Undaunted: Surviving Jonestown, Summoning Courage, and Fighting Back

by Jackie Speier

Expecting the unexpected got catapulted to a whole new level in January 2017, when Donald Trump was sworn in as president of the United States. The morning after the inauguration, I hosted a breakfast reception at the Capitol, mobilizing hundreds of women—many of whom were from my congressional district—in the fight to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and to make women’s rights a priority in the 115th Congress. That proposed amendment, twenty-four simple words that would make it illegal to discriminate against citizens based on sex, has been proposed in Congress without adoption since 1923. Most people are shocked to learn that sad truth about our Constitution. In an interview given by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in 2011, he provoked outrage by stating, “Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t.”