Eagle Forum

David Limbaugh appeared on Eagle Forum Live with Phyllis Schlafly to promote his new book, The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama’s War on the Republic. He told Schlafly that Obama is promoting “dependency and sloth” and is using “class warfare and race warfare and gender warfare and sexual orientation warfare and religion warfare” to get his way:

Limbaugh: This is so destructive of the social fabric the way he initiates and engages in class warfare and race warfare and gender warfare and sexual orientation warfare and religion warfare.

Schlafly: I was gonna say that class war is a major Communist tactic and he certainly does that.

Limbaugh: Yes he does. Class warfare and he distorts and uses propaganda to press his position. This is what I meant a minute ago when I was talking about the dependency class, he wants to discourage people from working and he wants to promote dependency and sloth and people not contributing to society.

He also maintained that Obama is “acting like a flaming leftist, radical, socialist, even Marxist” president and that “we are committing national suicide” if he is re-elected:

Limbaugh: If we re-elect him we are committing national suicide, I fully believe that. It might be cliché to say this is the most important election we’ve ever had but I don’t think it’s a cliché, I think most elections have incrementally been more important than previous elections because liberalism has been on a steady incremental march during my entire life, we pushed it back during Reagan and some other areas, but they always seem to move the ball towards statism overall and they are continuing to do it, every election is more important than the last, but this one is different in kind rather than degree. Obama is already acting like a flaming leftist, radical, socialist, even Marxist when he faces re-election, and lawlessly, can you imagine what he’ll act like if he is re-elected and perceives himself to have a mandate to take this country completely over the cliff.

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I think he's committed lawless acts, I think he is exceeded his constitutional authority but the Democratic party is institutionally corrupt and they circled the wagons around Bill Clinton when he was a known felonious perjurer. They are surely not going to do anything with an African American president who they would make a martyr, the Republicans would make a martyr. If the Republicans proceed on any kind of impeachment, Obama will become a martyr and you will increase the chances of his re-election; if he is re-elected, we are doomed.

During a recent appearance on Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum Live radio show, conservative radio talk show host Mason Weaver, whom Schlafly introduced as “a very articulate black” who is urging African Americans to “get a life” and “get off the plantation.”

Schlafly: Our guest today is Mason Weaver, who is a very articulate black, he is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, and he’s trying to encourage blacks to get a life, get off the plantation, make something of yourself and stop depending on Uncle Sam to give you everything from food to childcare for your kids.

He described the feminist movement as “anti-God”, and insisted that liberal social policy, (in this case referred to euphemistically as ‘the other man’) breeds dependency and thus promotes and justifies criminal activity. Schlafly’s organization recently lamented the downward trend in the white birth rate, and Schalfly herself has said wistfully that the United States “was a lot better off before 1962,” before the civil rights movement had made major gains.

Schlafly: And you realize the disaster the feminist movement has been in this country because they’re anti-men, and anti-husbands, and anti-masculine, and when they talk about liberation…

Weaver: They’re anti-God, that’s all it is.

Schlafly: Yeah.

Weaver: They’re anti-God. The feminist movement was created to have another front on the attack on masculinity. It’s an attack on the culture in the family, it’s an attack on success. They want dependency, they want failure, they want themselves to be in charge, it’s just simply agreed on their part.

Schlafly: And they want everybody, blacks and women, to believe they’re victims of society. And of course if you wake up in the morning and you think you’re a victim, how far are you going to get?

Weaver: Well think about the male ego. If you convince a 20 year old man, black or white, that another man controls his family, his health, his income, his job, why go get a job? The other man controls it. Why go out and try to earn something? He’s going to take it from you. But you also feel justified in criminal activity, in not respecting your family. If you buy the liberal mindset of yourself, as a black man, you are by definition depressed.

Schlafly: That's right.

Eagle Forum’s San Diego chapter is hosting a conference in June to unite conservatives in Democratic-leaning California before the upcoming election:

Tomorrow, Friday June 1, 4-9pm prominent national, state and local leaders will address hundreds of conservatives at the "Rise Up California" Eagle Forum San Diego Convention at Skyline Church in Rancho San Diego. The purpose of the convention is to gather, energize, educate, empower and activate conservative Californians 4 days prior to the primary, and into the November general election.

Skyline Church is led by Jim Garlow, a close adviser to Newt Gingrich who led efforts to pass Proposition 8 and has since become a national spokesman for anti-gay causes.

Brian Brown and Jennifer Roback Morse of the National Organization for Marriage will also address the conference alongside Vision America’s Rick Scarborough, a birther and “Christocrat” who believes AIDS is part of God’s judgment and is working against the “sexual anarchy led by sodomites.” The NOM leaders’ appearance with Scarborough, who as Kyle noted earlier today mourned the decline of the white population, won’t help their attempts to distance NOM from a campaign memo based on sowing racial divisions and build a “rainbow coalition” to oppose the gay rights “storm.”

Joining them will be Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, the anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist who was banned from CPAC and the “Weyrich lunch” for his extremist views and attacks on fellow conservative leader Grover Norquist.

Another speaker is Dinesh D’Souza, who is turning his discredited book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, into a movie with the help of Republican megadonor Joe Ricketts, who recently had to drop a proposed plan to finance racially-charged ads linking President Obama to Jeremiah Wright.

Other activists appearing at the event include Frank Pavone of Priests for Life, Charles LiMandri of the far-right Thomas More Law Center, the Libertarian Party’s nominee for Vice President in 2008 Wayne Allyn Root, Dran Reese of the Salt and Light Council, and anti-environmentalist campaigner Holly Swanson.

Yesterday, Eagle Forum’s Roger Schlafly, son of Eagle Forum president Phyllis Schlafly, mourned the dip in the white birth rate because of its impact on “American values.” Today, Schlafly is upset about the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. Quoting excerpts from an Associated Press article, Schlafly mocked VAWA proponents who think the law could “protect women from marrying men who like to get drunk and crazy” and for including protections for immigrants who can provide evidence of domestic abuse, writing, “We have an immigration policy that favors liars and whiners.” Schlafly went on to chastise Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI), who discussed her ordeal in trying to “press charges against her rapist before the law’s passage,” maintaining that she simply “did not want to answer questions about whether she seduced the man.”

What VAWA is about

AP reports:

WASHINGTON (AP) - House Republicans set up a showdown Wednesday with the Senate and President Barack Obama over legislation to protect women from domestic violence, a fight that's become as much about female voters this election year as cracking down on abuse.

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"The man I married had a penchant for drinking and was very violent when he drank," the bill's sponsor, freshman Rep. Sandy Adams, R-Fla., said during floor debate.

Really? Is that what the law is about? Is VAWA going to somehow use federal law to protect women from marrying men who like to get drunk and crazy?

Wisconsin Democrat Gwen Moore recalled what it was like to try to press charges against her rapist in the days before the law's passage.

"I took him to court (but) indeed, I was on trial," Moore said. "I had to prove, as a victim, that I was not being fraudulent in my accusations. They brought up how I was an unwed mother with a baby. Maybe I seduced him. They talked about how I was dressed."

So she testified in court that a man raped her, but did not want to answer questions about whether she seduced the man. She wants a federal law to presume that men are guilty so that female accusers do not have to answer embarrassing questions.

Another hot VAWA issue is visas:

Ronan and his allies argue that there's what he calls a "big national fraud" in which immigrant women claim to be abuse victims in order to gain residency or citizenship through the act, which can offer women permanent residency if they testify against abusive husbands.

The Violence Against Women Act actually offers two avenues for victims of abuse to seek immigration relief. Women in the US illegally can currently seek temporary visas if they are victims of domestic violence.

More and more foreign women are getting permanent USA visas by making unverified accusations of abuse. We have an immigration policy that favors liars and whiners.

Yesterday, Phyllis Schlafly hosted E. Ray Moore on Eagle Forum Live to discuss the Christian Reconstructionist film, “IndoctriNation,” about the supposedly destructive nature of the public school system. Moore called public schools the “main culprit” on why young adults leave the church, likening it to “playing Russian Roulette with your children’s souls.” Throughout the show he said parents are mandated by the Bible to homeschool their children to place them in Christian schools, saying that while public schools are “godless and pagan by precept and design,” there should be “God in the math class and in the science class as much as in the Bible class.”

Moore: We have so much research showing that Christian children who stay in these government schools through their career, 80% of them of what we would call evangelical Christians are adopting a secular humanist or Marxist/Socialist worldview. We also know that we’re having terrible attrition in the Christian family when children get to be college age, 70-80% of them are dropping out of the church and just abandoning the Christian faith, and we believe that the main culprit for that also is the fact that so many Christians have left their children in these public schools.

Schlafly: Well we’re told that the public schools are trying to be religiously neutral, do you think that’s true?

Moore: No they’re not religiously neutral, they’re godless and pagan by precept and design. That’s another myth that we have to deal with that somehow math and science are religiously neutral, no, we want God in the math class and in the science class as much as in the Bible class.

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Moore: Our own research shows 17-20% of Christian children seemed to have survived the experience.

Schlafly: Those aren’t very good odds.

Moore: It’s playing Russian Roulette with your children’s souls is what you’re doing.

Phyllis Schlafly is an all-around right-wing activist who has been around forever. You could say she was Tea Party before her time, railing against liberals and taxes and the UN's threat to US sovereignty. Her 2009 "How to Take Back America" conference was an amazing gathering at which health care reform was described as fascism, President Obama was described by Rep. Trent Franks as an "enemy of humanity," and attendees were encouraged to buy guns and ammo to defend themselves against impending tyranny.

But Schlafly’s real bread and butter is the hostility to feminism that fueled her campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment – and it was her anti-feminist schtick that she brought to George Washington University in D.C. last night.  I use the word schtick because it’s hard to take seriously Schlafly’s caricature of feminists as anti-men, anti-marriage, anti-family, and anti-child-rearing, not to mention claims like these:

• “Feminists don’t have any role models of happiness.”
• “They don’t believe that women can be successful. You never hear the feminists  talking about really successful  women like Margaret Thatcher or Condaleeza Rice, they just don’t believe women can be successful…that’s why they hate Sarah Palin….”

What?  Feminists don’t believe women can be successful?  That didn’t ring true to the many GW students, women and men, who politely protested Schlafly’s appearance.  During the Q&A, one challenged Schlafly directly, saying her mother is a feminist, a role model of happiness, and had instilled in her children a love of family.  The student said Schlafly seemed to be having a 40-year old argument with quotes plucked from early feminist writers.

Schlafly did have her admirers.  The young woman who introduced her said Schlafly had given her an example of how to stand up against the emerging “gender-interchangeable society.”  Schlafly returned to that theme later, saying that feminists don’t want equality for women, they want “gender interchangeability.”

Schlafly reveled in the recent flap about Ann Romney never having to work outside the home, since she saw it as proof that feminists have no respect for mothers who choose to answer to a husband rather than a boss.  But Schlafly was not on message with the Romney campaign’s claims that women have accounted for almost all job losses during the Obama administration.  Schlafly, who repeatedly claimed that the Obama administration is utterly controlled by feminists, “proved” her case by saying that feminists had successfully demanded that most jobs created by federal stimulus funds went to women.

Schlafly touched on a few other issues, such as her opposition to marriage equality (though she seemed to say she didn’t think civil unions were worth fighting about).  And she pushed the same theme being pushed by Ralph Reed and other strategists trying to build a broad electoral coalition: you can’t separate fiscal and social conservatism.  She took a shot at Mitch Daniels for seeking a “truce” on social values, something she called “impossible.”

In the end, she told the young women, they should get married before having babies, and they should ignore feminists who might poison their attitude toward life by telling them that women are victims of the patriarchy. She derided the notion of a "glass ceiling" and denied that unequal pay is a problem. Men, she said, are willing to do dangerous jobs that women aren't, because "women like nice inside jobs with carpeted offices." American women, she said, are the most fortunate people who have ever lived.  Why, in Africa, she said, some women have to wash their clothing in the river.  “We have all these wonderful modern conveniences that men have invented for our pleasure.”  

Intelligent Design activist Jay Richards of the Discovery Institute, who recently coauthored the book Indivisible with televangelist James Robison, appeared on Phyllis Schlafly’s radio program Eagle Forum Live this week where he argued that those who believe in individual rights and limited government should oppose the rights of gays and lesbians to marry. Richards maintained that stopping the legalization of same-sex marriage is needed to defend the rights of individuals, and argued that since marriage is “outside the jurisdiction of the state” same-sex couples cannot take part in it.

Richards: We argue that there are other pre-political realities besides just the individual that a limited government has to recognize and marriage is one of those realities, it’s a universal human institution, we find it in every time and place, in every culture, every religious tradition has this basic concept of marriage as between one man and one woman with a special connection to children. So a limited government is going to recognize that institution rather than try to redefine it, so that’s why we think, in fact, if you believe in limited government you need to believe in laws that protect marriage as it actually is historically. The institution of marriage is one of those things that is outside the jurisdiction of the state, so quite apart from the consequences, we think, if you believe that government should recognize individual rights, then you need to believe that the government is also going to recognize the rights and realities of this institution which it can’t dictate.

Yesterday, Phyllis Schlafly traveled to South Carolina to speak to at The Citadel, which now offers a course entitled the "Conservative Intellectual Tradition in America."

Speaking to an all-male audience, Schlafly assured them that women don't care about the issue of contraception and warned them not to date feminists:

The recent political flap about contraception being an important issue for women is completely contrived by Democrats and the media to divert attention from abortion and other important issues, said conservative political activist Phyllis Schlafly.

“Contraception is not controversial,” she said. “The issue is not access. It’s who’s going to pay for it.”

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Most women are concerned about issues such as jobs and religious liberty, Schlafly said, not issues being drummed up by feminists to foster support for President Barack Obama.

And feminists are working through the media and other channels because the American public no longer seems to strongly support their agenda, Schlafly said. “Feminists are having a hard time being elected because they essentially are unlikable,” she said.

Schlafly talked to a group of Citadel students about the culture of conservatism and the history of the religious right. She told the all-male group that “feminist is a bad word and everything they stand for is bad.”

And she warned them about having personal relationships with feminists. “Find out if your girlfriend is a feminist before you get too far into it,” she said. “Some of them are pretty. They don’t all look like Bella Abzug.”

Yesterday the US Senate voted 51-48 to kill the Blunt Amendment to the transportation bill that would have given employers the right to deny insurance coverage for any treatment that they objected to for any reason, representing a major setback for Religious Right groups who urged passage of the extreme amendment.

Tom Minnery of Focus on the Family’s CitizenLink called the vote an affront to the First Amendment, although it is hard to see how anyone’s First Amendment right to free exercise of religion is being violated:

“Today the government, this time via Congress, again told Americans they must ‘conform or pay a price’ when it comes to their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion,” he said. “Americans are speaking out because they understand that they should not be forced to fight to protect what the Constitution already grants them under the First Amendment.”

National Right to Life Committee claimed that the mandate was part of an “abortion-expansionist agenda, even though neither abortions nor abortifacients are included in the new rule:

The Obama Administration has issued an initial mandate that requires nearly all employers to purchase plans that cover all FDA-approved methods of birth control. NRLC has pointed out that the same authority could be employed by the Administration in the future to order virtually all health plans to cover all abortions. The focus now shifts to the House, where the same legislation, introduced as H.R. 1179 by Congressman Jeff Fortenberry (R-Ne.), currently has 220 cosponsors (more than half of all House members). In addition, numerous lawsuits have been filed by religiously affiliated employers, challenging the Obama mandate as a violation of constitutional rights and of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

"National Right to Life will continue to challenge the Obama Administration's abortion-expansionist agenda on Capitol Hill, and we will encourage millions of like-minded Americans to remember this issue when they cast their ballots in November," said Carol Tobias, National Right to Life president.

Eagle Forum president Phyllis Schlafly said that contraceptives “are not really medical care”:

"The contraceptive mandate is an introduction to the real ObamaCare, whereby a handful of leftists in D.C. impose the views of their big-money donors on more than 300 million Americans," said Schlafly. "If the Obama Administration's contraceptive mandate remains intact, then liberals will continue to demand that Americans pay for objectionable items and services that are not really medical care."

Tony Perkins of FRCAction warned that the Constitution has been “sacrificed”:

"Today, 51 senators, led by Sen. Harry Reid, sacrificed the Constitutional right of religious liberty on the altar of the Obama administration's radical big-government agenda. They turned a deaf ear to the very real religious and moral objections of millions of Americans and the First Amendment rights of all.

Concerned Women for America’s Penny Nance maintained that the mandate was part of a growing “oppressive federal bureaucracy”:

"America's women refuse to accept this unconstitutional government order," said Penny Nance, CEO of Concerned Women for America. The Obama Administration's HHS Mandate demolishes our constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion and conscience rights."

"Churches, religious organizations, and people of faith and conscience must have the right to choose their own health care and make their own moral decisions without having to submit to the one size fits all policies of President Obama and Secretary Sebelius' oppressive federal bureaucracy," Nance said.