Ginsberg = Equal Rights
“Equal Rights For All,” the clarion call leading off principle #6 of Our Common Purpose, is one of the many aspirations built into the “10 Principles to Unite America.” Learn more.
We are so much closer to that ideal today thanks to Ruth Bader Ginsburg than we would have been without her.
Her pioneering work in extending “equal protection of the laws” to the women of this country established the legal precedent that women – and for that matter, men – could not be discriminated against on the basis of their gender.
Pre-Ginsburg, it was widely accepted that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment applied only to racial discrimination. After all, the 14th Amendment was one of the measures enacted after the Civil War to protect those who had just been released from slavery. When Ginsburg was done, the Supreme Court had come around to accept that the 14th Amendment should guarantee equal protection for all.
Long before she became a justice herself, Ginsburg sensitized the then all-male Supreme Court to the inequities built into what is said to be hundreds of laws based on the antiquated view that the woman’s role was in the home and men were better suited to deal with everything else. In six cases heard by the court in the 1970’s, she convinced the justices that “equal protection of the laws” pertained just as much to gender as to race. There can be no discrimination based on sex.
Ginsburg was an equal opportunity advocate. She often used male plaintiffs to show that men could be disadvantaged by these laws as well. To her, equality meant treating women and men exactly the same.
The capstone came 20 years later when Ginsburg, by then a justice herself, announced the court’s majority opinion that the all-male admissions policy of Virginia Military Institute was unconstitutional.
“Women seeking and fit for a V.M.I.-quality education cannot be offered anything less under the state’s obligation to afford them genuinely equal protection,” she wrote.
Women and other victims of discrimination quite rightly point out we still have lots of work to do to truly achieve “Equal Rights For All.” But the tireless efforts of Ruth Bader Ginsburg brought us so much closer to the mark.