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Wednesday, March 20th, 2024
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GASBR Welcomes Stein Pledge on ERA
Expects More from a Green Candidate
Last week, Dr. Jill Stein, a candidate for the Green Party nomination for President of the United States at a campaign event at a home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, stated “We would do that on day one for sure”, in response to a question on the Equal Rights Amendment, indicating her support.
“While we welcome this first public statement from her campaign on this subject, we expect much more from the presumptive nominee of a self-described feminist political party,” said Carol A. Bouldin, Co-Chair of the Green Alliance for Sex-Based Rights. “It is not enough that she responds to questions on the subject. Women in the United States need Dr. Stein to lead on this issue and incorporate it into her stump speech at every appearance in order to educate voters and demand immediate action from the current administration, long before the polls open for the November election.”
GASBR’s ERA Task Force has for months been communicating with Jill Stein about the Constitutional Crisis facing this nation and the political opportunity available to her campaign in this historic moment. GASBR has been asking Stein to educate her campaign supporters and the public about the Trump and Biden Administrations’ obstruction of the ministerial duty of the National Archivist, in defiance of their oath of office to serve and protect the Constitution, including the Article V. provisions governing how it is amended.
Although private assurances from Dr. Stein promised action on the Equal Rights Amendment, the first time we have seen her speak in a public setting on the topic was in a video which surfaced from last Tuesday’s event in Milwaukee. She has, however, referred to the ERA having “met the constitutional standard” in an International Women’s Day themed message sent to her campaign email list earlier this month.
Constitutional recognition that the ‘equal protection of the law shall not be denied or abridged . . . on the basis of sex’ is expected to have a profound impact addressing the inequities in current US law adversely impacting women across a broad spectrum of issues. The failure to properly publish the ERA onto the Constitution left Roe vulnerable to roll back in the Dobbs v Jackson WHO case decided last year. A laundry list of concerns addressed by Dr. Stein’s IWD message would be diminished greatly were women to have their fundamental federal Constitutional rights acknowledged by the publication of the ERA, finally affording women equal standing before the law.
The Platform of the Green Party of the United States has since at least 2004 supported the ‘three-state strategy for ratification’ of the Equal Rights Amendment. The leadership of women organizers in Nevada (March 21, 2017), Illinois (May 30, 2018) and Virginia (January 27, 2020), led by the organization Equal Means Equal, fulfilled that strategy. Title 1 US Code Section 106(b) creates an affirmative duty that the National Archivist publish recognition of final state ratification in the Federal Register. But publication has been frustrated by reactionary politics playing outin a memo by the DoJ Office of Legal Counsel and the DoJ opposition before the federal courts, led first by the Trump, and now the Biden Administration.
The Equal Rights Amendment is central to any strategy to address women’s oppression in this country. GASBR calls on Dr. Stein to educate her supporters as well as the general public on these issues indispensable to women’s liberation and advancement.
“2023 marked the 100th anniversary of the first time the ERA was filed with Congress. This election should offer us at least one politician willing to stand out from the crowd who dares to say, ‘women have waited long enough’”, said Romi Elnagar, a former co-chair of GASBR. “Our foremothers did not win the franchise, nor secure the 1923 introduction of the ERA by sitting quietly with hands folded in their laps. We have been ignored by the Biden Administration. Now it’s time Stein step up and lead on this issue, as she has on US complicity in the ongoing genocide in Palestine and as she has with a plan to confront the threats of catastrophic climate change”.
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