Article from FLN Staff.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg believes that a special equal protection amendment should be added to the Constitution. “I want my granddaughters to see what are the fundamental tenets of our society,” The Washington Square News reports. “There is nothing in the Constitution that says that men and women are people of equal citizenship stature,” Ginsburg told the gathering.

Here’s the problem with that: at least since the Reed decision in 1971, the Court formally began throwing out laws that gave preference to males on the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment. Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that brief as a young lawyer.

The Court has built upon that precedent, as the Fourteenth Amendment’s language has become ever more flexible, as the amendment to enfranchize former slaves turned into a vehicle for liberal justices like Ginsburg to legislate from the bench. Does this mean that Justice Ginsburg never believed the validity of using the Fourteenth Amendment for such things?

Or does it mean that as the 84-year-old works on the court in her twilight years, is slipping? It could well be that she wants the language to be codified into the Constitution so that women enjoy comprehensive protection. Yet, women enjoy more rights now than they have in Ginsburg’s lifetime, leaving the interpretation of her remarks open to question.

Image Credit: Joe Ravi [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons