find we don’t have one.”
Meanwhile, comedian and author Chelsea Handler poignantly noted, “You wouldn’t think that in 2015, in the United States, women still need to fight for legal equality, but here we are.”