BY BETH REINHARD
`Iron my shirt! Iron my shirt! Iron my shirt!''
The caustic chant came from the middle of an auditorium filled with voters listening to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, one day before New Hampshire's presidential primary.
The incident drew some media attention, but nothing like the firestorm over her teary moment in a diner the same day, credited with driving empathetic women to the polls in droves. The rumpled heckler was quickly dismissed as a lout.
The January incident came to mind as I thought about the Equal Rights Amendment pending in Tallahassee, once described by Gov. Jeb Bush as ``kind of like going back and wearing bell-bottoms.''
Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.
First introduced in 1923, the ERA was not passed by Congress until 1972. Then it failed to clear three-quarters of the states as required, falling just three short. One was Florida, and the yearly ritual ever since by a handful of female legislators to get it done has come to be regarded with faint amusement and little suspense.
The women trek to the Capitol to get patted on the head, or worse, ignored. See you next year, gals!
This year is no different, with only one Senate committee deigning to consider the bill so far and not a single one in the House.
Why, asked sponsor Sen. Gwen Margolis of Sunny Isles Beach, can her colleagues summon the courage to apologize for slavery -- as it did, admirably, two weeks ago -- but can't abide saying women are equal to men?
What if the heckler in New Hampshire had yelled ''Shine my shoes!'' at Clinton's African-American rival, Barack Obama? Would the national reaction have been as muted?
I'm not suggesting we fall into the trap of comparing who's got it worse. No one wins that game, especially if your name is Geraldine Ferraro, who suggested that Obama caught a lucky break being black. As Obama has said, not so lucky when trying to hail a cab in New York City.
The most common objection to the Equal Rights Amendment is that we don't need it. But supporters argue that it's the only way to guarantee, across the board, that sex discrimination is subject to the same legal standard as race discrimination, prohibited under the 14th Amendment.
''It's harder for women to prove discrimination,'' said Margolis, who, when first elected in the early 1970s, played poker and went hunting with the good ol' boys in Tallahassee to gain acceptance. She went on to become the first woman to serve as president of the Florida Senate.
Now that it seems possible to elect a female president of the United States, shouldn't she earn more than 77 cents on the dollar paid to her male predecessor in the White House?
Carole Griffin of the Florida Eagle Forum -- apparently their motto is ''fly like an eagle but not so high that your husband feels bad'' -- recited a list of horrors to the lone Senate committee that considered the amendment: no more Mother's Day and Father's Day, legalized prostitution, integrated prisons, coed scout troops. One Republican senator sanely pointed out that none of those ''silly things'' have come to pass in Florida, even though the state constitution already declares men and women equal.
House Speaker Marco Rubio should do right by his two daughters and make sure the ERA gets a fair hearing. Gov. Charlie Crist, who has shown he cares about civil rights, should demand it.
And while they're at it, they can iron their own shirts.
Beth Reinhard is the political writer for The Miami Herald.
