One Less Nut

An editorial in today's St. Louis Post-Dispatch on anti-feminist gadfly Phyllis Schlafly who died yesterday at 92, said that she was, among other things, a successful businesswoman.

But doesn't a successful businesswoman or businessman actually make money? Ha! Not Phyllis – she went to her grave proud of her oft-stated swank that she never had a paying job after she married – that she didn't need to – that the men in her life were willing to provide for her.

Which is great when you come from a perfect family with plenty of money (or at least as much as is needed to get by without worries) or even marry into such an arrangement. Or, as in Schlafly's case, both.

'Course, the fact is, not every family is perfect like Phyllis'. Some people – some WOMEN – have to WORK for a living. Not every woman is born with a silver spoon in her mouth, enabling her to run off on any crazed, half-cocked endeavor, political or otherwise, no matter how looney such endeavor appears to be. And the case of The Woman Who Said Housewives Should Stay in The House But Didn't Do So Herself was pretty looney. But it was really more than that – it was absolute hypocrisy.

And that was Phyllis Schlafly in a nut- (and I do mean "nut") shell – your classic far right, holier-than-thou hypocrite.

They hate gays until one springs up in the family.

They hate abortion until their 15-year-old daughter is raped.

They hate guns until a loved one is a victim of our too-loose gun laws.

Phyllis Schlafly most likely had plenty of hate in her, with most of it, obviously, reserved for women – that is, women besides herself.

Given that at the height of its potential power in the 1970s when the push for equal pay for both sexes could have taken root, it could be said today that Schlafly – who fought AGAINST this idea at the time – was instrumental in pushing the movement BACK four decades. Appropriate enough for the woman who thought that the best thing to happen to a woman during her lifetime was the invention of the clothes dryer; who once said, "by getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don't think you can call it rape;" and in a final act of insanity, jumped on the Trump bandwagon. Pretty pathetic. They'll bury her later this week, along with her antiquated ideas about women, work and American culture in general. In Phyllis Schlafly's world, Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly and the rest of ladies at Fox News would just have to take it.

A sad legacy left by a despicable human being.