PZ Myers ‏@pzmyers
Phyllis Schlafly is dead
[….]
7:23 PM – 5 Sep 2016

It’s so sad that Phyllis Schlafly didn’t get to live to see a woman inaugurated as President of the United States.

Apparently there are some right wingnuts in Missouri engaged in a dress rehearsal for the republican National Convention. There’s a struggle of some sort at the Eagle Forum over Donald Trump, or maybe not, or sort of.

Today, via Twitter:

Charles Jaco ‏@charlesjaco1
Said every third-world despot ever as soon as he could hear gunfire from the Presidential Palace.

St. Louis News ‏@TheSTLScoop
Ed Martin: `I am still president’ of Schlafly’s Eagle Forum [….]

5:31 PM – 12 Apr 2016

Pass the popcorn

A few weeks ago, I wrote that Phyllis Schlafly,  Missouri’s conservative grande dame, was arguing that the GOP had to stop all that unseemly outreach to the lesser, brown people and concentrate on building its white support. Recently, Sean Trende has attempted to do the demographic analyses that show that it’s possible that the GOP could retain political power until the 2040s by doing just that. Perhaps Trende’s right, but there are, nevertheless, some potential problems with his analyses. As Steve Benen notes:

How would the Republican Party increase its share of the white vote to 70%? I don’t know. In fact, the more I think about it, I’m not sure I want to know. But for Trende, that’s not really the point — if the GOP pulls that off, the demographic time bomb is put off until around 2040.

As a matter of statistics, I suppose it’s a reasonable enough argument, but there are some relevant troubles with the thesis.

For one thing, there’s the question of heightened polarization. The more the GOP takes deliberate steps to pander to white voters to boost white turnout — or as Kilgore put it, double down on being the “White Man’s Party” — the more it risks alienating everyone else, including moderate and liberal whites.

There’s also a generational issue — for Trende’s thesis to work in the coming years, white turnout would have to go up quite a bit, but younger whites tend to be more liberal and Democratic. In other words, the GOP would need more votes from the very folks who are, at the risk of sounding indelicate, dying off.

And don’t forget the white female vote, threatened by GOP embrace of evangelical social authoritarianism, the growing number of young Latinos born in the U.S. to parents already here and, consequently, able to vote, etc. and etc.

These and similar objections, however, haven’t stopped Schlafly from banging the “Whites Only” drum. Most of what she has to say is the usual conservative ho-hum to the effect that Latinos don’t have what it takes to understand Democracy and, hence, would never vote for Republicans. Of course, it might strike a perceptive individual that Schlafly has that particular contingency backwards. Most progressives, after all, are very familiar with the Bill of Rights and Constitutional democratic principles that Schlafly thinks too elevated for the Latino consciousness, and I think we can all agree that they’re none too apt to ever vote Republican.

As a matter of fact, an excellent and very clever letter to the editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch today suggested that the recent Missouri state legislative session indicates that our state legislators need to be tested on their knowledge of the Constitution before they’re allowed to take office. Given the writer’s main example of unconstitutional, time-wasting legislation – Brian “Maddog” Nieves effort to nullify federal gun laws – there could be no doubt that this writer has abandoned any illusions that conservatives revere or even understand the Constitution. Schlafly’s really got it wrong this time.

Schlafly is even more confused about the intersection of sexuality, conservatism and liberalism – at least as far it relates to childbearing:

I don’t [think?] they have Republican inclinations at all, […] They’re running an illegitimacy rate that’s just about the same as blacks are.

Is Schlafly implying that Democrats are all B*****ds? Or only African-American Democrats? Or does she think all Democrats are African-American? No matter which option you choose, I here to tell you Schlafly’s mighty confused and I’m mighty offended (and my African-American cohorts ought to take this very deeply to heart so that they don’t forget it if they’re ever inclined to endorse a Republican for public office).

No matter what she’s implying about me and mine, you and yours, what’s clear as day is that Schlafly is claiming the GOP for lily white, octogenarian racists, folks, come to think of it, just like Phyllis Schlafly. Fine and good. As Jordan Fabian of ABC News puts it:

The GOP has lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections exactly by pursuing this type of strategy.

More power to ’em, I say.  

Previously:

The republican establishment and Todd Akin (r) (August 31, 2012)

The casual violence of GOP rhetoric, or what’s new in Todd Akin’s lalaland (August 31, 2012)

There’s some sort of republican commandment writ in stone which they can’t seem to remember.

Saturday, September 01, 2012

Phyllis Schlafly Calls on Karl Rove to Resign

Karl Rove has made himself toxic to Republicans by his incredibly offensive and dangerous statement suggesting the murder of Congressman Todd Akin of Missouri. Any candidate or network who hires Rove will now be tarnished with this most malicious remark ever made in Republican politics….

Senator Claire McCaskill (D) must be living right. Pass the popcorn.

Too good (as in ha,ha) to ignore: via ThinkProgress, Phyllis Schlafly’s latest rant – an anti-immigrant diatribe that aims to push all the paranoid zenophobe’s buttons. Seems Ms. Schlafly got all worked up by a report in the New York Times to the effect that “white” births are outnumbered by children born to often immigrant minorities. Here’s a sample of the high-level entertainment, Schlafly offers:

The NY Times liberals seek to destroy the American family of the 1950s, as symbolized by Ozzie and Harriet. The TV characters were happy, self-sufficient, autonomous, law-abiding, honorable, patriotic, hard-working, and otherwise embodied qualities that made America great. In other words, the show promoted values that NY Times liberals despise.

Instead, the USA is being transformed by immigrants who do not share those values, and who have high rates of illiteracy, illegitimacy, and gang crime, and they will vote Democrat when the Democrats promise them more food stamps.

I don’t think that Schlafly wants to imply that the New York Times is directly responsible for those minority births, just that the reporter doesn’t see changing demographics as a catastrophe.

Schlafly’s a bit behind the times, though, in her evocation of the TV show Ozzie and Harriet as the zenith of American culture. As I remember it was an especially lame bit of fluff that was mostly held in affectionate contempt by my generation in the late sixties and seventies. I think that we long ago pretty much rejected the sterile picture of American “family values” projected by the Nelson family – narrow-minded, unthinking conformism – while affirming that the virtues Schlafly attributes to the ineffectual Ozzie are not restricted to members of any particular ethnic group.

Of course, Schlafly’s panic-mongering is nothing new. Consider Wikipedia’s description of anti-Irish sentiment in the 19th century:

Anti-Irish racism in Victorian Britain and 19th century United States included the stereotyping of the Irish as alcoholics, and implications that they monopolised certain (usually low-paying) job markets.[…] They were often called “white Negroes.” Throughout Britain and the U.S., newspaper illustrations and hand drawings depicted a prehistoric “ape-like image” of Irish faces to bolster evolutionary racist claims that the Irish people were an “inferior race” as compared to Anglo-Saxons.

Now the Irish are so assimilated that, if they wish, they can fully participate in the same zenophobia that afflicts Schlafly. You will find similar stories about almost every group of immigrants into the U.S.  At the beginning of the 20th century, for example, nativists were similarly worked up about Italian and Eastern European immigrants and the cultural changes they were imagined to bring with them.

Schlafly’s mean-minded protests are simply more evidence that the process is now repeating itself. But one can’t help thinking that it would be an excellent sign that humans are actually capable of intellectual progress over time if we could manage change this time without the usual displays of nastiness emanating from the dominant tribe as it contemplates losing its privileged status.

*“Often immigrant” was added to the last sentence of the 1st paragraph.

Cute kid in the video, right? Based on what Phyllis Schlafly has to say about feminism and marriage, she might just be her Schlafly’s worst nightmare – a happy little girl who knows that she has a wide open future and that she needn’t be defined by her marital status.

Hotflash recentlly posted several videos showing Schlafly, the Queen Mum of Missouri conservatism, in action (here, here and here). They present a frail-seeming, fact-challenged woman, absurdly flailing at the the Affordable Care Act. A Huffington Post interview on the topic of Schlafly’s new book, The Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know – And Men Can’t Say, cowritten with Suzanne Venker, serves to reinforce one’s sense that this woman is seriously out of touch with reality.

In the interview, Schlafly describes a right wing fantasyland where flippant feminists set about destroying the American Way of Life just because they “love divorce”:

… They wanted to be independent of men and liberated from the duties of marriage and motherhood. So, their first legislative goal was the adoption of easy-to-get divorce

She and her co-author, like many social conservatives, view divorce as something that superficial women, seduced by empty feminist platitudes, embrace simply because they can. Consequently, Schlafly and her ilk have devoted themselves to making sure that they can’t. Here in Missouri, for example, Schlafly think-alike, Cynthia Davis, introduced legislation to eliminate no-fault divorce, and in her role as Chair of the House Interim Committee on Poverty issued a trumped-up report that reduced a complex, many-faceted issue to the scourge of unmarried motherhood. There seems to be no social pathology that these folks can’t explain by reference to women’s sexual behavior and marital status.

Social conservatives who want to meddle in people’s marriage choices often claim that they do so because prohibiting divorce is in the best interest of children. Proponents of this view usually trot out various studies that purport to demonstrate the dire future outcomes for children of divorce and Schlafly doesn’t disappoint, citing Judith Wallerstein’s highly publicized, but questionable research.

It is interesting and typical of the conservative modus operandi that Schlafly does not point out any of the many criticisms of Wallerstein’s methodology and conclusions, nor the many studies that reach different conclusions. If she were a fair disputant, she would certainly also discuss findings that show that children who remain in intact, high-conflict families have an equal or even higher rate of negative outcomes when compared to children from divorced families. As an analysis of such studies from the Cato Institute’s Cato Unbound series concludes, “the evidence that preventing divorce would benefit children is weak at best.”

Based on the interview, I’m betting that Shclafly’s book offers little more  than the latest iteration of the perennial rightwing Kinder, Küche und Kirche propaganda – bolstered by the usual misrepresentation and twisted logic that we expect from the less thoughtful social conservatives. Schlafly can, on one hand, lambast the family court system, which often oversees custody disputes, as an example of government overreach, “an arm of government that exercises virtually unlimited power to dictate the private lives and income of millions of Americans.” On the other hand, she openly asserts the right of government to legislate morality when it comes to limiting divorce. The question for us, of course, is do we want the Schlaflys of the world to be our moral arbiters? Do we want our children, children like the little girl above, bound by her view of female destiny?

Note:  Steve Benen takes on possible GOP presidential contender Mike Huckabee on the marriage issue. The money quote:

… if right-wing activists have thrown a months-long tantrum over Michelle Obama encouraging kids to eat healthier foods, how will these same activists perceive a presidential candidate who wants to press parents to get married, whether they want to or not?

I’m guessing that if they notice at all, they’ll praise him to the skies.

It doesn’t mean anyone to the left of Attila the Hun and Tea Partiers. Socialism, according to Wikipedia, advocates “public or common ownership and cooperative management of the means of production and allocation of resources.” The public isn’t going to own hospitals or medical practices. It’s going to regulate them. Not that I would mind a little more socialism in this country. We’ve always had it:

Public libraries. Check.

Fire departments. Check.

Police departments. Check.

Public roads. Check.

Public schools. Check.

Hell, until Dubya farmed it out to private contractors, the military was socialistic.

But (yawn) Phyllis Schlafly expects us to scream in horror at that vile socialist, Barack Hussein Obama.

…………………..

Coverage of the Ed Martin event has been thorough on the Missouri progressive blogosphere. St. Louis Activist Hub, in fact, has three postings:

• I Don’t Care What You Say, It Was A Great Night For Health Reform
• Ed Martin Forgets His Supporters, Claims People “Know How To Be Civil”
• Ed Martin, Bill Hennessey Hide in the Back of Their Own Forum: Schlafly Bolts!

FiredUp! has one: This Is What a Better Informed and Better Organized Movement Looks Like.

Women’s Voices Raised for Social Justice has a posting on its Facebook Page: Women’s Voices Members speak out at Health Care Forum

All that is in addition to my first piece, In which I explain who showed up for Ed Martin’s dance; my two videos–so far–of Schlafly: MS. Schlafly takes on “Obamacare” and But, but … I thought Republicans liked police states.; and a video of Harvey Ferdman, Harvey Ferdman takes the health care reform conversation to common ground.

One of the fascinating paradoxes of the wingoverse is that the law and order, grant no quarter crowd shifts so seamlessly into victimhood when it suits them. “Woe is me. Woe is me,” cries Henny Penny, alias Chicken Little, otherwise known as Phyllis Schlafly.

Coverage of the Ed Martin event has been thorough on the Missouri progressive blogosphere. St. Louis Activist Hub, in fact, has three postings:

• I Don’t Care What You Say, It Was A Great Night For Health Reform
• Ed Martin Forgets His Supporters, Claims People “Know How To Be Civil”
• Ed Martin, Bill Hennessey Hide in the Back of Their Own Forum: Schlafly Bolts!

FiredUp! has one: This Is What a Better Informed and Better Organized Movement Looks Like.

Women’s Voices Raised for Social Justice has a posting on its Facebook Page: Women’s Voices Members speak out at Health Care Forum

All that is in addition to my first piece, In which I explain who showed up for Ed Martin’s dance. And then there’s my first video of Schlafly: MS. Schlafly take on “Obamacare”.

George Lakoff, in “What Conservatives Really Want”, lays out the right wing worldview more precisely than anyone I’ve read. You should read it.

But at least, before you watch the video below of Phyllis Schlafly at Ed Martin’s “Obamacare hearing”, you should have an inkling why she so opposes taking the sensible, compassionate course of regulating insurance companies and offering health care to those who can’t get it:

Conservatives believe in individual responsibility alone, not social responsibility. They don’t think government should help its citizens. That is, they don’t think citizens should help each other. The part of government they want to cut is not the military (we have 174 bases around the world), not government subsidies to corporations, not the aspect of government that fits their worldview. They want to cut the part that helps people. Why? Because that violates individual responsibility.

But where does that view of individual responsibility alone come from?

The way to understand the conservative moral system is to consider a strict father family. The father is The Decider, the ultimate moral authority in the family. His authority must not be challenged. His job is to protect the family, to support the family (by winning competitions in the marketplace), and to teach his kids right from wrong by disciplining them physically when they do wrong. The use of force is necessary and required. Only then will children develop the internal discipline to become moral beings. And only with such discipline will they be able to prosper. And what of people who are not prosperous? They don’t have discipline, and without discipline they cannot be moral, so they deserve their poverty. The good people are hence the prosperous people. Helping others takes away their discipline, and hence makes them both unable to prosper on their own and function morally.

UPDATE: Coverage of the Ed Martin event has been thorough on the Missouri progressive blogosphere. St. Louis Activist Hub, in fact, has three postings:

• I Don’t Care What You Say, It Was A Great Night For Health Reform
• Ed Martin Forgets His Supporters, Claims People “Know How To Be Civil”
• Ed Martin, Bill Hennessey Hide in the Back of Their Own Forum: Schlafly Bolts!

FiredUp! has one: This Is What a Better Informed and Better Organized Movement Looks Like.

Women’s Voices Raised for Social Justice has a posting on its Facebook Page: Women’s Voices Members speak out at Health Care Forum

All that is in addition to my first piece, In which I explain who showed up for Ed Martin’s dance. And then there’s the piece I’m about to post: “But, but … I thought Republicans like police states.” Coming soon.

Wednesday evening at Drury Plaza in downtown St. Louis, Ed Martin gave a party aimed at drawing mainstream media. But the media stood him up–as did many of his own people. We didn’t stand him up though. At least seventy health care reform advocates attended his “Obamacare” hearing, outnumbering his own crowd. ACA proponents listened stone faced to Peter Kinder’s disembodied voice from Jeff City describing his heroic lawsuit; to Phyllis Schlafly’s tirade about what a vile socialist Obama is; and to Bill Hennessey, insisting that “Obamacare” is unconstitutional–though why, exactly, he didn’t explain. More in later postings about Schlafly and Hennessey.

As soon as the Q & A opened, Rea Kleeman was on her feet challenging Ms. Phyllis’s idea that health insurance accounts would be a better solution than the Affordable Care Act. Kleeman, who is an M.D., pointed out that such accounts don’t work because they require a thousand dollars to open one and because many people are too parsimonious to get the preventive care they need, thus opening themselves up to more serious expenses later. Unable to respond to Kleeman’s specific criticism, Schlafly repeated her canned speech and then blamed the fact that the accounts are ineffectual on Teddy Kennedy. Rea was just the opening salvo, though. Next came a soft spoken woman named Alice Sgroi, who gently blasted Mr. Hennessey out of the water and brought the house down.

By that point, the Ed folk had to know they were in for an earful. If they didn’t, the next speaker cinched it. A gentleman pointed out the hypocrisy of creating a Medicare Part D program where the government doesn’t negotiate for low prices, thus handing billions over to drug companies and costing people like him money. He laid out the excuses that Republicans have used to defend that smelly setup and, pointing at the panelists, wondered aloud “Where were you then?”

That brought us to break time. After a ten minute break, audience members were to be given two minutes mic time to express their concerns about health care reform. My understanding of a “hearing” is that the panelists speak, then listen to other testimony and respond. That didn’t happen. Schlafly evaporated; Hennessey and Martin stood in the back of the room for ten or fifteen minutes, often chit chatting; then Hennessey slipped out. After that, Martin murmured asides to the other suits in the back. Okay, so it wasn’t a hearing.

But Martin’s people, especially Bob, who was in charge of the mic, get credit where it’s due. They did let the left wingers speak. Frankly, I was shocked, because it is uncharacteristic of right wing politicians, in my experience. Left wingers let it rip. I attended those McCaskill town halls in the summer of 2009 where she was subjected to heckling and screaming from angry mobs. In Jefferson County, despite the coarse uproar from those yahoos, Claire put all the questions from the audience into a fishbowl and put two right wingers in charge of picking questions out of the bowl.

Contariwise, the only town hall Todd Akin ever was foolish enough to announce so that I could attend it, his media person tried valiantly to talk me out of coming. But I went, and what I filmed that day was totally scripted. Akin and Luetkemeyer took only the “questions” that fitted their agenda. When one gentlemen in the audience, tired of having no chance to speak, challenged a baldfaced lie, that man was escorted from the room.

So, Ed and Bob. You took me off guard. You said both sides could speak and … you actually allowed it. Bob handled the mic with fairness and good humor. The hard part for me, then, is picking and choosing who, of the many that spoke, I’ll include here. More left wingers spoke since there were more of them in the audience. I’m going to offer you a selection. Choose the ones that pique your interest, but I especially recommend the one about death panels–and be sure you see at least the first five seconds of “Generally confused”.

Oh, and you might want to check out the last video, where Martin reveals that he doesn’t understand the term “socialized medicine”.

A Martin supporter contends that death panels are rampant in countries with socialistic medicine.

LaDonna Appelbaum describes how health insurance companies made it virtually impossible for her to get health coverage for pregnancies.

A Martin supporter, after scornfully dismissing “these people”, seems confused about what she’s trying to prove–not to mention being hardhearted.

Judith Parker describes the worry her family endures over the possibility that her four year old granddaughter, who has cancer, would–were it not for health care reform–meet her lifetime caps very soon. The clip begins with a previous speaker talking about what “insurance” means and includes Parker’s response to that.

Fritzi Lainoff praises Medicare and, by extension, the idea of involving the government in our health care. A right winger objects to something Lainoff said and an interesting compromise ensues.

This young man sees the big picture.

This woman is angry that illegal immigrants get care that she has to pay for.

Bunnie Gronborg refutes the right wing canard that we’re getting socialized medicine. And she explains the billions that ACA will save the government.

Ed Martin disagrees with Gronborg. She tried to explain what “socialized medicine” means. Honest to god, he doesn’t seem to get the concept. Furthermore, he continues disputing the Congressional Budget Office’s prediction that ACA will save the government $143 billion over ten years.

I’m sure that we did little if anything to shift attitudes among the Tea Partiers at that event. But we lefties are delighted that we went. We were exhilarated by the show of strength and unity we mustered, by seeing how many well informed, well spoken people trekked to the Drury to defend the idea that health care corporations must no longer be allowed to hold us and this economy hostage. The worries about death panels from the other side were so small minded they were, really, pitiful. I’d be embarrassed if my confreres couldn’t do any better
than that.