The long and complicated history of the struggle for equal rights continues to draw attention in the United States. In the twentieth century, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was introduced to the Supreme Court but failed to pass, instead of becoming a set of statutes to the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (Greenberg & Page, 2018). While they did focus on equality, they did so through non-equal means and can be interpreted in different ways. It is vital to assess the impact of the Fourteenth Amendment versus the planned changes.
There are core differences in the proposed addition to the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment. The most obvious one is the initial goal of the latter, as it did not account for sex-based discrimination, which was a last-minute addition (Murphy, 2019). The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is more abrupt, less direct, and easier to avoid. Many women during the period of active discussions of the ERA were highly discontent with the outcome, as it is more easily repealed, which puts women’s rights under threat (Greenberg & Page, 2018). This dissatisfaction continues to cause sex-based struggles in politics, as the ERA remained out of the scope of the Supreme Court.
Both amendments deal with a similar concept: protecting a particular part of the society from discrimination. However, their primary focus differs, which shifts the attention from sex-specific inequalities to less concrete terms for discrimination (Murphy, 2019). The opponents of the ERA ensured people that its addition would merely duplicate the existing statements and put sex-based discrimination into the category for intermediate scrutiny, requiring extremely concrete justification for such cases (Murphy, 2019). In conclusion, the critical difference between the ERA and the Fourteenth amendment is the security of women’s rights.
References
Greenberg, E. S., & Page, B. I. (2018). The struggle for democracy, 2018 elections and updates edition. Pearson.
Murphy, B. L. (2019). The Equal Rights Amendment revisited. Notre Dame Law Review, 94(2), 937-958.