Conservative crusader Phyllis Schlafly: Grassroots can take back the Republican Party

The woman who rocketed to national fame in the culture wars of the 1970s might be disillusioned with Republican leadership at its elite levels, but is keeping the faith with the grassroots activists she’s built a career on.

And at 90 years old, she doesn’t care who knows it.

Phyllis Schlafly, founder of the pro-family organization Eagle Forum and a staunch opponent of the homosexual marriage movement, told a liberal radio interviewer at the weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference that conservative causes suffer setbacks, but can fight to regain lost ground – and win.

“The gays have their argument about inevitability, I don’t think so,” Schlafly told interviewer Michelangelo Signorile of Sirius XM Progress, according to a column Signorile wrote for the Huffington Post.

“I’m extremely disappointed that the Republican Party, the conservative movement, even the Democratic Party and the churches, have been saying, ‘Well soon the court will decide, and that will be it,’” she said.

“Well, a lot of people thought that about Roe v. Wade, and we’ve seen the whole abortion movement turned around in the last 10 years.”

Schlafly’s point is the kind of thing that should keep progressives up at night. As much as the gay marriage movement and its cheerleaders in the liberal media would prefer not to think about it, its victories have been in courts of law – not in the courts of public opinion.

And the 40 years of fighting since Roe v. Wade — and the pro-life successes at the ballot box — have proven that in a democracy that’s the only court that really matters.

As the Proposition 8 fight in California proved, the conservative cause is the cause of the majority of Americans. Even in 2008, the year Barack Obama won the presidency, the most liberal state in the country passed a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

It was only after former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, and the state’s Democrat attorney general – the soon-to-be Gov. Jerry Brown — refused to defend a constitutional amendment passed by his state’s own voters that the Supreme Court ruled against it the basis that the groups that worked to pass Proposition 8 had no legal right to defend Proposition 8.

In other words, the gay marriage gang won in a forfeit.

And at the age of 90, after a lifetime of activism, Schlafly wants to make sure the Republican Party doesn’t forfeit anything.

“I do believe the grass roots can take back the Republican Party,” she said. “These kingmakers… they’re the people who really want us to be bipartisan and get along with everybody. But that’s not the American way. Americans believe in the adversarial concept.”

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Joe Saunders

Joe Saunders, a 25-year newspaper veteran, is a staff writer and editor for BizPac Review who lives in Tallahassee and covers capital and Florida politics. Email Joe at [email protected].

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