An ‘Obligation To Fix The Constitution’: Alyssa Milano And Democrats Team Up To Illegally Amend Our Founding Document

Although you have likely not heard much about it from the media, the Democrats recently unveiled a plan to illegally add an element of their radical, intersectional agenda to the text of the U.S. Constitution. The controversial amendment could eliminate all laws that recognize biological differences between men and women, and it could force taxpayers to fund abortion-on-demand. Worse yet, their actions come decades after the Left tried and failed to convince Americans to adopt the proposed amendment democratically. Congressional Democrats’ plot to declare victory despite their national repudiation is so unscrupulous and unserious that their main witness at a recent hearing was actress Alyssa Milano, who said they have an “obligation to fix the Constitution” and “stop it from failing” everyone “who is not a cisgender man.”

At issue is the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), a benign-sounding Nixon-era amendment that concealed an unpopular feminist agenda. Critics say it would erode the legal protections of women and create a constitutional right to abortion just as Supreme Court justices seem poised to amend, or overturn, Roe v. Wade. Regardless of its substance (which we’ll discuss in a minute), conservatives should be alarmed at the Democrats’ plan to amend the text of the U.S. Constitution 38 years after their ratification efforts failed.

The Equal Rights Amendment seemed destined to become the 27th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1972. Article V of the Constitution requires amendments to pass Congress by a two-thirds margin, then be ratified by three-fourths of the states (38 states out of 50). The ERA — which was championed by democratic socialists Rep. Bella Abzug (D-NY), Gloria Steinem, and Betty Friedan — passed the U.S. House of Representatives by the required margin in October 1971 and cleared the Senate five months later. But the legislation they passed contained a time limit: The ERA had to be ratified within seven years.

That hurdle seemed insignificant, as a total of 30 states ratified the ERA within a year — 14 of them within the first month. Five more states followed by 1978, when the Democrat-controlled Congress voted to extend the deadline to June 30, 1982.

The reason the momentum ground to a halt can be encapsulated in two words: Phyllis Schlafly, a well-educated mother from Illinois who would go on to found Eagle Forum. Schlafly gave the American people an opportunity to think through the ways the ERA would impact daily life. The main text of the amendment read: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”

Women already enjoy equality under the law thanks to the 14th Amendment, she said. In fact, she continued, society gave women such an elevated state that legal equality would downgrade their status. How would eliminating all laws made “on account of sex,” she asked, affect such policies as:

women’s exemption from being drafted into military service;separate facilities for showers, restrooms, college dorm rooms, battered women’s shelters, and prisons;federal programs like Title IX, Social Security benefits for women who worked in the home, and Women Infants and Children (WIC)

While her opponents insisted Schlafly exaggerated the impact of the bill, its legislative history says otherwise. For instance, in 1972, the U.S. Senate rejected by an 82-9 vote an amendment that said:

The provisions of this article shall not impair the validity, however, of any laws of the United States or any State which exempt women from compulsory military service, or from service in combat units of the Armed Forces; or extend protections or exemptions to wives, mothers, or widows; or impose upon fathers responsibility for the support of children; or secure privacy to men or women, or boys or girls; or make punishable as crimes rape, seduction, or other sexual offenses.

Senators proposed a portion of this amendment specifying that the ERA does not overturn state laws banning “sexual offenses” as a separate amendment; the Senate rejected it, 71-17. Indeed, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) recently said that the “ERA will eliminate sex discrimination in the armed services.” Conservative scholar Inez Feltscher Stepman of Independent Women’s Voice said that, taken to its logical conclusion, the ERA could require the military “to draft men and women in equal numbers and to send equal numbers of women and men into combat positions.”

But the biggest fight over the ERA is how it would impact abortion — and here, it is not conservatives making the bold claims. To this day, the abortion lobby believes the ERA would strike down pro-life legislative protections in all 50 states. “With its ratification, the ERA would reinforce the constitutional right to abortion by clarifying that the sexes have equal rights, which would require judges to strike down anti-abortion laws because they violate both the constitutional right to privacy and sexual equality,” NARAL wrote on a website, which