Phyllis Schlafly
September 6, 2016
PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY, the famous anti-feminist, died yesterday at the age of 92.
Schlafly was a staunch anti-Communist and brilliant organizer, best known for creating a strong grass roots movement against the Equal Rights Amendment during the 1970s. The amendment officially died in 1982 after many people realized that it would eliminate privileges for women, such as the privilege of not being drafted into the military. The Equal Rights Amendment has basically been enacted anyway by the courts and the federal government. However, women are still not required to register for the draft.
Schlafly was the bright, cheerful face of the invisible women who opposed feminism. She was also active in many other political causes from her conservative foundation, initially Stop ERA and later the Eagle Forum, and had an especial interest in foreign policy. She bears the distinction of being called “hateful” by the Talmudic establishment. Alan Wolfe wrote of her in The New Republic in 2005:
Let it be said of Phyllis Schlafly that every idea she had was scatter-brained, dangerous, and hateful. The more influential she became, the worse off America became.
A woman who wrote 20 books; earned a masters degree from Radcliffe in nine months; later got a law degree and led a major national campaign against a Constitutional amendment was “scatter-brained?” A woman who opposed foreign wars that were not in America’s interests was “dangerous?” Wolfe typifies the hatred born against American patriots like Schlafly. He gave not a single example in his hit piece of a “hateful” comment by Schlafly, who refused to kowtow to “minorities” but never expressed hatred toward anyone and, greatly to her credit, opposed the war in Iraq. Her opponents were the vicious ones. Betty Friedan famously suggested she be burned at the stake and a feminist once threw a pie at her, injuring her eye.
Wolfe also wrote:
Long before William F. Buckley Jr. modernized American conservatism with the National Review, Midwestern America was honeycombed with people who denounced Franklin Delano Roosevelt, saw no role for the United States in the struggle against European fascism, and hated east-coast elites for their cosmopolitanism. The Schlaflys were part of this milieu. The world they idealized was filled with rugged individualists, and it had no place for labor unions, cities, racial minorities, Jews, or liberated women.
Although remarkably uninterested in taking on Hitler while he was killing all those European Jews, adherents of the Old Right became obsessed with the evils of communism in the years after World War II.
This is wildly inaccurate. Schlafly never advocated exclusion of non-whites or Jews or mistreating them in any way. And the isolationism which Wolfe mentions would have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews, who died in concentration camps (not extermination camps or gas chambers) that were a direct result of the war. Furthermore, her obsession, if one can call it that, with the “evils of communism” was righteous and noble given that more than 60 million Russians were exterminated under the Communists, the leadership of which was heavily Jewish (a fact which Jews themselves have acknowledged again and again). In opposing Communism, Schlafly opposed the likes of Hirsch Apfelbaum, the Bolshevik leader also known as Grigory Zinoviev, who famously said in 1918:
From the population of a hundred million in Soviet Russia, we must win over ninety million to our side. We have nothing to say to the others. They have to be exterminated.
We do not wage war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.
(George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police, Clarendon Press, 1981)
Schlafly’s sort of conservativism confronted some of the evils of Capitalism too, principally free trade and open borders. She wrote in a column last year:
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would turn over to globalists the power to issue regulations about U.S. trade, immigration, the environment, labor and commerce. It’s called a “living agreement” which means the globalists can amend and change the text of the so-called agreement after it has gone into effect.
That reminds me of our supremacist judges who invented the term of a “living” Constitution, which they can rewrite to comport with their own updated ideology. The globalists claim that this “living” document (TPP), now called Obamatrade, has all the powers of a treaty to commit the U.S. to new foreign obligations, although it certainly did not comply with any U.S. constitutional provisions for treaty ratification.
Her conservatism did not ultimately stem the growth of big government or the sell out of the Republic Party. And as afar as I know she did not strongly oppose the great swindle of the central banking system or educate Americans about it.
Schlafly was a Roman Catholic who, I believe, supported the Vatican II Church. She had a resilience in the face of strong opposition that will likely make her cherished in the future as well, especially as the fall-out from feminism grows more obvious. She was often attacked by feminists for having a wealthy husband and she was called a hypocrite because she did many other things besides raise her six children. Throughout it all, she maintained her conviction and composure. Though I don’t agree with all of Schlafly’s positions or share her devotion to the Republican Party, I view her as an inspiring model for women. She demonstrated how they can influence a culture and be political leaders without ever sacrificing their femininity or their support for the cultural institution of motherhood.
