The Schafly Impulse

Recall the end of "Pan's Labyrinth." The villainous stepfather, Captain Vidal, is perfectly willing to face death in a calm military manner until he is told that he will be persona-non-grata to his infant son. The desire for a male heir had been the only independent, internally conceived desire the loyal fascist had throughout the film. He is indifferent when his wife dies in the birthing of it, and he is perfectly willing to murder his stepdaughter to make sure the boy doesn't leave him. Vidal is a man who 'obeys simply to obey' while in turn violently enforcing obedience from those deemed subordinate to himself.

I once read a National Geographic article from the sixties in which the writer reported a Barcelona man who crossed himself at the sight of a digital watch. There are many who will accept oppression so long as there is someone beneath them that they can oppress themselves. More importantly we are inclined to accept oppression in return for the promise that society will not change. A society that doesn't change is one where new thoughts do not exist. A father can be assured that his son will inherit his own station, occupation, thoughts, and personality. Accept slavery and live forever.

And indeed it seems that Phyllis Schlafly, eighty-three and still zestfully battling The Other, will do just that. Madam Schlafly is a profoundly strange bird, an indisputable alpha-female who claims that there is no such thing as marital rape, who calls herself a homemaker by profession in spite of making a great deal of bread traveling the country to denounce the dark conspiracies of liberals.

One who reads the drivel of either the elder Schlafly or her dingbat Conservapedia founder son Andrew will clearly discover a morbid obsession with public education,
http://www.eagleforum.org/psr/2009/jan09/psrjan09.html a passionate belief that schools are being used by all of the right's old boogeymen as social engineering factories. One is quickly reminded of the battle cry of fellow lunatic Gary Bauer "We are engaged in a social, political, and cultural war. There's a lot of talk in America about pluralism. But the bottom line is somebody's values will prevail. And the winner gets the right to teach our children what to believe."

The theocratic cranks of the world tend to wear themselves on their sleeves. To oppose them there is no need to conjure strawmen of secret thoughts as they do but merely comment on what they admit to. On the one hand there is a strong dose of intregalism here; the belief that society is an organic reflection of nature. In regards to sexuality this leads to a tendency to dismiss the academic distinction between sex (the physical ownership of a pee-pee or hoo-hah) and gender( the meaning that any given society ascribes to having one or the other) as mere politically correct twaddle. It simply doesn't occur to them that there was probably never any such thing as "naturally ordained" sex roles in the first place, that even if there were they couldn't possibly have been filtered through dozens of generations of human kink to emerge in the present day undistorted, and that finally there is no reason to think that human perception regarding sexuality is more accurate then our perception of anything else.

And so we have Madam Schafly's famous predictions of manditory unisex bathrooms and mass lesbianism during her anti-ERA crusade. If social gender is the same thing as natural sexuality, then it follows that the end of whatever legal privilege for this or that gender is the same thing as being physically desexed.

But Schafly would also rail against the dark specter of 'homosexual school teachers' in these halcyon rants, and this brings us back to the original point, slavery for immortality. Phyllis Schafly was willing to sign ownership of her vagina over to her husband in return for the comfort of knowing her place in the world. This was her choice, and people have been known to get quite a bit kinkier then that. So far so good. But Schafly had no hope of living forever unless she could compel all women to wear her gimps mask. Only when slavery is universal does time freeze and mortality cease, and slavery can only be universal when those who have already chained themselves control education. Andrew Schlafly's Conservapedia was built primarily as a home-schooling resource. He has referred to politics as "the battle for control of the future" The Schlafly hatred of education is not based on politics but dynasticism. Their core anger is not directed against pernicious ideas but simply ideas, not liberal teachers but simply anything that may influence their children besides themselves.

Phyllis Schlafly will die wealthy and well-aged. I do not begrudge her this. May every woman who is battered and forcibly kept ignorant in the name of an imaginary God someday enjoy the same fate. At any rate Schlafly has already lived to see her son John admit to flaming gayness and several other children grind through divorce and stunted relationships. The mirage of immortality has dissolved before her eyes, and now there is nothing left to do but spend her days warbling about lesbians and William Ayers for whoever will listen.

No one but each other in the modern right wing.