NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
When Washington University in St. Louis announced its intention to grant an honorary degree to alumna Phyllis Schlafly, students and faculty alike went wild. But not in the good way.
Fourteen law professors wrote to the administration condemning her “anti-intellectualism,” while students staged protests on campus. Then the press joined in, with magazines such as The Nation condemning the university for honoring someone with Schlafly’s controversially conservative views.
When the day of the ceremony arrived—May 16, 2008—it only got worse. As Schlafly stood up to accept the honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree, one-third of the faculty and student body stood as well, turning their backs on her in silent protest. A sizable portion of the parents and friends in the 14,000–person crowd did the same.
In her 50-plus years of political activism, however, Schlafly had encountered worse.
Born into a prominent Catholic family in St. Louis, Missouri, Schlafly earned her B.A. and J.D. from Washington University and an M.A. in government from Radcliffe. Her involvement in politics began in the late 1940s, not long after her marriage. Not until the early 1970s, however, when Schlafly successfully led the crusade to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment (arguing that it would “dismantle social security benefits for dependents and open women to the draft”), did she become a walking political lightning rod.
Schlafly’s strongly conservative views on the most controversial cultural and political issues of the day—feminism, abortion, same-sex marriage, arms control, and communism—made the mother of six no small number of enemies and friends around the country. Likewise, her effective issue-oriented political organizing through Eagle Forum (the group she founded in 1972) made her a force on Capitol Hill with whom few politicians, Democrats or Republicans, enjoyed reckoning.
For those reasons and more, Schlafly didn’t bat an eyelash at the angry protestors on that day in May 2008. She just smiled politely and returned to her seat, her honorary degree for a lifetime of debate-changing political activism in hand.