Everyone in the U.S. has the right to habeous corpus no matter how despicable. Only some people have the privilege to drive because only some people have passed their driving test, payed their fees, etc.
If the ERA had passed then women would have all rights that men had, and vice-versa. This would have led inexorably to all men and women having the opportunity to apply for all privileges as well. It would only be a matter of passing tests, paying fees, etc. for women to get all the privileges that men enjoyed.
These privileges would have included being available for Selective Service and any potential military draft. It would also have meant employers having to bend over backwards to allow pregnant women to keep jobs even if those jobs endangered their fetuses.
This of course is all besides the point, but to come to the point. Here is the main text of the ERA:
Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
What the liberals supposedly meant by this was to allow women to be firefighters (even though they couldn't haul 250lbs of dead weight), fight in combat, get special consideration on their way to becoming CEO, etc.
However, since we now know that the Constitution is a "living" document we know that the following rationalization (ala Kennedy, Souter, etc.) would most certainly have followed if the ERA had every become law:
1. A man wants to marry a man
2. The only difference between this and a traditional marriage is that one of the participants is a man
3. To deny them the right (or privilege) to marry would be to do so based entirely on the sex of one of the participants.
4. This is a violation of the ERA. Thus gay marriage is AOK in the USA
Phyllis was right and it was a very good thing that the ERA didn't get ratified for more reasons than women in combat, more affirmative action nonsense, etc.
Unfortunately the liberals found other ways to push their agenda and a lot of pubbies are either supporting them or at least not getting in their way much at all.