Lori Falce: Do we need an equal rights law?

No one knows every law.

Congress makes them. So do state legislatures. They are passed for each county, for each city, for each school district. Making them is a defining aspect of every level of government.

And there are just too many to track. That’s why we have as many courts and law enforcement officers as we do. State police don’t — and can’t — enforce every local ordinance. They have enough to do monitoring the ones signed in Harrisburg. They have no way of knowing what was done by leaders of all the 2,561 municipalities in Pennsylvania.

Have you ever seen a municipal code book? They can be thick as a shoe box and have print like the Bible — and sometimes that’s just one of several volumes.

The bulk of those ordinances can be there for a mix of reasons. Something may have made total sense at the time but has long since lost a real purpose as time marched on. For example, more than a hundred years ago, for some reason, someone in the tiny town of Pine Island, Minn., decided people should tip their hats when they meet a cow. That stayed the law of the land long after it became a mystifying quirk.

Other rules lost to time but still on the books are contradictions that weren’t resolved or redundancies that have seemed like good ideas more than once.

It makes you wonder if government could get more done if more attention was paid to enforcing the laws we have and eliminating the ones we don’t need rather than arguing about new ones that might not be needed at all.

On Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to restart the clock to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment — which was originally passed by Congress in 1972 and spent the next 10 years seeking enough state ratification to make women’s equality part of the Constitution.

Whether resurrecting the ERA is legally viable is up for debate, but there is also the question of whether it’s needed.

The Ninth Amendment says any right not spelled out belongs to the people, so unless women are noted as unequal, they should be assumed to be equal. The 14th Amendment defines citizenship and spells out equal protection. Women were accorded voting rights with the 19th.

And before all of that, the preamble gave birth to our laws with the words “We the People,” not “We the Men.”

Maybe, regardless of whether the ERA progresses further than it did in 1982, what we need to do is remember that the laws we agree on apply to everyone equally already. There aren’t separate laws about murdering men or stealing from women.

Plenty of effort has been made to rectify problems of unfair treatment, and equal remains the goal although frequently not the reality.

But as with other issues — from racism to violence to gun control — the tools to achieve the goal may already be on the books and in our grasp.