Melinda Pillsbury-Foster
Friday, September 14, 2007, 4 pm PST
This Week's Show
Dr. MacLeod will be sharing with us her lifetime experiences as an advocate for the rights of women. The doctor was one of the first women who break through the glass ceiling and occupy a position of responsibility and power in corporate America. Her Ph D. is from Columbia University in New York and she worked her way up into corporate American through sheer grit and determination.
Her life is filled with amazing events and insights she will be sharing with us – long with the truth about what feminism means now and what the loss of ratification of the ERA has done to women. Dr. MacLeod has strong opinions about Phyllis Schlafly, the subject of my ongoing series on mouths hired by the NeoCons.
Phyllis Schlafly - Paid Operative for Fascism.
Phyllis Schlafly was well paid work for her work over the last 40 years. Her most significant accomplishment to be recorded in history will be stopping the ratification of the ERA in 1982.
Those are the facts, but not all the facts.
Her career was founded on, “A Choice, Not an Echo.” The book, well written and researched, itself turned out to be the persuader that focused attention on Schlafly's potential to feed a disinformation campaign that has gone on for decades.
BigOil found Phyllis hanging around the John Birch Society in the mid 60s. Schlafly was ambitious, looking at a cultural reality that denied to women the opportunities available to men in professions. The Glass Ceiling was still intact. Someone, doubtless made her a lucrative offer, perhaps even William F. Buckley, Jr. They needed a mouth to inject disinformation, persuading women they wanted to stay second class citizens.” Phyllis grabbed the job with both hands.
Her other alternatives were bleak. Ads for jobs in the paper were still listed in two categories, “MEN,” and “WOMEN.” Intelligent women who, like Schlafly, had advanced degrees, were routinely offered jobs as typists.
It was understandable; her background was not strong on any familial work in social justice; her family had never contributed to any of the movements that created the wealth of America in social consciousness.
Intelligent, driven, and entirely focused on doing the job for which she had been hired, Phyllis blossomed.
The biography written by Donald T. Critchlow, titled, “Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism,” was reviewed favorably by the Horowitz organ, Front Lines Magazine, October 12, 2005. That interview by Critchlow holds some interesting insights into Schlafly and events along with crediting Schlafly with phenomenal success in subverting the agenda for women's rights.
“Critchlow: It is certain that ERA would have been ratified. It defeating ERA, Schlafly tapped into a new constituency that GOP conservative strategists realized could revive the party: Christian evangelicals. This was a constituency waiting to be mobilized. Traditional minded Christians, as well as Jews, felt that they were under attack by the secular left. Since the banning of prayer in public schools in 1962, evangelical Christians had been simmering. Then in the late 1960s came further assaults on tradition and custom through the liberalization of abortion on the state level, feminism, sex education, and the spread of pornography. Schlafly mobilized evangelical Christian women into the STOP ERA campaign, and in doing so, helped revive the conservative movement and the GOP, shifting it to the Right. She showed that social issues was the key to unleash a conservative revolution that began in the midterm elections of 1978 and continued through the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.”
Critchlow is incorrect on many of his points while correctly crediting Schlafly with stopping the ERA. Other forces had been in play for some time. Schlafly was hired for one part of a larger job.
BigOil had gone after the Conservative Movement using William F. Buckley, Jr., Ronald Reagan, and employing the wiles of Bush Senior and his paid political operative, Karl Rove. They had subsidized the work of Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson in remaking the demographics of the GOP. Hiring Phyllis was a natural continuation of the same strategy. The first goal was extinguishing the real agenda of Conservatism as enunciated by Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater while continuing to shake the boogie man of Communism.
It worked. But looking back we can see that it was always a ruse.
The analysis of United Republicans of California, the group who had gotten Reagan the governorship of California in 1968, showed clearly that Ronald Reagan was never a Conservative. His administration had laid the groundwork for a shift to centralized control that was unprecedented in California history. Changes included state control of education, promotion of regional government, institution of sex eduction in schools, guidelines for redress of racial imbalance in schools, a sharp decrease in personal property rights, Income Tax Withholding, a move towards gun control, and other acts that caused the group to pass a resolution at their 1975 Convention in Santa Maria that ended with “That UROC oppose Ronald Reagan as candidate for President or Vice President, and urge Americans Nationwide to carefully scrutinize his record.”
An educated woman who had known Barry Goldwater and was well informed, Phyllis Schlafly would have had to be well aware of the disconnect between two philosophies that were diametrically opposed. Schlafly consistently ignored the ideas of Conservatism, selling the repackaged ideas of the newly rising wave of Evangelicals from Southern denominations then being urged to become political and active in the Republican Party. This wave of membership was very different than the activists who had supported Goldwater.
The Republican Party shifted not to the Right, the traditional direction of individual rights, small government, and low taxes, but to burgeoning Federalism that used government as the accepted means for coercing personal behavior. Phyllis helped create that shift; she profited and gloried in her success.
When an intelligent, articulate woman undertakes a clear agenda that in no way conforms to her stated goals it is well to take the irrefutable actions as leading straight to the truth of the matter.
Schlafly herself came from a home where her mother, Odile Dodge, the daughter of the moderately successful attorney, worked as a librarian and a school teacher to support her own family and that of her parents. Schlafly herself was forced, due to the family's financial straits, to begin working early to put herself through college.
Why would Schlafly work to deny to other women the opportunities she took for herself?
The obvious is that this strategy made possible a prominence and prosperity that otherwise would have been impossible. Schlafly was motived by a fierce desire for money and social prominence that also propelled her into the Daughter's of the American Revolution.
Opposing the Equal Rights Amendment was a job, nothing more. The arguments she carefully honed each shared that they were posed in heavily charged emotional terms, threatening dire changes in the culture. In each case she made sure that the objective facts were not available to legislators actually making the decision to vote for or against the ERA. That has remained her strategy ever since.
It is true that Phyllis Schlafly was personally responsible for the derailing of the ERA; what was missed was the fact that the ERA was needed to make the torturous process of trying to simulate equality through the intrusion of government at all levels unnecessary.
In vilifying the women she dismissed as 'feminists' Schlafly ignored for her own benefit the generations of women who had endured a reality that refused them the rights that preexist all government, as promised in America's Mission Statement, the Declaration of Independence.
Schlafly understood what she was doing and for whom she worked. We need to redress those actions today and ratify the ERA.
Catch the interview with Dr. Jennifer MacLeod today on the Spiritual Politician at BBSRadio.com
What the Show is about and being a Spiritual Politician
Bringing government into alignment with the Lessons of Jesus:
The focus of our show is how to bring government into alignment with truth of our spiritual nature. So America started with the idea we are all, inherently free. We are free to choose, free to live, to breath, and to live our lives as we see fit. Government does not own us; government is just a contractor, providing service.
That framework is in alignment with the spiritual truth that each of us connects to God directly, needing no agency as an intermediary. To be free is to be free in the spirit and so in the flesh that temporarily holds the spirit.
When Thomas Jefferson said we were all possessed of inherent rights, existing before government he was extending a spiritual truth into a civic form. It is that Mission Statement from the Declaration of Independence we need to keep in mind.
Because we are free and reject, as did Christ, the use of deceit, manipulation or violence we need to be conscious about our relationships with others and find ways to grow into the sense of connection and community that makes us One in Him.
This is especially true for Christians but it is true for everyone else as well.
Nearly every major spiritual viewpoint enunciates the idea that we are connected to each other and should be good to each other. Christians just have an even more exacting mission. Christians are to love every one, treating them as they would Jesus.
Jesus was very clear about how we were to treat others. He did not say that it was alright to be abusive, deceitful, and violent if we used government as our tool and agent. There was no exception, He wanted all of our hearts, minds and souls. Christ did not lay out any plan of government, but left it to the conscience of the individual, the same way He connects to each of us.
We are Americans but we are also members of a human family that connects us to something truly wonderful and immense.
So our job here at the Spiritual Politician is to look at Government as a human tool we use every day. We need to consider if government is working in a way that speaks that common understanding about our connections to each other and, if it is not, we need to change it.
Americans have had many successes over the last 231 years since our founding and, learning from both mistakes and successes we can consider that question. So here at the Spiritual Politician we look at the truth behind of rhetoric.
Given what is going on today in Government what we may decide to do it reboot the whole system.
To provide the examples of what has gone right and what has gone very wrong we here at the Spiritual Politician have put together several different kinds of segments you will hear on our show from time to time.
Founder and president of the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation
Books by Melinda: Links to Melinda's sites:
How the NeoCons Stole Freedom
Shards of Verse Melinda's Poetry
Greed: The NeoConning of America
