Phyllis Schlafly

Many conservatives took a break over the summer from their typical screeds against so-called judicial activism as they demanded the Supreme Court step in and overturn the 2010 health care reform law. After the court upheld the law, they simply decried the ruling as “activism” anyway, further proving that right-wing activists see cases of judicial activism as really just decisions they disagree with.

Now, Truth in Action Ministries has released a new film, Freedom on Trial, featuring Robert Bork, the failed Supreme Court nominee and a senior adviser to Mitt Romney, Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly, Christian Reconstructionist attorney Herb Titus and Heritage Foundation vice president Genevieve Wood, among other conservative speakers who denounce the judiciary for “circumventing the Constitution and legislating from the bench.” Freedom on Trial focuses on the usual conservative criticisms of Supreme Court decisions regarding organized prayer in public schools, reproductive rights and LGBT equality. Bork warns that courts are “teaching the people that religion is evil” and Titus claims that decisions that go against the Ten Commandments will “destroy the country” while rulings in favor of LGBT rights are “making a certain sexual behavior straight when it is crooked and the nation will self-destruct.”

Watch highlights here:

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.

…

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.”

...

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.

Eagle Forum president Phyllis Schlafly today applauded a Canadian court for ruling that the government does not have to recognize polygamous marriages, which she used to make an argument against marriage equality for gays and lesbians:

The Canadian courts have legalized same-sex marriage. Will they legalize polygamy, too? After all, if consenting adults should be able to marry anybody they like, then why should same-sex marriage be allowed but not polygamy?

Many libertarians now insist that government should get out of the business of marriage, and not prohibit same-sex marriage. But if government lets everyone do what they like, then that would presumably include allowing polygamy. This issue was presented to an appellate court in British Columbia, a province of Canada. And it delivered a resoundingly pro-marriage decision, and upheld Canada’s 121-year ban on polygamy.

The Court held that “the institution of monogamous marriage [is] a fundamental value in Western society from the earliest of times.” Its 335-page opinion cited numerous ways in which polygamy causes harm to society, from higher rates of abuse to greater emotional problems, to underachievement by the children in schools. The Court traced the history of monogamous marriage between one man and one woman back to the ancient world, observing that from 600 B.C. to the 500s A.D. “marriage was understood as a union between a man and a woman presumptively for life” and that “by the ninth century, Byzantine emperors had decreed polygamy a capital offence.”

The Court pointed out that in the United States, in the mid-1800s, “Polygamy and slavery were considered to be among the ‘twin relics of barbarism,’” and that the American “Congress has ‘the right and the duty to prohibit’ this ‘odious institution.’” Those principles were established by the Republican Party platform of 1856. An appeal of this recent polygamy decision is expected eventually to reach the Supreme Court of Canada. That court previously established a constitutional right to same-sex marriage so no one knows what it will do.

But the decision Schlafly just praised actually makes the case why the legalization of same-sex marriage does not lead to polygamy.

In the ruling, the judge answers Schlafly’s question “why should same-sex marriage be allowed but not polygamy?” He argues that monogamous same-sex marriage does not lead to polygamy “because committed same-sex relationships celebrate all of the values we seek to preserve and advance in monogamous marriage” and dismisses Schlafly’s claim as an “alarmist view” that “misses the whole point,” as “the doctrinal underpinnings of monogamous same-sex marriage are indistinguishable from those of heterosexual marriage”:

[M]ore importantly, this line reflects, again, the pre-eminent place that the institution of monogamous marriage takes in Western culture and, as we have seen, Western heritage over the millennia. When all is said, I suggest that the prohibition in s. 293 is directed in part at protecting the institution of monogamous marriage. And let me here recognize that we have come, in this century and in this country, to accept same-sex marriage as part of that institution. That is so, in part, because committed same-sex relationships celebrate all of the values we seek to preserve and advance in monogamous marriage.

The alarmist view expressed by some that the recognition of the legitimacy of same-sex marriage will lead to the legitimization of polygamy misses the whole point. As Maura Strassberg, Professor of Law at Duke University Law School, points out in “Distinctions of Form or Substance: Monogamy, Polygamy and Same-Sex Marriage” (1997) North Carolina L.R. 1501 at 1594, the doctrinal underpinnings of monogamous same-sex marriage are indistinguishable from those of heterosexual marriage as revised to conform to modern norms of gender equality. This counters, as well, the argument advanced by many, that “in this day and age” when we have adopted expansive views of acceptable marriage units and common law living arrangements, the acceptance of polygamy, or at least the abandonment of its criminal prohibition, is the next logical step. This is said in the context of the sentiment often expressed that the “State has no business in the bedrooms of the Nation”. Here, I say it does when in defence of what it views is a critical institution - monogamous marriage - from attack by an institution - polygamy - which is said to be inevitably associated with serious harms.

Michele Bachmann yesterday picked up the support of the person she called “the most important woman in the United States in the last one hundred years,” Phyllis Schlafly. The Des Moines Register reports that the anti-feminist leader and head of Eagle Forum urged Iowa caucus-goers to back Bachmann:

In a written statement, Schlafly says: “Most important, Michele has the courage to be a leader among her peers. She is a real champion in speaking up for values we care about. Michele is a woman of faith and the mother of a beautiful family. She has a 100 percent pro-life record and is a strong supporter of traditional marriage.”

…

“If I were an Iowa voter, I would be making plans right now to cast my vote for Michele Bachmann for president on January 3. I hope you will take advantage of this golden opportunity to support a candidate we can all be proud of.”

Schlafly said conservatives don’t want the media to choose their candidate, “or tell us we must choose one of the two who currently lead in the polls.”

Bachmann praised Schalfly at the Eagle Forum Collegians 2011 Summit and even awarded her the Citizens United Lifetime Achievement Award at CPAC earlier this year. During a conference call with tea party members, Bachmann described Schlafly as “my heroine and my example as a forerunner” along with “my dear mentor and the person that I hope to be some day”:

Best known for leading the effort to stop the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, Schlafly has continued to work as an ardent Religious Right activist and commentator who in recent years blamed the Virginia Tech shooting on English professors, called President Obama an enemy of “real Americans” who wants to “take us into socialism,” and argued that married women cannot be raped by their husbands.

Several weeks ago, the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins hosted a press briefing at the National Press Club to discuss just what it is that the Religious Right is seeking in a Republican presidential nominee.

During the Q&A, Perkins was asked to discuss the idea that the very positions that make a candidate appealing to the Religious Right are the same positions that make such candidates unappealing to the general voting population.

Not surprisingly, Perkins took issue with that assessment and asserted instead that without the support of the Religious Right, no Republican candidate can hope to win the general elections and pointed to John McCain as proof:

This idea that a candidate that would be supported by social conservatives that would win the Republican nomination would be unacceptable to the general populace is just not true. I think the opposite it true; we saw that in the last election cycle. There was a Republican nomination that was not acceptable to social conservatives. He did not have the enthusiastic support of social conservatives and, as a result, the Republicans lost the general election.

Now, obviously McCain and the Religious Right had a rather contentious history, but to say that the McCain campaign did not receive the "enthusiastic support of social conservatives" requires one to completely ignore the rapturous lovefest that exploded when McCain announced the selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate, which we chronicled at the time:

James Dobson, Focus on the Family: "A lot of people were praying, and I believe Sarah Palin is God's answer.”

Tony Perkins, Family Research Council: “Senator McCain made an outstanding pick.”

Connie Mackey, FRCAction: “I am elated with Senator McCain's choice.”

Mat Staver, Liberty Counsel: "Absolutely brilliant choice.”

Richard Land: “Governor Palin will delight the Republican base.”

Rick Scarborough, Vision America, “I’m elated. I think it’s a superb choice."

Ralph Reed: “They’re beyond ecstatic. This is a home run.”

Gary Bauer, American Values: "[A] grand slam home run."

Phyllis Schlafly, Eagle Forum: “She is the best possible choice.”

Janet Folger, Faith2Action: “[T]he selection of Sarah Palin is more than ‘Brilliant!’ ‘Electrifying!’ and ‘Energizing!’ The selection of Sarah Palin will lead to words like: ‘Rejuvenating!’ ‘Victory!’ and ‘Landslide!’"

Wendy Wright, Concerned Women for America: “Governor Palin will change the dynamics of the entire presidential race.”

Janice Shaw Crouse, CWA's Beverly LaHaye Institute: “She is an outstanding woman who will be an excellent role model for the nation's young people.”

David Barton, Wallbuilders: "The talk won't be about, 'look at Sarah Palin' as much as 'look at what McCain's choice of Palin says about McCain's core beliefs.”

Jonathan Falwell: “John McCain made it very clear that his administration was going to be a pro-life administration, and he proved that’s his belief and his passion today with the choice of Sarah Palin.”

Jerry Falwell, Jr.: “I think it’s a brilliant choice.”

Charmaine Yoest, Americans United for Life: “And then when [Palin] was announced — it was like you couldn’t breathe. [We] were grabbing each other and jumping up and down.”

Gary Marx, Judicial Confirmation Network: "I can tell you that this pick tells millions in the base of the party that they can trust McCain. More specifically that they can trust him with Supreme Court picks and other key appointments’"

David Keene, American Conservative Union: “The selection of Governor Palin is great news for conservatives, for the party and for the country. I predict any conservatives who have been lukewarm thus far in their support of the McCain candidacy will work their hearts out between now and November for the McCain-Palin ticket."

If social conservatives were unenthusiastic about the McCain ticket last time around, some apparently forgot to tell all of these social conservatives who were gushing about just how thrilled they were.