Kamala Lopez is angry.
The founder of Equal Means Equal, a small group dedicated to the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment—which would enshrine women’s rights into the U.S. Constitution—has had a banner four years since we last spoke in October 2016 as her organization helped ratify the ERA in Nevada, Illinois and Virginia in spite of a hostile presidency.
Those three states were the last holdouts during the original push in the 1970s and ’80s to ratify the ERA as the 28th Amendment. An amendment campaign that many thought was dead is now closer than ever to becoming a reality—yet for some reason, a surprising number of would-be natural allies are still pushing back and saying it’s not going to happen.
Hence the anger.
“Women keep getting thrown under the bus by our own friends,” Lopez said from her home in Los Angeles. “People that we put in power just take us for granted and they don’t finish the job.”
Who are the “friends” she’s alluding to? Take your pick—establishment women’s groups, Democratic members of Congress, even other corners of the progressive world. Anyone who would seemingly support the long-overdue passage of ERA but doesn’t could be broadly looped into that category.
According to Lopez, the source of this establishment pushback comes from the misbegotten notion that proponents must “start from scratch” and campaign to get the ERA ratified by two-thirds of the 50 states to achieve passage—even though Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the ERA in early 2020, meaning it has now been ratified by two-thirds of the states.
“I stepped into the establishment women’s movement with my arms very wide,” Lopez said. “I was very excited and happy and wanting to be of service and thinking I’d brought a lot to the table and I was willing to work and I was met with a great deal of suspicion, pushback.”
Mainstream women’s groups repeatedly told Lopez and Equal Means Equal that they “couldn’t go for the three-state strategy,” and that the amendment died in 1982 after the 10-year deadline it was given following its passage in the House and Senate in 1972.
“That just didn’t seem to fit,” she added. Where in the Constitution did it say that the amendment ratification process has a deadline?
Interestingly enough, former Senator Russ Feingold—now the president of the American Constitution Society—agrees.
Eleven and a half years after reintroducing the 28th Amendment as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Feingold publicly threw the ACS’ weight behind the reinvigorated campaign on the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment’s ratification.
Lopez counts Feingold and the ACS as her top allies in the ERA fight.
“He agrees that women should have equal rights, that it’s not controversial,” she said. “He also thinks it’s great that a few people passed three states in four years and got the bloody ERA ratified after 100 years.”
Having allies like Feingold is crucial, especially considering that when those last three holdouts sued for the ERA to be added to the Constitution in January 2020 after it was ratified in Virginia, U.S. Archivist David Ferriero and the National Archives and Records Administration refused to do so unless a federal court orders it.
In spite of the wins achieved in the last four years, the ERA remains in limbo, and Lopez expects a fight when a court finally rules that the 38-state threshold has been reached. She and her tiny, mostly unpaid team are prepared for that outcome — and they aren’t backing down regardless.
“We don’t have another hundred years,” Lopez exclaimed in her sunny office during our October Zoom call. “We are not starting over. We have equal rights by dint of being human beings, and I am not playing this game anymore.”
“I am not going back to ask any man for my equal rights in this country,” she added, exasperated. “That day has passed.”
