Wash U

I have two sons who will be entering college in just about 479 days, a fact that has imposed a considerable burden on Sue, our most excellent letter carrier.  Six days a week she staggers to our door and shoves a forest acre's worth of college catalogues, brochures, letters and postcards into our letter slot.   

Over the last year, Sue has delivered more mailings from Washington University in St. Louis than mailings from any other institution.  They send more almost every week, despite the fact that as far as I know, neither of my kids have ever expressed any interest in the school.  This long ago ceased to be flattering; it soon struck us as desperate, and eventually as pathetic.

Apparently the school's frantic efforts to be noticed are not confined to the admissions office there.  They've now decided to give an honorary degree to a famous person.  Yeah, that'll get them on more high school students' radar!  So who did Wash U choose to bestow with that honor?  A woman who has said things like this:

“The atomic bomb is a marvelous gift that was given to our country by a wise God.”

“Sexual harassment on the job is not a problem for virtuous women, except in the rarest cases.”

“By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don’t think you can call it rape.”

“Sex education classes are like in-home sales parties for abortions”

“The snowflakes that grace us at Christmastime typify the artistic beauty that bestows joy on all ages but, like an acid, evolution corrodes this inborn appreciation of beauty and falsely trains children to view themselves as mere animals no more worthy than dogs or cats.”

"It is long overdue for parents to realize they have the right and duty to protect our children against the intolerant evolutionists.”

“ERA means abortion funding, means homosexual privileges, means whatever else.”

"We are starting a movement in the state legislatures...to forbid the installation of clinics that dispense contraceptives."

"It's very healthy for a young girl to be deterred from promiscuity by fear of contracting a painful, incurable disease, or cervical cancer, or sterility, or the likelihood of giving birth to a dead, blind, or brain-damage [sic] baby even ten years later when she may be happily married. "

The woman is Phyllis Schlafly.

That's a name I hadn't heard in a couple decades at least.  Perhaps Wash U figures that age has detoxified her more noxious actions and pronouncements--but I think not.  It's a disgrace for an institution of higher education to honor someone so resolutely anti-intellectual, so committed to perpetuating inequality, so hypocritical, and so downright wacky as Phyllis Schlafy.

Kathy G. over at Crooked Timber sums up some of the highlights of Schlafly's career:

Early on Schlafly was a member in good standing of the John Birch Society. You know them—they were an organization of redhunters so freakishly obsessed and paranoid that they famously believed President Eisenhower was a “conscious agent” of the international communist conspiracy. Schlafly first became well-known for her slim 1964 volume—a pamphlet, really—supporting the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater, A Choice Not An Echo. The book has been described as

a conspiracist theory in which the Republican Party was secretly controlled by elitist intellectuals dominated by members of the Bilderberger banking conference, whose policies were allegedly designed to usher in global communist conquest.

And yes, to be sure, in that book she didn’t explicitly identify those communist international bankers as Jews—but then again she didn’t have to, did she?

Later on, Schlafly’s conspiracy theories took more of a black helicopters, anti-UN, anti-”one-world government” flavor. In recent years, she has been identified as one of the leading proponents of conspiracy theories about the National American Union—the belief that “behind closed doors, the Bush administration has collaborated with the governments of Mexico and Canada to merge the three nations into one Socialist mega-state.”

Given her anti-intellectual conspiracy-mongering, it’s not surprising to learn that Schlafly rejects the theory of evolution and believes that creationism (or “intelligent design”) should be taught in schools. It must be said, though, that it is startling to read that she blames the Virginia Tech shootings on that school’s English department.

*  *  *

I can hardly believe that someone whose entire public career as a writer and speaker is littered with lies, smears, conspiracy theories, and shrill, ugly rhetoric would ever be rewarded with so high an honor as an honorary doctorate from a great university. But there are yet more reasons why every decent person should consider Phyllis Schlafly beyond the pale.

There is, for example, not just her style of argument, but the content of her political views. Which is very disturbing indeed.

Schlafly has always been an energetic proponent of the view that in America, nonwhites should not enjoy equal rights under the law. Here, for example, is what Wolfe has to say about the relationship between Schafly, the Goldwater-for-president boom, and the civil rights movement:

The origins of the Goldwater boom could be traced to a meeting between Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon in 1960 when, in return for Rockefeller’s support, Nixon agreed to endorse a civil rights plank calling for “aggressive action to remove the remaining vestiges of segregation or discrimination in all areas of national life.” This was too much for the right-wing activists from the South and Southwest, who were intent on taking over Abraham Lincoln’s party for their own bigoted ends. Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and conservatives such as Schlafly loved him for it. Conservatives maintained that their opposition to the Civil Rights Act was based on a preference for state’s rights over federal power, but no one, least of all their enthusiastic followers, was fooled. Conservatism was in large part a revolt by whites against the aspirations of blacks, and whatever success it enjoyed was a by-product of the backlash that it generated.

Her views on race remain unchanged, lo these many years later. Unsurprisingly, Schlafly (again quoting Wolfe here) “strongly” endorsed “Lee Atwater’s use of Willie Horton to scare voters away from Michael Dukakis.” She continues to be (Wolfe’s words) “anti-immigrant and hostile to minorities.” She has fairly recently, for example, described Mexican immigrants as “invaders” seeking to take control of America.

*  *  *

Schlafly has had a powerful, and entirely negative, influence on the political direction of this country, and on the tone of our political discourse. But there is no question that the thing she has been most famous for is being an antifeminist. Throughout her career, she has been given to such outrageous statements as “Sexual harassment on the job is not a problem for virtuous women, except in the rarest cases” and “By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don’t think you can call it rape.” But she is best known for almost single-handedly stopping the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).

Ah, yes.  I remember back in the day how Schafly claimed that passage of the ERA would lead to the abolition of gender-specific bathrooms--an utterly loopy pronouncement that still probably did more to galvanize opposition to the amendment than anything else.  I also remember her going around the country giving speeches to the effect that women should stay home and be homemakers.

I think it's good for universities to expose their students to liberal and conservative thought.  I abhor the PC conformity of many of our institutions of higher learning.  If Wash U wanted to honor a conservative, there are many people out there with whom I disagree about nearly everything but who are not kooks and bigots. 

Maybe this is all part and parcel off Wash U's aggressive direct mail campaign: both are designed to get the school noticed.  OK--I noticed.  Now stop recruiting my kids to come to an institution that honors no-nothingism, conspiracy theorists and hypocrites.

Comments

[Dallas Employment Lawyer]

Send your kids to Vanderbilt! I can remember reading "Why We Lost the ERA" by Jane J. Mansbridge in sociology. It's a much more critical take on Shafley. And an excellent school. And Nashville is better than St. Louis.

[queerunity]

schlafly is a nut

http://www.queersunited.blogspot.com

[James F. Trumm]

Actually, my kids are looking east toward New England or New York (with an outside shot at Berkeley), but I agree about Vanderbilt and Nashville.

And yeah, Schlafly is indeed a nut. Like a zombie, she's risen from two decades of deserved obscurity to walk across a stage in St. Louis. Maybe even nuttier are the folks at Wash U who chose to bestow this honor upon her.