Arch-conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, who bitterly opposed LGBT rights, pro-choice rights and the Equal Rights Amendment, among other causes, died Sept. 5. She was 92.
Schlafly, an attorney and writer, gained considerable influence in conservative circles in the '70s when she spearheaded opposition to the ERA, though she'd been active on the right for several decades. The amendment had 30 out of the required 38 states on board when Schlafly entered the fray; it was defeated in 1982. Schlafly maintained that the ERA would lead to a loss of workplace-safety protections for women, increased rights for gays and a strengthening of the pro-choice movement.
Indeed, those were all issues that Schlafly turned her sights upon, and much of her early work laid the groundwork for the contemporary conservative milieu. She also played a large role in conceiving conservative platforms opposing same-sex marriages, gays in the military, LGBT equal-rights laws and sex education in school.
In 1992, her son, John Schlafly, was outed as gay just after his mother debated a gay Republican at the 1992 GOP convention. A staffer at his mother's organization, the Eagle Forum, he continued to support her in her causes.
In March 2015, she told Michelangelo Signorile in Huffington Post that, should the U.S. Supreme Court come down in favor of marriage equality, the right would mobilize against it, just as it had done after Roe v. Wade.
"We should develop all kinds of strategieslegal strategies, legislative strategies and public opinion strategies, in order to reject the rules of, in many cases, a single judge or just a simply majority of judges," Schlafly said. "I do believe the grass roots can take back the Republican Party … . 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."
The Huffington Post article is at huff.to/1BzSjVp .