Renee Diamond - Excerpts 1 & 2 Transcript
(Las Vegas, Nevada; August 30, 2001)

VC: Okay.

RD: (Laughing) (RDiamond1) We had thought we - we might lose the ERA. It was very difficult to explain. We had the Mormon Church actively campaigning against us, giving out anti-ERA newsletters and other things in church parking lots after meetings on Sunday, and Jean and I would just rail against that, you know, we were staunch civil libertarians who believed in separation of church and state, and that just annoyed us no end. The non-official newspaper, the Beehive, constantly had anti-ERA things in it, and we never quite figured out, during the campaign for choice, what - why this was such a serious attack on the church, but equality, it seemed to Jean and I that it was just something that one should accept,(RDiamond1) and Jean has - had two daughters and I had three daughters and one son, and so we were convinced that our daughters needed to - needed to have the ERA, so we just soldiered on. But we were our daughters needed to - needed to have the ERA, so we just soldiered on. But we were financing the Equal Rights Amendment campaign with things like lasagna bake parties and things like that. It was really tough, and then I was contacted by some Washington folks, NOW folks, National Organization for Women, that I was close to, and so I went back there and we got money and the campaign exceeded - succeeded to go on to actually have print material and other things after we got those contributions. (RDiamond2) Jean and I would just sit over a cup of coffee and rail about why the church was - saw equality as being threatened, and we - we also once went to a - they had panels, pro and con, in libraries and so on, and we once went to one, and the big issue on the other side was that we might have to share bathrooms, and she and I had just come from someplace and had been on an airplane, which of course it always had unisex bathrooms, so we used to go out and really do speeches on the Equal Rights Amendment, take part in panels, and then Jean and I would just laugh afterward about what kind of threat this was going to be. (RDiamond2) But that's mostly what I remember of that period.