At the risk of getting a ton of heat for saying this, Save Jerseyans, I have to admit that I was very disappointed with Phyllis Schlafly in recent years.
Like many in the modern GOP coalition, at some point over the past several years, the Eagle Forum’s founder devolved from peerless conservative lioness to just another angry culture warrior who wasn’t primarily driven by free market/constitutional principles so much as an unquenchable hatred for the Left and those deemed not sufficiently pure enough to stand with the Right.
More “rightwing” than conservative if we’re being honest.
How could this strong, independent woman who articulately dismantled the Equal Rights Amendment on logical constitutional grounds in the 1970s perform an about-face 40-years later and offer a full-throated primary endorsement of a man who supports extra-constitutional political citizenship tests and mocks women’s menstrual cycles?
Maybe it says more about the country’s (and party’s) devolution than her own? William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan wouldn’t recognize today’s conservative movement.
I chalked it up to the manifestation of a lifetime of activism’s cumulative frustrations. One Facebook friend from inside the Beltway saw it another way, lamenting how “[t]his poor woman was taken advantage of in her old age by a bunch of charlatans.”
She certainly paid for her choices — regardless of how informed those choices were — with an Eagle Forum coup attempt that tarnished the organization’s brand in her final years.
Life happens. All the same, she was also a pioneer for women in the political arena and an inspiration to many who questioned conventional thinking. She changed our politics. Everything you see today — from blogs to Super PACs — finds its source, for good or for ill, in the work performed by Buckley, Schlafly and other contemporaries long before the Internet existed.
Now that she’s gone, let’s remember Ms. Schlafly not for her recent missteps but the totality of a lifetime devoted to fierce public advocacy.
Anyone who loves America can respect that fighting spirit even if we didn’t always agree with its focus.
May she rest in peace.
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