Opinions

Election

Students with different political outlooks give their take on what's at stake in the presidential election.

Page 25 Staying Safe

The Editorial Board urges Marksmen to stay committed to safety on campus. Page 26

Pigeons

Axel Icazbalceta reflects on the trials and tribulations of owning and caring for pigeons. Page 26

short & SWEET

Our hot takes on the month's less consequential issues – in 280 characters or less.

SAGE's food has been good overall, but inconsistent. The churros: fantastic. The meatloaf, not so much. And the pizza ran the gamut – we saw every shade of mozzarella from white to well-burnt brown.

Political discussion should be encouraged in relevant classes. Full stop. That's especially true in the run-up to an election, because it'll make for better-informed voters and a less polarized atmosphere.

This year's Senior Class is the biggest yet and that means less available parking. Right now there's enough space given a little leakage into the junior lot. But, as classes grow across the Upper School, we hope to see a more permanent solution. EDITORIAL Ratify the Equal Rights Amendment Seventy seven years after it was first introduced in Congress, the Equal Rights Amendment, which seeks to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sex, remains in limbo. Here's why it should be the 28th Amendment.

GOOD TROUBLE

A diverse coalition of women demonstrate in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Section 1: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. Section 2: The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. Section 3: This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

Above is the text of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). It’s remained virtually unchanged since it was written 77 years ago by lawyer and activist Alice Paul. She recognized then that while the 19th Amendment guaranteed women the ability to vote, it didn’t protect them from genderbased discrimination. Today, according to a 2016 poll by the ERA Coalition, such an amendment would be supported by 94 percent of Americans. So why hasn’t it been ratified?

By 1982, the ERA was passed by the House and the Senate with a two-thirds majority and ratified by 35 of the necessary 38 states (including Texas). Ever since, it’s remained at a standstill, because while it’s been reintroduced in every session of Congress and three more states have since ratified it, five states have also taken the legally murky step of withdrawing their ratification, leaving the ERA’s future in question.

Nevertheless, we believe these challenges can and should be overcome with bipartisan action at both the federal and state level. The ERA is worth fighting for because it exemplifies why Constitutional amendments were created in the first place: to

From the 1970s till now, you've had legislation which has outlawed discrimination against women under the 14th amendment. But that amendment wasn't designed specifically around gender. It was part of the civil rights legislation, and it's been expansively viewed to enforce some kind of equality between genders. But the right to that equality is nowhere in the Constitution, unless you're interpreting due process.

Photo Creative Commons prevent the nation, in the words of Justice Joseph Story, from “by the pressure of its inequalities bring[ing] on a revolution.”

There is, however, one common counterargument to the ERA: that it’s unnecessary, that legal precedent has already established that gender-based discrimination is illegal. But the Constitution contains no explicit language that protects people from discrimination on the basis of sex, so any precedent is vulnerable to being overruled. And that’s not just our opinion — no less than Justice Antonin Scalia has said that the Constitution “doesn’t forbid” discrimination on the basis of sex.

More importantly, under current precedent racial and religious discrimination are held to a higher level of judicial review under the 14th Amendment (“strict scrutiny”) than gender discrimination (“intermediate scrutiny”). In other words, while any discrimination is incredibly difficult for the government to justify, a government policy that discriminates by gender would be easier to justify as Constitutional than one that discriminates by race or religion.

It’s evident, then, that ratifying the ERA would result in more than just symbolic posturing—it would mean real legal protections for those facing discrimination on the basis of sex. And the country should do so as quickly as possible: surely there would be no better way to honor the legacy of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg than by cementing in the

Constitution the protections that she fought so hard to uphold. – History instructor Andrea Hamilton

GRAPHIC Jonathan Yin

the profs WEIGH IN

Five things to know

• 38 states, just over two-thirds of the country, are needed to ratify the ERA • 35 states ratified the amendment before the original Mar. 1979 deadline • 5 states, Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska,

Tennessee and South Dakota, subsequently rescinded their ratifications. • 3 states, Nevada, Illinois and Virginia, have since ratified the amendment • A new amendment will need to be re-ratified by Congress

Amendments can be expanded or contracted by courts to mean all sorts of different things. Especially now in this era, the whole issue of gender now is kind of up in the air – everybody's arguing over what gender is, whether someone can identify as a particular gender, who can participate in certain sports – throw all of that into an Equal Rights Amendment and it's thrown into a cocked hat. You've got confusion rather than clarification. – History instructor Bruce Westrate