This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Equal Rights Amendment
The following section approaches the case of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and considers the influence of the LDS Church on its ultimate failure to be ratified by the required 38 states by the initial 1982 deadline.[1] A ratification map [2] shows three missing states needed to make the amendment part of the constitution. Two blocks, the south and Nevada, Utah, and Arizona present themselves. Did the LDS Church have any bearing on whether the ERA was ratified in these three states? If so, how? I argue that the LDS Church influenced the outcome of the ERA so strongly that if it had supported its passage, it would have been ratified. Further, I argue the reason that the desire for Mormon acceptance as a part of mainstream Christianity compelled them to exert such influence.
In order to understand how the LDS Church influenced the ratification process for states with large LDS populations, let us first examine the historical context surrounding the ERA and some key arguments in favor of its ratification. Representative Martha Griffiths of Michigan initially introduced the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. House of Representatives using a discharge petition on August 10, 1970.[3] The text of this proposed 27th amendment was:
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.
Though it failed to pass through Congress on the first attempt, it eventually passed both houses on March 22, 1972, giving it seven years to become ratified by three-fourths of the states.[4] The amendment ultimately came close to full ratification, but as I mentioned earlier, fell three states short.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg explains the rationale for amending the Constitution to give men and women equal rights and responsibilities as citizens in her paper, “The Need for the Equal Rights Amendment.”[5] She refutes the “four horribles” commonly cited by opponents, like Phyllis Schafly, who stood in opposition to the ratification of the ERA. These were that women would lose protection under labor laws, that wives would lose financial support, that women would be forced to serve in the military, and that there would no longer be separate men’s and women’s public restrooms. Ginsburg argued that, considering judicial precedent, full equality was unlikely to be reached without a constitutional amendment. Another of her arguments attacked the idea that women were biologically inferior to men by nature – that if women were indeed the intellectual peers of men, they would have shared the same prominence in intellectual circles as men one hundred years ago. She refuted this, writing that this inequality resulted from unfavorable historical circumstances, and not any biological factor or inability to match male intellectual prowess. The significance of this argument here is that the LDS Church rejected it. Despite solid argumentation, it is worth noting that neither a lack of understanding or refutation of the arguments characterized the anti-ERA camp, but rather they completely rejected the premises. The complementarian doctrinal stance of the LDS Church meant an inevitable rejection of the premises.[6]
Traditionalists were not the only people who stood in opposition to the ERA. Another group, the protectionists, did not think, as the traditionalists did, that the roles of women should be confined to those of wife and mother. Instead, their rationale for opposing the ERA back when it was first proposed in the 1920s was that it would remove the labor protections that progressives fought for, including child labor laws.[7] As such, the circumstances surrounding the ERA became quite complicated.
The current prevailing narrative about why the ERA failed to become part of the constitution blames the disenfranchisement of Southern women voters. Kyle Goyette’s 2014 paper, “Southern discomfort: The Equal Rights Amendment, the new right, and the southernization of American politics” derives from this camp, but challenges the notion that women did not have agency.[8] He contends that the final proverbial nail in the ERA’s coffin became the prevalence of political conservatism in the American South in response to civil rights. He argues that the South in the 1970s simultaneously existed in a space culturally behind the rest of the country, yet also predictive of the rise of conservatism in the 1980s. According to Goyette, the region’s conservatism set fire to the later conservative resurgence.
I disagree with the Southern disenfranchisement narrative. One concern with this argument is that Texas did ratify (without later rescinding) the amendment. Perhaps this could be explained by a difference of culture between the Deep South and Texas. However, I am not convinced that in the 1970s there was as discernable a political difference between conservatives in Texas versus those living in the rest of the South, as Goyette assumes.[9] Matthew Dowd’s statements on the matter explain how Texas’s shift from preference for conservative Democratic candidates to Republican candidates were predictive of what would happen in the rest of the South. For this reason, I am not convinced that one can be certain that the conservative South bears exclusive responsibility for the failure of the ERA to achieve full ratification.
However, Goyette’s gender explanation is persuasive. He suggests that Southern conservatives ultimately rejected the ERA out of concerns that ratifying it would destroy traditional gender roles. It is worth noting how this is identical to the main concern of the LDS Church regarding the ERA – that it would radically alter the roles of women.
Goyette overemphasizes the distinctiveness of the South. He states, “Nowhere in America was the ERA more detested than in the South, which resisted the amendment on religious, social, and cultural grounds.” While that may be true, my research suggests that certain parts of the Wasatch front region rivaled the South in its resistance. The main difference lies in the fact that the Southern resistance to ratification was a grassroots effort. In the case of the other states, where it failed to pass with large LDS populations (Utah, Arizona, and Nevada), responsibility laid in a centralized effort on the part of the LDS Church. That these areas do end up both rejecting the amendment makes sense, especially since they both prized traditionalism. Nonetheless, I argue that their reasons for prizing traditionalism differed, especially since the Mormon sphere of influence historically departed from “traditional” by society, especially with regard to marriage.
Other narratives compete with the Southern disenfranchisement model, including one that I favor, which considers the possibility that the LDS Church played a much larger role in preventing the ultimate ratification of the ERA than typically considered. Overwhelming evidence indicates that the LDS Church had direct involvement in telling its members what to do, extending to the LDS women attending the Utah International Women’s Year conference. These women systematically shut down every proposal made at the conference, even ones they agreed with in principle. The Church sent them to do it and they obeyed (Quinn, 116). Historian Neil Young argues that the women complied out of a desire to prove their value in the LDS Church beyond the prescribed gender roles that predominated in the mid-20th century.[10] As I will argue later and as the literature supports, this actually makes sense given the history of the LDS Church and the relative freedom Mormon women experienced in the 19th and early 20th centuries compared to women living elsewhere in the United States.
Even though the LDS Church actively campaigned against the ERA, other LDS individuals campaigned just as actively for its passage. In December 1979, the Mormon Church excommunicated Sonia Johnson, the founder of the group, “Mormons for the Equal Rights Amendment.” In Johnson’s opinion, in an effort to defeat the ERA, Church leaders turned “Church meetings into precinct meetings” (Quinn, 88).[11] Nor was she the only one in favor of the amendment. Popular opinion in Utah actually supported the ERA up until the 1960s[12] even as the Church leaders became increasingly wary of it and increasingly public in that wariness (Quinn, 105). When the Church initially came out against it, no true Mormon monolith existed with respect to the ERA. Despite sharing the same doctrinal beliefs, the division over the amendment occurred primarily along political party lines at first.
The LDS Church justified involvement in blocking the ERA because they viewed it as a threat to the broader moral issue of gender relations. Church leaders felt they could remain politically neutral while engaging in the political sphere because they understood the roles of men and women in society to be a moral issue. This means that officially, resistance to the ratification of the ERA was not political, but based on moral principles. This excuse however, obscured what I see as the real reason for rejecting the ERA – the desire to gain a seat at the table of national political power through acceptance by mainstream Christianity.[13]
Can an institution that makes a concerted effort to systematically resist something claim political neutrality if the effort was made under the banner of morality? I think not. When evangelical leaders and organizations organized into the “moral majority” during the conservative resurgence of the 1980s, they did not take a stance of political neutrality. Even if they rooted their motivations in issues they considered moral, like abortion and same sex marriage, they nevertheless openly acted politically. Further, I doubt evangelical leaders at the time would have contested that reality. Therefore, while morality certainly can be a justification for acting politically, it is not grounds for claiming political neutrality. Logically speaking, one cannot both be politically involved and politically neutral at the same time. The question of morality is irrelevant because the argument itself, while technically valid, is simply not sound.[14]
The rest of Quinn’s paper casts doubt on the political neutrality narrative offered by the LDS Church today. He argues that the early Church never really operated in a politically neutral manner. As such, a lack of neutrality on issues like the ERA does not exist in aberration. Political action instead, he argues, fit in the plan from the very beginning. In August of 1833, Joseph Smith received a revelation that proclaimed Mormonism a separate and fully sovereign entity within the United States. This meant that Joseph Smith remained effectively in charge of the Mormons because he was the prophet (a divine mandate to rule). In doing so, he successfully built a theocracy within the United States. Quinn argues that even when Mormons moved to Utah, LDS Church leaders actively endorsed candidates, who usually won (95). Even after the Utah territory became a state, the general authorities[15] of the Church retained an outsized influence in the politics of the region.
This ultimately leaves us with the question of whether political neutrality stays an accurate phrase to use when describing the institutional LDS Church’s approach in the context of the ERA’s ratification process. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the answer is no. Even previous co-sponsors of the ERA, like Bryon Fisher, changed their tune when the Church came out against it, saying, “‘It is my church and as a bishop, I’m not going to vote against its wishes’” (Quinn, 107). The significance of this statement, aside from the obvious shift in point of view, is that a legislator said on public record that his religious leaders had changed his mind. For this reason, it is impossible to say that Church and State were separated in Utah in 1975 during the ratification process of the ERA.
Even as we accept that political neutrality never really belonged in the tapestry of LDS history, a paradox emerges when we view the Church’s stance on the ERA as a “moral issue” for the preservation of gender roles. Up until the mid-20th century, the actions of the Church did not indicate that they necessarily favored traditional gender roles. In fact, reality was often to the contrary. Up until the 1920s, Mormon women enjoyed freedoms unavailable to women from the rest of the United States. They were afforded suffrage, equal access to higher education (including professional degrees to become doctors and lawyers), the opportunity to successfully run for state offices, no-fault divorce and the legal ability to successfully file for it, and the ability to do what they were best at in the domestic sphere (including handling finances) instead of what gender roles of the time prescribed (Quinn, 99). Because of polygamy in the Utah territory, women were not held to Blackstone’s common law marriage ideal of “coverture.”[16] Women were also generally allowed to speak about issues of significance to them without suffering repercussions. There was general disdain for traditional Victorian ideals of family (possibly left over from the condemnation of polygamy that emerged from Victorian sensibilities), and when Emmaline Wells publicly renounced these ideals in support of equal partnership in marriage; she was duly rewarded with the Relief Society Presidency (100).[17] However, from the 1920s onward, the LDS Church’s leadership came to adopt the Victorian ideals they once despised as their own. The question is, why?
I propose that the reasons the LDS Church leadership came to reject the ERA and its supporters had little to do with any sort of “moral issue” at all, but rather belonged as part of an attempt to achieve long-desired acceptance as part of the Protestant in-group and thereby achieve acceptance in American society at large. While the present cultural narrative generally accepts the notion of a relatively strict separation of church and state, this idea has not always predominated. In the 19th century, when Mormonism emerged, a different narrative prevailed. Back then, the majority of U.S. inhabitants and those in power understood the United States to be a fundamentally white and Protestant nation. The narrative of cultural diversity was to be found in few places.[18] This cultural narrative shaped the environment in which Mormonism expanded, and Mormons, like Catholics, were vilified as outsiders, if not even more so. Early Mormons were not accepted as fully white, so converts experienced “racial demotion” as well as religious discrimination in American society at the time.[19] Clues to this disdain can be found in the landmark polygamy case Reynolds v. United States (1878). The argument of the Supreme Court ruling against it was that people could believe whatever they wanted, but that the First Amendment did not protect all religious practice. Polygamy was one of the non-protected religious practices. However, the court approached the case with a worldview that had a cultural understanding of Protestant dominance. They assumed that anything other than the Protestant hegemonic ideal of monogamy would be morally inferior, if not outright harmful (not because it was inherently harmful to women, but because it was not monogamy).
Given this history of stigmatization, it makes sense for LDS Church leaders to want their religion to belong at the proverbial table by gaining relevance in American society. The reasons behind opposition to the ERA, despite earlier relative rejection of traditional gender roles, had less to do with morality than with adopting the ideals of the rest of Protestant Christianity at the time. In a quest for long-awaited legitimacy in the eyes of outsiders, there was a need to abandon some of the things that made Mormonism so distinctly “different.” Political involvement in an issue so important on the national stage had more to do with joining the Protestant club than with moral conviction, regardless of whether the leaders themselves were aware of it at the time.
Even if we accept that the rejection of the ERA was part of a subconscious campaign for acceptance as part of American Protestantism, this does not answer whether and why the LDS Church interfered politically later on, well after they achieved legitimacy[20] as a modern global religion. In the next section, I explore this issue through the lens of the case of Proposition 8 in 2008 in California and examine how the “I’m a Mormon” campaign offers clues to the answer.[21]
[1] Article V of the U.S. Constitution states that three-fourths of all states must ratify am amendment in order for it to become part of the constitution, which in this case means 38 states.
[2] See appendix
[3] “The Equal Rights Amendment.” US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives. Accessed March 02, 2017. http://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1951-2000/The-Equal-Rights-Amendment/.
[4] “History.” ERA: History. Accessed March 02, 2017. http://www.equalrightsamendment.org/history.htm.
[5] Ginsburg, Ruth Bader. “The Need for the Equal Rights Amendment.” American Bar Association Journal (September, 1973) 59, no. 9 (September 1973): 1013-019. Accessed March 2, 2017. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25726416.
[6] Complementarianism is a theology that men and women are equal, but have different roles. This stands in opposition to the doctrine of egalitarianism, which states that men and women are equal and do not have any prescribed roles based on gender.
[7] Kyvig, David E. Historical Misunderstandings and the Defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment. University of California Press on behalf of the National Council on Public History. The Public Historian, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Winter, 1996), pp. 45-63
[8] Goyette, Kyle T. Southern discomfort: The Equal Rights Amendment, the new right, and the southernization of American politics. University of Houston, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2014.
[9] “How Texas Became a “Red” State.” PBS. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/architect/texas/realignment.html.
[10] Young, Neil J. “The ERA Is a Moral Issue”: The Mormon Church, LDS Women, and the Defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment.” Johns Hopkins University Press: American Quarterly. Volume 59, Number 3, September 2007. pp. 623-644 |
[11] Quinn, D. Michael. The LDS Church’s Campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment. University of Illinois Press. Journal of Mormon History, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Fall 1994), pp. 85-155
[12] The ERA grew from the passage of the 19th amendment in the 1920s, when it became topic of debate among suffragettes, some of whom opposed it out of concern that it would undo their efforts to unionize for better working conditions and abolish child labor.
[13] I am not using this term in the sense that Hall and colleagues used it in their 2012 psychological paper, Lifting the veil of morality: Choice Blindness and Attitude Reversals on a Self-Transforming Survey. I am instead trying to use a concise phrase to get at a broader concept of using morality to justify decisions when it is perhaps unclear that morality is truly the motivation.
[14] For our purposes, a logically sound argument has all true premises. Technically, it is a valid argument to affirm that from the premises “the cat is orange” and “the cat is not orange” one can conclude, “all cats are red” because logically anything follows from a contradiction. However, since this is not a practical argument in the real world because in the real world something cannot realistically be both true and false when the truth-values of their premises are known with certainty (the Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment is for another day and is far beyond the scope of this paper).
[15] The term “general authority” is an LDS-specific way to refer to a member of Church leadership.
[16] Coverture laws were quite restrictive, to the point where women were essentially the property of their husbands.
[17] The highest office a woman in the LDS Church can hold.
[18] One such place is the writings of William James, who wrote often on the importance of tolerance. However, his views were an aberration.
[19] Reeve, Paul W. Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness. Oxford University Press: Oxford. 2015.
[20] By legitimacy, I mean it is not perceived as a cult, but as one of the world religions. There are still many Protestants who for doctrinal reasons do not accept Mormons as Christians, but the overall American culture does not view the LDS faith as a cult in the same way that they might view the Jehovah’s Witnesses or Scientology.
[21] The advertising campaign launched in 2011 based on research conducted in 2009.