The Week

Dear Skylab Astronauts: Welcome home. We’re proud of you, and your beards look great. In case you’re wondering what you’ve missed down here lately, we’ve had more inflation, a couple of kidnappings, run-ins with some tough Arabs, an energy crisis, comebacks by Bob Dylan, Muhammad Ali, and Maria Callas, Governor Rockefeller’s resignation (no, he’s clean as a whistle), bad weather, and lots and lots of optimistic predictions for the new year. All the best.

Ohio has become the 33 rd state to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, leaving only five states to go before the Amendment is ratified. The opponents of ERA have always had the harder case: presenting legal technicalities is never easy and rarely makes good copy for prime-time news. But some of the arguments of some of the opponents have also been less than convincing, however logical they may have seemed: would we really require pretty young things to undergo basic training in the Army? And surely the good sense of Americans makes unlikely a mandate for common bathroom facilities. If the Amendment is ratified, kooks will be all over the place with absurd lawsuits, nonkooks by the thousands will be trying to find out just what the Amendment does mean, and people will wonder how it could be that the Constitution before ERA was unable to handle the difference between men and women. One certainty: if the Amendment is ratified, lawyers will be more equal than anyone else.

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Equal Rights Amendment

Dear Skylab Astronauts: Welcome home. We’re proud of you, and your beards look great. In case you’re wondering what you’ve missed down here lately, we’ve had more inflation, a couple of kidnappings, run-ins with some tough Arabs, an energy crisis, comebacks by Bob Dylan, Muhammad Ali, and Maria Callas, Governor Rockefeller’s resignation (no, he’s clean as a whistle), bad weather, and lots and lots of optimistic predictions for the new year. All the best.

Ohio has become the 33 rd state to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, leaving only five states to go before the Amendment is ratified. The opponents of ERA have always had the harder case: presenting legal technicalities is never easy and rarely makes good copy for prime-time news. But some of the arguments of some of the opponents have also been less than convincing, however logical they may have seemed: would we really require pretty young things to undergo basic training in the Army? And surely the good sense of Americans makes unlikely a mandate for common bathroom facilities. If the Amendment is ratified, kooks will be all over the place with absurd lawsuits, nonkooks by the thousands will be trying to find out just what the Amendment does mean, and people will wonder how it could be that the Constitution before ERA was unable to handle the difference between men and women. One certainty: if the Amendment is ratified, lawyers will be more equal than anyone else.