re: #69 Shiplord Kirel

Rush Limbaugh pointed out today that Phyllis Schlafly had supported Nixon early in his administration but split with him over the ERA. Of all the evil this woman did, her almost single-handed defeat of the ERA might well be the worst.

Actually, there had been an earlier split: Schlafly first came to national prominence when she led a “revolt” against the civil rights plank of the GOP platform at the 1960 party convention. She reminded the delegates that the GOP had not received a majority of the “negro” vote since 1928, and they were alienating a (then) much larger southern segregationist vote by trying for it. The plank stayed but Nixon and the party did come around to Schlafly’s view in 1968. As such, Schlafly was a very early and crucial instigator of the southern strategy. Like anti-feminism, this remains a bedrock component of the Republican strategy to this day.

Huh. I only new her as a horrible person from the anti-ERA stuff in the 1970s. I didn’t realize she’d been horrible for a long time before that.