Posted on 09/21/2009 8:47:00 AM PDT by rhema
This past weekend I had the pleasure of being one of the presenters at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, where we honored Phyllis Schlafly for her lifetime of achievement. She is the person whom even liberal academics look to when they want to explain grassroots conservatism. Phyllis was hailed—rightly so—for having stopped the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).
Many of the battles that are being fought out now–from the defense of marriage and the fight against abortion in healthcare to the effort to protect women from being ordered into combat—would have been lost if Phyllis had not sounded her trumpet call against this grave threat to family life and liberty in America. Feminist icon and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wanted to ban separate prisons for men and women, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, and recruit the young for Person Scouts only. Imagine what Justice Ginsburg would have done with an ERA as a battering ram.
We were not engaging in some nostalgic trip down memory lane when we salute Phyllis Schlafly’s leadership; we are learning lessons in leadership. Phyllis had arrayed against her far more power than we are currently facing. The media back then was all liberal and all out for the ERA. The White House—not just the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter White House, but the Jerry and Betty Ford White House as well—was against her. So were the Democratic and Republican parties. Bi-partisan majorities in both houses of Congress not only gave the ERA a two-thirds vote, but also extended the deadline for ratification by a constitutionally dubious less-than-two-thirds vote when it appeared Phyllis’ STOP ERA efforts were beginning to gain traction.
She never gave in. She did her homework—just as Tea Party-goers are doing their homework today. She knew what the legal impact of the ERA would be. She explained why she was against the ERA in clear and strong terms. That’s what we need to do with Obamacare today. She got loud—I love the picture of this most ladylike woman belting out her message with a bullhorn. Today, they’re not going to simply ask us politely to pipe down; they’re going to try to shut us up. The latest news is that the unions are being recruited to shout down opponents of the healthcare takeover at future Town Hall meetings. Maybe ACORN will turn in their red T-shirts for SEIU vests. But the idea will be the same: Threaten, intimidate, silence, and rule.
We must have the courage now that Phyllis Schlafly showed in that ERA fight. But the best part is that she’s still in the fight. She fought for life and liberty then, and she’s in the fight for life and liberty now. And I’m proud to fight at her side.
Phyllis Schlafly was a conservative leader who stood out to me when I was young.
She did the talk show circuit, commentaries on CBS Radio alongside other liberal and conservative commentators and even did some CNN commentaries when that network first began in the early 80’s.
Phyllis was out there and she took them on, RINO’s and Democrats alike.
The fight against ERA was historic.
Of course the Left didn’t stop, they are working every day to end run what Phyllis stood in the way of.
The ERA was given up as a cause and new causes were discovered to advance the agenda of the Left.
The redifining of marriage is clearly the kind of thing ERA was laying the groundwork for. Now that cause is advanced by other means at state levels and in the courts.
She even helped Ronald Reagan keep on track for foreign policy...keeping globalists such as Kissinger out of the administration...as she reported here...
Link at: REMEMBERING REAGAN
Phyllis SchlaflyAppointed by President Reagan to serve as a member of the Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution
Ronald Reagan's three greatest accomplishments were winning the Cold War (without firing a shot, as Margaret Thatcher said), defining conservatism as the belief that big government is the problem not the solution, and convincing all of us that it's morning in America.
Reagan's campaign to win the Cold War began with his battle at the 1976 Republican National Convention in Kansas City, where he and Senator Jesse Helms waged a Platform battle demanding a "morality in foreign policy" plank that directly attacked the Kissinger-Ford foreign policies. It criticized détente with the Soviet Union, unilateral concessions on nuclear testing, the signing of "secret agreements" to give away the Panama Canal, and Ford's snub of Solzhenitsyn.
The 1976 Platform battle enabled an exciting new grassroots conservative movement to take shape. Reagan bought a half-hour of television time on March 31, 1976, raising what the media labeled "the Kissinger issue." He quoted Henry Kissinger as telling Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, "The day of the United States is past and today is the day of the Soviet Union. My job as Secretary of State is to negotiate the most acceptable second-best position available." Reagan correctly identified Kissinger's worldview as the policy of surrendering U.S. strategic superiority of the Soviet Union, missile by missile, bomber by bomber, submarine by submarine. Reagan and his followers rejected this as unacceptable.
Reagan narrowly lost the Republican nomination in 1976 to Gerald Ford, who then was defeated by Jimmy Carter. But the pro-American foreign policy which Reagan had articulated survived, and it motivated his followers to build their strength for the 1980 presidential nomination.
Of the many times I met with Ronald Reagan, I count as the most important my visit with him on March 28, 1980, in his Los Angeles office. I directly asked him, "You did promise, didn't you, that you would not reappoint Henry Kissinger or give him any role in making our policy toward the Soviet Union?" Reagan replied, "That's right; I did."
Reagan kept his word to me and to America, both in the backroom negotiations during the 1980 Convention and throughout his two terms in the White House. Reagan reversed the Kissinger policy of accepting second-place to the Soviet Union and adopted the goal of victory over Soviet Communism.
She still is, isn’t she?
As Ann Coulter pointed out in one of her books, Phyllis accomplished much of her work in the days before the net. It is all the more remarkable that she succeeded. She is a top notch lawyer and broke barriers entering law school as early as she did, when few women were going into the profession. Phyllis truly is a role model but she will never get the credit she deserves. Other so-called icons of the women’s movement are the ones who get the praise.
God bless her....and thank-you God for giving us Phyllis.
Heck, I was proud to wear my ERA button back then.
E-lect
R-eagan
A-gain
I heard Michael Reagan tell a story about his sister Maureen, who was an ERA proponent, wearing a button that said Elect Reagan Anyway.
Phyllis is a leader who bears no resemblence to the inside the beltway types of today.
She isn’t the kind of D.C. lobbyist money “conservative leader” who’s now cheering Willard M. Romney
Yes, she still is a leader.
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