With the death of Phyllis Schlafly, America has lost an authentic heroine.
Schlafly was an American patriot, a true renaissance woman, an exceptional leader, and a wonderful human being.
At the age of 92, Phyllis was one day from releasing her latest book. While she wrote many, no one can forget the one that started it all: "A Choice Not an Echo." That little book issued in paperback helped to spur the modern conservative movement.
I have one of those original books and it helped me to know what I believed and why I believed it. And for younger conservatives who are seeking the truth, that little book was re-released as a 50th anniversary addition, updated and expanded.
Schlafly's Political Leadership
Phyllis will be remembered by most Americans as the lady who defeated the so-called Equal Rights Amendment. And she did, though she would be the first to tell you that it was the women across America, roused and incensed by learning the truth of how this amendment would demean their status and roles in the name of equality who took to the hallways of state capitols to stop ratification of this amendment to the United States Constitution.
Her leadership, however, was historic. She organized women (and more than a few men as well) under the banner of Eagle Forum to take their facts, their unique brand of lobbying, their winning smiles, and their messages of unintended consequences to scores of state legislators.
Phyllis was ever present at the state capitols but also on the television programs where her debating style, facts, and a smile disarmed many a host and frustrated the most fervent of her opponents. She never resorted to ad hominem attacks as her opponents often did because she had the truth and the facts on her side.
But, Phyllis Schlafly was a leader on so many other fronts that matter today. She loved the U.S. Constitution and believed it to be inspired. One of her greatest joys was being appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. I worked for Reagan as his deputy for presidential appointments at the time and I don't really know who was happier about this appointment-Reagan for being able to appoint Phyllis or Phyllis for receiving this appointment from Reagan.
She, of course, served with distinction alongside former Chief Justice Warren Burger in bringing the Constitution and its limits on federal government to millions of Americans.
When people think of those who have had made the most impact on American history, it is common for them to think of presidents or members of Congress. But Phyllis Schlafly (shown) is a testimony to the positive influence that one man - or one woman - can have on the course of our history, without that person having served one day in either the White House, or even in the halls of Congress. As political scientist Alan Wolfe wrote in The New Republic in 2005, "Schlafly has to be regarded as one of the two or three most important Americans of the last half of the 20th century."
Phyllis Schlafly died of cancer on Sunday at the age of 92, an icon of those conservatives who were dedicated to our constitutional form of government.
In an interesting aside, insight into the political viewpoint pushed by the Associated Press (AP) was revealed in its commentary about Schlafly: Schlafly's Eagle Forum organization was characterized as "ultraconservative," summing up its mission as for "low taxes, a strong military and English-only education." That's "ultraconservative"?
Schlafly considered Eagle Forum, an organization she founded in 1975, as her greatest legacy. Eagle Forum evolved from STOP ERA, an organization she formed in 1972 to combat the passage of the so-called Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Although Schlafly is probably most associated in the public mind with such "social issues" as feminism, same-sex "marriage," and abortion, prior to her involvement in the fight against ERA, she was a pillar of the Old Right - those who were concerned about fidelity to the Constitution and a non-interventionist foreign policy.
In fact, she was rather ambivalent about the ERA when it was first being considered by Congress. Then, in late 1971, she was asked by a friend to oppose it, a friend who pleaded with her to educate herself on the issue. This friend's intervention with Schlafly is yet another proof that one person can make a huge difference. ERA, which proposed to outlaw any discrimination on account of sex, had already passed the House of Representatives, and appeared certain to win ratification by enough state legislatures to be added to the Constitution.
After becoming convinced of the dangers of the ERA, Schlafly formed STOP ERA. Along with the constitutionalist John Birch Society, she tirelessly warned that the ERA was dangerous to our very form of government, noting that it would involve a massive transfer of laws and power from the states to the federal courts. She predicted it would be used by the federal judiciary to require the drafting of women into combat (of course, progressives of her day dismissed her concerns as a fear tactic, while progressives of the day embrace women in combat).
I can well remember the efforts of STOP ERA in my state of Oklahoma, in which ladies lobbied state legislators against the proposed constitutional amendment. Oklahoma was the first state to defeat its ratification. Despite garnering 35 of the 38 states needed to add ERA to the Constitution, the efforts of Schlafly and her anti-ERA allies killed it.
When the Supreme Court issued its infamous Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, Schlafly was a key figure in the creation of the pro-life movement. By 1976, due largely to her efforts, the Republican Party platform embraced the protection of the unborn, a plank that has continued to find a spot in every national party platform since.
Schlafly's effectiveness at blocking the feminist agenda so angered Betty Friedan that she once told Schlafly, "I'd like to burn you at the stake," dismissing her as an "Aunt Tom." Schlafly enjoyed provoking such hostile reactions, once saying that "sex-education classes are like in-home sales parties for abortions." Among her favorite opening lines of a speech was to say, "I want to thank my husband, Fred, for letting me come here," knowing how much it irritated what she called "the women's libbers."
During her fight against ERA, Schlafly was not only verbally attacked, she also was the victim of physical assaults, from pig's blood being thrown on her to having a pie smashed into her face.
Phyllis Schlafly passed away today at the age of 92 and today leading pro-life advocates are remembering the pro-life champion.
Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, was a longtime friend of Mrs. Schlafly, who spoke at the annual SFLA national conferences and who was a mentor to Ms. Hawkins as well.
Hawkins told LifeNews.com that Schlafly deserves credit for getting the pro-life plank in the Republican party platform approved in 1980 and then keeping it there ever four years after that.
"Phyllis Schlafly was one of my personal heroes and mentors who inspired millions to the fight against abortion and the disastrous Equal Rights Amendment which would have made abortion a constitutional right. Phyllis is the reason the Republican Party is a pro-life party," Hawkins said.
She told LifeNews: "Phyllis will be missed yet her legacy will live on through my generation and in the young women who are fearless in the fight for the lives of the preborn and their mothers on their campuses and in their workplaces and communities."
Family Research Council President Tony Perkinstold LifeNews that "Phyllis Schlafly will be remembered for her courageous leadership in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds."
"With the political establishment, the media, and academia all arrayed against her, she organized a grassroots movement that not only stopped the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) but became the foundation for the pro-life, pro-family movement we have today," he said. "I have little doubt that the political and cultural landscape of America today would have long ago been devoid of true conservatism if not for her leadership. She never surrendered her principles and she never gave in to intimidation."
"Her love for God and this country drove her to fight for the Constitutional principles that founded this nation. We honor Phyllis for the lessons that she taught us all. I'm proud to have stood alongside her for faith, family and freedom," concluded Perkins.
In her long and consequential career, Phyllis Schlafly accomplished many amazing things, including her almost single-handed defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, but none of them had a more lasting effect on American politics than her 1964 publication of a paperback book titled "A Choice Not an Echo."
In the late spring of that year, Sen. Barry Goldwater was on his way to winning the Republican nomination for president, but had yet to win a major primary. That made the California primary pitting the conservative Goldwater and the liberal Nelson Rockefeller of New York all the more important. Even Goldwater had suggested privately that if he did not win California he might withdraw from the race.
The early polls favored Rockefeller, then-New York governor, but Goldwater stepped up his campaigning and narrowed the gap, helped by an army of conservative volunteers armed with an unusual weapon-Schlafly's "little" book, "A Choice Not an Echo."
Schlafly pointed out how liberal GOP "kingmakers," using every dirty trick in the political playbook, had been dictating the Republican presidential nominee for decades. But now conservatives had the candidate, Barry Goldwater, who could turn the party and the nation in the right direction.
More than 50,000 copies of "A Choice Not an Echo" were handed out in key precincts up and down the state of California. Later surveys revealed that Goldwater had edged Rockefeller in many of those precincts, providing the margin of victory for the conservative senator.
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Painful as it is to acknowledge, Phyllis Schlafly, who died yesterday at the age of 92, was one of the most important American political organizers of the second half of the 20th century. In the 1970s, at a time when the women's movement seemed to be soaring from strength to strength, she forged a reactionary grassroots women's movement that defeated the Equal Rights Amendment at practically the 11th hour-a blow from which the feminist movement took decades to recover.
Schlafly's genius was to recognize that conservative middle-class Christian homemakers were not submissive little hens interested only in trading recipes and getting the kids to church on Sunday. Like the liberal feminists they despised, these stay-at-home mothers wanted power, recognition, a field of action. All they needed to take to that field was a general, and Schlafly was a very good one. "In the ERA struggle, she was the expert debater, against all of us amateurs," political scientist Jane Mansbridge author of the definitive history, Why We Lost the ERA, told me in an e-mail. That the entitlements conservative women were defending-to economic support from male breadwinners, social deference to homemaking, chivalrous respect for traditional femininity-barely existed as a matter of law, and were breaking down even as fitfully observed social custom, only made their fight more energetic.
Schlafly didn't rest on her laurels for a minute. She went on to shape the women's auxiliary of the Christian right into a powerful political bloc through the Eagle Forum, and she was a powerful influence inside the Republican Party until the day she died, albeit often behind the scenes. She helped make opposition to LGBT rights and abortion signature right-wing causes, with many prominent female leaders and propagandists. Sarah Palin is her spiritual granddaughter. So is Ann Coulter. And so is Michele Bachmann, who managed to combine wifely obedience with being in Congress and running in the 2012 presidential primary.
Phyllis Schlafly, the Lion-Hearted Lady
By Twila Brase, RN, PHN
It was an honor to know Phyllis Schlafly.
Although not all conservatives agreed with everything she said or did, her impact was undeniable. Phyllis often stood when no one else did, wrote what no one else would (the updated "Choice Not an Echo"), andkeptthe Constitution of the United States intact. Her zeal for conservative, constitutional, life-affirming principles never wavered.
I often marveled that this woman could know so much about so many things on so many levels and speak it in such an articulate and understandable manner.
Phyllis Schlafly was intellect and principled passion personified. And for a woman so despised by the Left (and by some on the Right), it was always fun to see the twinkle in her eye and the ever-present smile on her face. Less than two months ago, when we last spoke in person, that smile was still there despite suffering from cancer, a fact I did not know until I read it in the news.
I recall the first time she asked me to speak at Eagle Council. The room was packed with 400 women and a few men. When she mentioned I was a certified public-health nurse, I heard a few gasps. But Phyllis knew I was not working for big government. She knew our organization was committed to protecting health freedom.
