The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed a joint resolution last month that would remove the deadline to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), and that’s leading some activists in Tampa to now re-engage support for the proposal in anticipation of when that resolution reaches the U.S. Senate later this year.

“The Equal Rights Amendment would put into the Constitution gender equality, and that can be used as the basis for arguments for pay equity – which to me is the greatest need,” says former Tampa City Council member Linda Saul-Sena. “It would give us a heft and gravitas that we haven’t had previously.”

Saul-Sena is a member of the Tampa’s Athena Society, which was created in 1976 to support the passage of the ERA and become an advocate for getting more women on boards of organizations.

Congress passed the ERA in 1972 with a stipulation that 38 state legislatures had to ratify it within seven years. When that deadline expired, only 35 states had done so, and the push to add equality protections “on account of sex” into the U.S. Constitution ended.

However, three more state legislatures (Nevada, Illinois and Virginia) have passed the measure in recent years, giving the movement new energy.

A federal judge ruled in March that the deadline to ratify the ERA had “expired long ago,” prompting the Democratic House to pass their resolution just days later.  It should be noted that five of the original 35 states that signed off on the ERA in the 1970s have since rescinded their support.

Former Tampa City Council member Linda Saul-Sena

“This current co-called ‘campaign’ to ratify the ERA is an exercise in political theater,” said Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee, speaking to Spectrum Bay News 9. “Every federal judge that’s gotten anywhere near this issue over a 40-year period – and I mean judges of every stripe – have ruled that the ERA died in 1979.”

Public opinion polls taken in recent years show strong bipartisan support for passage of the amendment. A 2020 survey conducted by the Association Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research of more than 1,000 Americans showed 73 percent for the measure, and 61 percent support from Republicans.

“The ERA is very simple,” says Tampa attorney Starr Brookins, a self-proclaimed “common sense conservative” and registered Republican who ran for a Hillsborough County Circuit Judge seat in 2018. “The core of it is 24 words. And you can’t discriminate. Everybody should be equal, right?”

For younger generations, the fight for the ERA was brought to light last year with the FX series “Mrs. America,” starring Cate Blanchett as Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative Kansas activist who successfully campaigned against the passage of the measure.

Tampa attorney Starr Brookins

Schlafly died in 2016, but her daughter Anne has picked up the mantle in leading the charge against the renewed calls for ERA passage.

“The ERA failed 40 years ago for good reasons,” Anne Schlafly Cori wrote in an op-ed in the Kansas City Star in 2019. “The more we learn about it, the more people oppose it.”

Schlafly then lists a panoply of items that she says will happen to women if the ERA were to be approved, including measures that would “overturn laws and practices that provide privacy and protection in bathrooms, locker rooms, hospitals, nursing homes, domestic abuse shelters and correctional facilities.”

Saul-Sena dismisses Schlafly’s analysis as simply “ridiculous arguments that are just a veil for not wanting to be fair.”

Schlafly also wrote in her op-ed that the ERA would overturn laws that support women, such as exempting them from the military draft and front-line combat.

“These are arguments that we’ve heard before,” says Brookins, noting that the Pentagon has previously issued a recommendation that women be allowed to enroll in the Selective Service System. 

“So that’s where we’re going, and I don’t think that there should be any special protections,” Brookins says, adding that “it’s kind of crazy that we’re talking about this during this day and age.”

Another Tampa Republican who supports the passage of the ERA is former Hillsborough County Commissioner Sandy Murman, who confirmed her support with Spectrum Bay News 9 recently.

The joint resolution that passed in the U.S. House has now moved to the U.S. Senate, which would require gaining the support of ten Republicans to join all 50 Democrats (not guaranteed) to pass. Saul-Sena and Brookins say they want people who support the ERA to reach out to Florida’s two GOP Senators, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, to push for them to back the measure.