OTD

Forty years ago today, I was in Washington, DC, marching for the Equal Rights Amendment to prohibit sex discrimination by government. This march won a three-year extension of the deadline set by Congress for ERA's ratification, but it was still a few states short of the requisite three-fourths when that date passed in 1982.

Today there are still a number of areas where government discriminates on the basis of sex -- two of them being the men-only draft registration and penalties for non-registration, and government-mandated batterer intervention programs based on the sexist "Duluth model." But there's a revived ratification campaign inspired by the belief that the Congression

ally set deadline won't stand Constitutional scrutiny. It's now only one ratification short of the needed thirty-eight, if the deadline is struck down and they're all counted as valid.