(RNS) — Recent Supreme Court opinions dangerously undermine women’s equal protection under the law. As women of faith, we are alarmed and active. Each of us has struggled against patriarchal interpretations of texts and teachings that undermine women’s autonomy and rights. We reject the mainstreaming of repressive religious interpretations in shared public spaces that derail our quest for equal justice.

On Women’s Equality Day, we affirm the Equal Rights Amendment as an essential next step to protect women’s rights and dignity.

Justice and equality are at the heart of the human project. American history is replete with diverse, multifaith coalitions that advance cultural shifts toward inclusivity. It is appalling that the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson overturned abortion rights based on the literal text of a centuries-old document that excluded women from its inception. “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected …,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito.

We recognize this brand of originalism from religion. Opposing justice because a text does not mention a word or emerged from a patriarchal context is a familiar argument made to preserve hierarchical power. It has long been common conservative practice to declare that the sexist historical context in which a document was penned should remain the norm today — just as the court did.

Many of our religious texts make no explicit mention of the terms “abortion,” “homosexuality,” “same-sex marriage” or “the declaration of human rights,” but all emphatically insist on justice.

In Islam, the word “abortion” does not exist; the supreme right and well-being of the mother do. For centuries, a Muslim woman has had the right to end her pregnancy whether for the mother’s health or for economic reasons. A fetus’s personhood is only recognized with the baby’s first gasp of air.

Judaism has a similar belief rooted in Exodus. The Jewish tradition has such reverence for human life that the pregnant person is held in high regard. Abortion is not only mandated to save the mother’s life but is permitted to save her from great distress, physical or emotional. The ancient rabbis described a fetus as part of the mother’s body, which does not take on personhood until the majority of the head emerges from the womb.

Protestant and Catholic Christians hold diverse views of abortion and women’s equality. A thread of misogyny runs through traditional orthodoxy; control of women remains a consistent theme in many theologies. Yet, Christian sacred texts highlight the dignity and empowerment of women in accord with Jesus’ teaching that all are equal.

Christian Scriptures are silent on abortion. There is no Christian consensus on when fetal life begins. Many feel compelled by their faith to respect women’s moral agency to make prayerful choices about childbearing and family life. Opposition to responsible reproduction is a minority view among U.S. Christians. It should not be accorded broad legal authority in a pluralistic society.

The Sikh tradition proclaims the equality and dignity of women. Sikh sacred texts present a vision of a world where people of all castes, creeds and genders are sovereign in their bodies. Any ban on abortion is a violation of this core belief. To strip away a woman’s freedom to care for her body — to decide when, whether and how to bring children into the world — is to deny her intelligence and humanity.

In 1802, Thomas Jefferson stated that “a wall of separation between Church and State” was a foundational element of American democracy. Since then, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly cited Jefferson’s words as justification for the priority of secular law over the teachings of any individual faith. We live in a democratic society where rule of law, not fiat, should control.

The Equal Rights Amendment will play an important role in ensuring such a democracy. By inserting these words in the Constitution: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged … on the basis of sex,” we can correct the intentional exclusion of women. For the first time in U.S. history, people of all genders will be citizens of equal stature.

This nation is a hair’s breadth away from finalizing the ERA. It has been duly ratified by 38 states and needs only to be published by the U.S. archivist. We call on President Biden to ensure that this happens swiftly. We call on the U.S. Senate to affirm that there is no arbitrary deadline on the ERA’s adoption.

Recent Supreme Court decisions, with repercussions in the states, have shown us how urgent this reform is. As women of faith, we are committed to the common task of making the ERA the law of the land. We invite all people of goodwill to join us as we get it done.

(Ani Zonneveld is the founder and president of Muslims for Progressive Values. Lisa Sharon Harper is the president and founder of Freedom Road. Mary E. Hunt, Ph.D., is cofounder and codirector of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual (WATER). Valarie Kaur leads the Revolutionary Love Project. Rabbi Sharon Brous is the senior and founding rabbi of IKAR and a leading voice in reanimating religious life in America. Allyson McKinney Timm is a human rights lawyer and the founder of Justice Revival. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

This article was originally published by Religion News Service.

We have long extended cruelty to Black immigrants, Haitians in particular. I will never forget my trip to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a decade ago as a legal observer where Muslims are incarcerated without charge or trial in the war on terror. But before that, Guantanamo was used to detain thousands of Haitian refugees intercepted on the high seas in the 1990s. They were seeking asylum in the U.S., but the first Bush administration captured and detained them at Guantanamo, asserting that Haitians who were HIV-positive had no right to asylum in the name of public health. Candidate Bill Clinton decried this inhumane policy. But once in office, the Clinton Administration advanced the argument, claiming that Haitians at Guantanamo had no constitutional rights whatsoever. This position made it possible for President George W. Bush to reopen Guantanamo as a site to detain people indefinitely and without due process after 9/11, a practice that continues today.

History continues to repeat. Candidate Biden vowed to uphold our moral and legal obligation to asylum. Yet now the Biden Administration invokes Trump’s much-criticized Title 42 to prevent and expel thousands of Haitian refugees from seeking asylum, using COVID-19 as a pretext for mass deportations and inhumane treatment of Black immigrants.

Anti-blackness transcends political party; it permeates our culture and becomes keenly visible in moments like this. We are a nation that has grown accustomed to images of Black people gasping for breath from knee-on-neck cruelty. There is a better way. We can counter our unconscious bias and retrain the eye to see others as a part of us and leave no one outside our circle of care.

This brings me back to the images from Del Rio, Texas. I focus on the face of the Black man running from the horse. I want to look away. Instead, I look into his eyes and say “Brother” in my mind a few times. I imagine his family, the home he left behind, and learn why he has risked everything to seek asylum. I wonder if his children will eat tonight. The word “refugee” melts away and his full humanity comes into view.

Our faith traditions call on us to see every person’s humanity. Jesus instructed his followers to welcome the stranger. My Sikh faith invites us to see as our gurus did: “Na ko bairi nahi begana.” “I see no enemy; I see no stranger.”

READ: A Time to Grieve

And so I slowly turn to the violent white officer on the horse. I say “Brother” in my mind. My body immediately seizes with disdain and revulsion. Such a man could not be my brother. I take a breath. I choose to wonder about him as a human being. What makes him cruel? Then it happens: I see a frail man driven by illusions of duty, power, and aggression that permeate the culture of the institution he serves. He is severed from his capacity to see another’s humanity. As a result, his own humanity is diminished. It’s the same dullness I saw in the prison guards I met in the supermax prison, or the white supremacists who spill my people’s blood, or the slaveholders in the old photos. The treatment of other human beings as less than animals day in and day out comes with a cost—the shrinking of one’s soul.

Many are rightly decrying the agents on horseback. But calling them monsters lets us off the hook. When we see the culture that drives these men, then we know the solution is not simply to remove a few bad apples, as implied by the Administration’s promise to investigate the Border Patrol agents at Del Rio. The solution is to hold them accountable and reimagine our culture that radicalizes them and the policies that authorize them to inflict suffering on Black and brown bodies with impunity.

Choosing to see the humanity of our opponents is a hard practice. Practicing seeing no stranger provides us with information on how to respond. First, we push for immediate policy steps called for by civil and human rights organizations to halt immediate harm: restore asylum access at ports of entry, rescind Title 42, issue a new termination memo for the Migrant Protection Protocols, and end reliance on incarceration for processing immigrants.

Then, we reckon with our nation’s role in the chaos in their home countries. We reject the falsehood that America’s public safety and public health require us to sequester, ban, incarcerate, and expel Black and brown immigrants. We see the humanity of those coming to our border in need and make this the moment that expands our circle of care beyond what was previously imagined. After a long constriction of civil and human rights, and in the wake of the immediate horror of Afghanistan and Del Rio, this could be the era we begin to reimagine America as a safe home for refugees. But only if we show up to the labor with the moral courage called for by our faiths.

Balbir Uncle’s murder turned a generation of young people like me into activists. My team and I made a film about his murder and began a life helping communities organize against racism and violence.

Today we are still living in the shadow of 9/11. The cycle of violence feels endless: an act of terrorism followed by a wave of hate violence, profiling, surveillance, detentions, deportations, bigoted rhetoric and use of force abroad. Then followed by another terrorist attack and more hate and violence.

So Balbir Uncle’s younger brother Rana and I did something that was previously unthinkable. We asked: who is the one person we have not yet tried to love? We decided to call Balbir Uncle’s murderer Frank Roque.

Watch our powerful conversation and read more about the call:

Over the weekend, my community gathered at the gas station where Balbir Uncle was killed. We mourned all who have been killed in white supremacist hate violence this year, including our brother Srinivas Kuchibhotla in Kansas City (February 22nd) and sister and ally Heather Heyer in Charlottesville (August 12th). We also mourned all those killed in ambiguous circumstances yet whose deaths have shaken our communities, most recently:

• our Muslim sister Nabra Hassanen in Reston, Virginia (June 18th)
• our Sikh brother Simranjit Singh in Sacramento, CA (July 25th)
• a Sikh father Subag Singh who I called ¨Baaj Uncle¨ in Fresno, CA (July 23rd)
• and our young Sikh brother Gagandep Singh in Bonner County, Idaho (August 28th)

In this time when hate crimes are the highest they have been since 9/11, we need your love and solidarity now more than ever.

What can you do? Please watch and share our film Divided We Fall to learn about our struggle against hate since 9/1 — and our defiant love. The film is available online for free and comes with teacher´s guides and dialogues questions to use in your classroom, house of worship, or even your living room. The first step toward loving us is hearing our story.

Today we mourn. Tomorrow we organize.