by Phyllis Schlafly
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has made it clear that ERA would abolish the homemaker wife's and widow's benefits in Social Security. This is the benefit that most mothers and grandmothers rely on.
The Social Security Act is sex-neutral -- employed women receive exactly the same Social Security benefits as employed men.
But what about the homemaker wife who is financially dependent on her husband for much or most of her life, who may work in the labor force only a few years or only part-time, and therefore does not build up enough credits in Social Security to receive a significant retirement check based on her own earnings?
The Social Security System recognizes her value by giving the homemaker "wife" a check for 50% of her husband's benefit over and above the check he receives. Upon her husband's death, the widow receives the full benefit that her husband had been receiving. (The law also gives this benefit to a dependent husband, but we know that nearly all dependent spouses are women.)
Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in her 1977 book "Sex Bias in the U.S. Code" that the concept of "dependent women, whose primary responsibility is to care for children and household ... must be eliminated from the code if it is reflect the equality principle." (page 206) Ginsburg re-emphasized this in her opinion in the 2007 Supreme Court Partial Birth Abortion case, where she wrote that we must get rid of "archaic" notions such as the "dependency" of a homemaker on her husband's financial support.
Beware! A vote for ERA is a vote to take away Social Security checks received by most mothers and grandmothers. It's hard to think of anything more anti- woman and anti-mother than the plan to deprive mothers and grandmothers of their Social Security benefits in order to obey some nebulous "equality" principle demanded by the feminists.
Please vote NO on ERA to protect mothers and grandmothers.
