I didn’t encounter Phyllis Schlafly often – we were on opposite sides of the ERA campaign, and I made sure to avoid her for the most part because, well, because she wasn’t a very pleasant woman. I did once slip her a shit ton of acid stashed in a blueberry brownie before a debate, but frankly I couldn’t tell the difference. After that I stuck to laxatives in the brownies, but she still ended up wining that one.
She was a nasty, hypocritical, unchristian old baggage – she believed in jobs and power for her, but not for other women, that there was no rape inside marriage, that Anthony Kennedy should have been impeached for abolishing the death penalty for minors, and that all Muslims should be banned from the armed forces and political office.
She endorsed Donald Trump, but that might just have been because she was bats at the end.
She was a prude whose hatred of sex and those who dared to have it – in particular those who she thought God had cursed with disease for having it – somehow made her the respectable face of a campaign to stigmatise people with HIV and AIDS (and not just the gays) which gave the Reagan administration cover to ignore the AIDS crisis, held back AIDS education and funding of AIDS research for years, and therefore directly or indirectly resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the infection of twice that many again.
Phyllis Schlafly was a cruel woman – the kind of woman who, in November 1985, as hundreds, and soon thousands of people were dying every month, could write:
… At least 10% of AIDS sufferers are innocent, involuntary victims such as babies.
Male homosexuals are the principal victims of AIDS but they are also the principal carriers of the contagion. The public health problem has been spread throughout our country by an identifiable class of people who engage in a bizarre risk taking recreation: frequent promiscuous (often anonymous) homosexual sex. …
Has the homosexual lobby really persuaded us that their right to engage in perverted, promiscuous sex takes precedence over the rights of the rest of us to have uncontaminated blood available for medical emergencies?
The New York school system asserts the right of a child who has AIDS to attend school and thereby run the risk of exposing healthy children. Where are the rights of the healthy children and their tens of thousands of protesting parents? …
Other proposals include making it a felony for homosexuals and intravenous drug users to donate blood; quarantining AIDS victims; barring children with AIDS from public schools; prohibiting anyone with AIDS from working in the health-care industry; assuring protection for health-care workers against AIDS patients; requiring a test which detects AIDS antibodies for workers in certain occupations like food handling.
The whole thing is posted after the fold.
Phyllis Schlafly was, in short, the kind of person who sees a kiddie with a fatal disease and wants to kick them out of school, lock them away from everyone else, and prevent them from ever getting a job or going to a hospital when they are sick.
In memory then of Phyllis, who is still dead, I give you this (via Queerty) – a sweet little story about a deaf Lyft driver, his passengers, young love and, probably, perverted homosexual sex – because it makes me feel all mooshy inside that young gay/trans/whatevers are out there making sweet little love stories like this, and because the mere existence of this video would have fucked up Phyllis’s day completely.
Although probably not as much as dying did.
Cheers, you old trout. Say hello to Fat Tony for me before the little devils stick their toasty hot pitchforks into you.
WereBear
She was the poster crone for hypocrisy.
sunny raines
?
bluefish
She was a deeply stupid person.
Patricia Kayden
Since she was such an anti-feminist, I wish she had lived long enough to see President Hillary Clinton. And of course, she endorsed Trump. That doesn’t even need to be said. I wonder how her gay son feels about her strong homophobia.
donnah
Fear, hypocrisy, intolerance, and hatred were her calling cards. And now we have Trump to carry forth her work. But as bad as he is, and he’s bad, for sheer spiteful hate he can’t touch her and what she did.
amk
.
well.
It’s a repost, but wth.
Betty Cracker
Trump called Schlafly a “champion for women” in a statement released yesterday.
Sarah, Proud and Tall
@sunny raines:
!
scav
@Betty Cracker: Well, Trump also considers himself a champion for black and hispanic Americans.
DanF
@bluefish: With deeply stupid offspring (Andrew Schafly) who created Conservapedia which is an endless shit-storm of stupid.
Elmo
@amk: Posted to Facebook, thanks! “Step one – complete.”
tjlabs
Back in the 80’s in NYC, a good friend of mine from Atlanta came to visit my partner (now husband) and me. He brought his new boyfriend with him. A very handsome young man named John. John Schlafly. My Atlanta friend was quite smitten with him. But they had to keep their relationship on the DL because of dear old mom. If puritan women back in the day had stature, she’d have been in charge of the Salem witch trials.
Not long after, John was involved in a very serious car accident that almost cost him his life. In critical condition for days, with the outcome uncertain, guess who never went to the hospital to see him.
Ding dong, etc, etc.
OzarkHillbilly
As I said to start the morning thread:
phyllis schlafly is dead. phyllis schlafly is dead. phyllis schlafly is dead. phyllis schlafly is dead. phyllis schlafly is dead. phyllis schlafly is dead. phyllis schlafly is dead. phyllis schlafly is dead. phyllis schlafly is dead. phyllis schlafly is dead. phyllis schlafly is dead. phyllis schlafly is dead. phyllis schlafly is dead. phyllis schlafly is dead. phyllis schlafly is dead. phyllis schlafly is dead. phyllis schlafly is dead. phyllis schlafly is dead. phyllis schlafly is dead. phyllis schlafly is dead. phyllis schlafly is dead. phyllis schlafly is dead. phyllis schlafly is dead. phyllis schlafly is dead…..
no matter how many times i say it, it still brings a smile to my face.
Gin & Tonic
@Sarah, Proud and Tall: I had long heard the story of this being the entirety of the correspondence between Victor Hugo and his publisher, but sad to say, this was likely invented.
I will leave untouched the link between fictional correspondence and fictional nonagenarian women.
Wag
@bluefish:
She wasn’t stupid. Just deeply immoral and distinctly unchristian in word and action.
Aardvark Cheeselog
I have a bottle of really, really old cognac that I open for toasts celebrating the deaths of enemies. I drank from it when Nixon died, and Reagan, and Scalia. It’s getting low, but I’ll be tasting it again tonight.
bystander
Phyllis Schlafly’s honorary degree from Washington U resulted in the loss of a lot of alum donations. I have not since given WU a dime, and I loved the place, now in the thrall of rwn board. ETA: although I’m still tempted to donate to the Elizabeth Schreiber.
Persia
@tjlabs: Apparently he’s carried water for her for years. that’s either some serious self-loathing or an eye on long-term profits. Maybe both.
Tramp the dirt down, sez I.
EDIT: THANK YOU for sharing that video too. Ded of cute.
MomSense
Condoms not coffins. AIDS won’t wait!
I can’t re read that opinion piece of hers. Just remembering it brings back all the angry feelings.
OzarkHillbilly
@bystander: it was inevitable that Wash U would end up there.
Sarah, Proud and Tall
@Persia:
I know right?
Jeff
The worms are going to have really bad indigestion once they are done.
Feathers
I read Donald Critchlow’s biography for a women’s study class. It was pretty bad. The class was on women’s biographies, and there wasn’t much in the way of conservative women’s biographies to choose from. I was older than the other students, and what fascinated me was how much Critchlow skipped over. He talked about her Bircher days, but did’t include the contents of what would have been in the Bircher newsletters she wrote. The class was fairly shocked when I gave a brief history of Bircherism, as well as the implications for her fight against the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and all of the various nuclear treaties, SALT I & II, and the rest. It was clear that Critchlow was constrained by his mission to write a book approving of Schlafly – the title was Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade – and the truth of what grassroots conservatism actually consists of. Yes, Phyllis Schafly was for unlimited nuclear testing.
In the overnight thread, Kay quoted Schlafly’s recent statement:
I had to laugh. It’s not that they’re brown, it’s that the have “no experience with limited government.” In that case we should be taking in ALL the Syrian refugees. They have more experience with limited government than any American could hope for.
OzarkHillbilly
So…. I see the doc at 10:10 thursday morning. sigh. told the gal on the phone if anything sooner opens up, please call me as I can’t use my arm for anything at all and I am taking v1cod1ns like candy (the first is true, the 2nd not- I only take them so I can sleep).
continues to suck to be me
hovercraft
@tjlabs:
I read somewhere that she never accepted or acknowledged that he is gay. Talk about Mommy Dearest.
Gin & Tonic
@Feathers: I’m not actually interested in looking this up, but I wonder precisely which libertarian paradise Schlafly’s forebears immigrated from.
hovercraft
@scav:
And we consider ourselves the biggest advocates for not voting for him. So we’re doing our part, it’s up to the rest of you to give us a hand.
schrodinger's cat
What a hateful bitch.
scav
@Feathers: I’m not sure any of the colonials present in 1776, not even in the founding fathers would have been allowed in under her stringent criteria of having experience with limited government.
hovercraft
@OzarkHillbilly:
Sorry to hear that, hang in there.
boatboy_srq
@Aardvark Cheeselog: THAT’S what I’ve been saving that Hennessy XO for…
Ruckus
@hovercraft:
If limited experiences are an indication, people are coming out of the woodwork to do just that. Sat at a table doing phone banking with 4 other people. One a republican and one a lady who hadn’t voted in she said decades. Not only voting for Clinton but working for her as well, in their own words, to stop him. We of course don’t have this entirely, but it seems many of us have your back. And more than might be imagined.
Barbara
There was a public health need for researchers to figure out what kinds of contact were and were not likely to transmit HIV infection, but Schlafly was a political opportunist who seized on AIDS to create another culture war issue in order to cram conservative ideology down everyone’s throat. She was not interested in protecting the uninfected so much as she was interested in stigmatizing and ostracizing the infected.
WaterGirl
@OzarkHillbilly: Oh, that does suck. You waited as patiently as possible for the holiday weekend to pass, and now you wait 3 more days. I’m so sorry.
rikyrah
How the Press is Making the Clinton Foundation into the New Benghazi
by Paul Glastris
September 2, 2016 2:08 PM
Over the last two weeks, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has taken a hit in the polls, much of it pretty clearly due to aggressive press investigations involving her relationship with the Clinton Foundation when she was Secretary of State. Even Hillary fans should see that these investigations are warranted. After all, Clinton is running for the most powerful office in the world. While she was Secretary of State, her husband was overseeing a $2 billion a year charity. That charity took in donations from foreign governments and individuals with international interests. These facts raise legitimate questions. Did donors to the Foundation get special access to the secretary and the department as a result of their donations? If they did get special access, did they receive any favors? Did Hillary or her staff do anything illegal, unethical, or contrary to U.S. interests or administration policy?
The good news is that as a result of these investigations we can now answer those questions pretty definitively: no, no, and no. The bad news is that the press doesn’t seem to want to take “no” for an answer, even if the answer is based on the evidence of its own reporting.
Consider the story in today’s New York Times by Eric Lichtblau based on a new batch of emails released by the conservative group Judicial Watch as part of its lawsuit. The emails show that Doug Band, then with an arm of the Clinton Foundation, asked Huma Abedin, a top aide to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to help him procure special diplomatic passports for himself and two other Clinton Foundation staffers. Band also asked for a private meeting between Secretary Clinton and Dow CEO Andrew Liveris, a Clinton Foundation donor. These emails, writes Lichtblau, raise “new questions about whether people tied to the Clinton Foundation received special access at the department.”
Gin & Tonic
Saw on the Twitter that Greta van Susteren is leaving Fox News. Effective *today* – Brit Hume is anchoring her timeslot tonight and through the election.
Sort of unprecedented, no? After 14 years leaving on essentially zero notice?
Dennis
Also, a rank hypocrite, a woman lawyer with a long career in political activism, who insisted women should stay at home to raise the children and support their husband’s careers. And she lived to 92, which would seem to indicate she didn’t stress much about it.
bluefish
@Wag: Precisely. At some point, these qualities collide. Sooner rather than later. Clever, cunning, crafty, opportunistic, cynical, filled to the brim with misguided religious fervor — and profoundly stupid. The lethal cocktail we see every day now on our screens in the form of DJT. Minus the religious fervor in Trump’s case. That’s been supplanted by a revolting form of self-adulation. These are folks without a core and too damn dumb to know it. They believe they’ve something to offer of transcendent significance and value — that what they’re relentlessly peddling serves only to aggrandize themselves and creates confusion, anger, & unhappiness seems not to enter their minds — or hearts. Because there is no real sense of others — it all coils back to their own self-interest and screwed up world view. Like I said, deeply, deeply stupid. Also, too, badly raised and poorly educated. These last two can be overcome.
hovercraft
Speaking of champions of women:
Donald has very charming supporters.
If the GOP keeps this chump and doesn’t disown him, that says so much about them.
Dennis
@Gin & Tonic: planning to join in on a lawsuit, maybe?
hovercraft
@Ruckus:
Excellent. I’m in NJ, but I will be phonebanking and may go so far as to venture into PA for some canvassing. Everyone GOTV.
bluefish
Precisely. At some point these qualities collide. Clever, cunning, opportunistic, cynical — and filled with misguided religious fervor. These are the qualities we see everyday now on our screens in the form of one DJT, though in his case the rel. ferv. has been replaced by pathological self-adulation. These are folks with no core who are too unintelligent to know it. The overwhelming urge to peddle their “world views” is confused with having anything of value to offer. The more they are rejected for having zilch, the angrier and more compulsive they become. That’s my take on stupid.
Chris
That fucking op-ed.
Please note that this is exactly the “law” that my friends and I want implemented in the economic sphere across the entire nation. And also in the sphere of gun ownership and use.
This op-ed rings a bell; of all things, it reminds me of the discourse towards Muslims today. “Yes, Muslims are the principal victims of jihadist violence, but because they’re also the principal promoters of it, death to all of them.”
Never heard of Phillis Schafly before yesterday. But now that I’ve read this op-ed, I’m very glad she’s dead.
hovercraft
@Gin & Tonic:
Lots of doings over at FOX today, Greta gets canned, Carlson gets 20 million, and Roger Ailes has hired the Gawker slayer attorney to begin his harassment of Gabe Sherman and New York Magazine. I’m sure they are better prepared than Gawker. Coincidentally this is the same lawyer handling the Melania Trump suit against a British tabloid that implied/accused her of being an escort. Fun times over there.
germy
The Copley News Service! Brings back memories.
germy
from the Pedia of Wiki
Chris
@Aardvark Cheeselog:
Damn, I need one of those.
I would also have used it for Andrew Breitbart (who is still dead). And Margaret Thatcher (who is still dead). And Ariel Sharon (who is still dead).
Chris
@Feathers:
Ha! I swear I hadn’t read that when I wrote the comment above. Yep… a very comprehensive piece of shit who kept up with the times, I see she was.
Feathers
@Gin & Tonic: I was curious, and I read the book long(ish) ago, so Wikipedia says Scotland will have to do.
More recollections from the book. She actually ran for Congress back in the 50s. The candidate choosing committee was actually considering her husband, but when they thought a female candidate would be better optics, they chose Phyliis. That was the start of her political career. How she built a female base for Bircherism/Goldwaterism – she lived in St. Louis. She would pack the kids off to school, get in the car, drive 2-3 hours to be the guest of honor at a ladies luncheon, and then drive back home again in time to have dinner on the table for her husband. (I think there was a housekeeper involved.) That impressed me, she did that several times a week for well over a decade. She also ran various newsletters out of her home. The anti-ERA fight was almost an afterthought, and came right at the end of the ratification process. I don’t remember what petty shit got her involved, but the result – no ERA – has really been tragic for the country.
Best reaction I saw on Twitter – I don’t rejoice at anyone’s death, but there some times I do breathe a sigh of relief.
gene108
What fascinates me about articles like Shafley’s and other articles from the 1980’s from right-wingers is how badly the right-wing has lost the culture wars.
Other than abortion rights, which they have viciously chipped away at, especially since 2010, they have lost the plot on gay rights, interracial marriage, single people having sex outside of marriage, etc. Edit: And the rap music and other types of music with explicit “dirty” words.
And despite their direst warnings, society has not crumbled.
Crime is low, teen pregnancy is low, etc.
Larkspur
@OzarkHillbilly: So sorry. Remember, offices get busy and the squeaky wheel, etc. Call them again this afternoon and tomorrow morning and ask them if anything has opened up.
Feathers
@gene108: But they haven’t stopped fighting. They also haven’t stopped being taken seriously. That was one of the things I took away from the Critchlow book. He obviously wanted to write a biography of the Reagan’s muse era Schlafly, but to do that he really did have to elide over a lot of her earlier work and beliefs. This was a serious book, written by a history professor for Princeton University Press, which meant that he couldn’t ignore her Bircherism and pro-nuke views, but boy did he try to make sure the reader wouldn’t quite catch what was going on. This book came out before Rick Perlstein’s Goldwater bio. The real problem is that I don’t think you can write a serious biography of a major conservative figure that isn’t critical of their worldview. Hold it up to the light, and there is always a flaw.
hovercraft
@gene108:
Well in their view it has, a black man is president, a woman may soon be as well. The gays are having consequence free sex, young women are also having sex and not suffering the appropriate consequences, pregnancy and the societal condemnation that comes with it. Whites are not reproducing fast enough to maintain their superior numbers. The cities are lawless bastions of black on black crime. Shall I go on? America is no longer the country they grew up in, where everyone was here to serve the white man, they used to be large and in charge, now look at them, second class citizens in their own country. SAD !!
CONGRATULATIONS!
An awful human being. I felt glee when reading about her death this morning, which, of course, is shameful. No one should glory in the death of a fellow human being. But she was deliberately, viciously awful to so many people, none of which had ever done her harm, and I’m glad she can’t hurt anyone else now.
Samuel
Schafly was in my law school class at Wash. U. in St. Louis and was pretty weird then. It was the late 70’s before all of this got normalized and everyone thought she was nuts. I had one class with her about legal systems in other countries and legal philosophies. When we talked about India she kept going on about child brides, which seemed a weird thing to focus on, especially for someone from downstate Illinois. She and the Constituional Law prof were touring the country on an anti-ERA campaign and they were so strange, no one could believe that they would be successful. Who knew? All the more reason to make sure Trump is crushed.
Bjacques
She lived long enough to see her entire philosophy repudiated, at least in US law. Time to repurpose an old ditty. (Intro NSFW)
NR
Trump is ahead by 2 in the latest CNN poll.
Hillary Clinton is probably going to go down as the worst presidential candidate at least since McGovern if not longer than that. She’s the only candidate who could possibly lose to someone as awful as Donald Trump.
Chris
@Feathers:
To be fair, that’s true of just about every major politician, but I’d argue it’s more damning on the right because the image they insist on maintaining of their politicians clash much more with the reality. Liberals today don’t generally contest FDR’s sins in re Japanese internment or LBJ’s sins in re the Vietnam War, or try to defend those as somehow good things. Conservatives will either try to erase their sins from history or deny that they’re sins at all – witness the entire 150-year-long whitewashing of the Confederate cause.
HeartlandLiberal
Thanks for publishing this honest and true response to Schlafly’s death. Betty Bowers, America’s Best Christian, tweeted earlier today that her mother had taught her never to speak anything but good of the dead. So, she tweeted that “Phyllis Schlafly is dead. Good”. Can’t say I disagree with her. Schlafly really was a sad, sick, evil woman, whose hatred led her to be instrumental in stopping the passage of the ERA, an amendment that says, quite simply, that women and men are equal before the law. Seriously. She opposed that.
HeartlandLiberal
Even better, Betty Bowers followed up with this on her Twitter account: “Phyllis Schlafly didn’t believe in Climate Change. I bet she does now.”
TriassicSands
The world is a better place today. Sadly, it came 92 years too late.
Cat48
@OzarkHillbilly:
I share your glee about Phyllis! She lived in Alton, Il, where I lived for 30 years. She had a column in our evening paper & she was always wrong. She eventually moved to Ladue, of course.
Rasputin's Evil Twin
@TriassicSands: Proof that the good die young.
Tom
@Feathers: “I will not attend his funeral, but I approve of it.” Mark Twain
Theodore Wirth
What a horrible person and evil enough to make a grand living as a horrible person. Sounds like some others that come to mind like Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity, Ailes, Rove, etc., etc. Schafly may have even been an inspiration to some or all of the aforementioned. Good riddance!