A Song Dedication

Today hundreds of Washington University students in St.Louis had to sit at their graduation ceremony with their backs turned as the anti-feminist female Joe McCarthy, Phyllis Schlafly, received an honorary doctorate for reasons unclear. Apparently Chris Matthews of MSNBC's "Hardball" had also received one, so the university must be getting pretty desperate to award these things to any recognizable name in politics. Among the crazed paleocon stances Mrs. Schlafly has taken--a hard line against the possibility that a married woman can be raped by her husband. Here's some quality excerpts from her interview with the university's student newspaper:

What do you mean when you say, "Feminists want women to think that they can't succeed"?

Everything that they are teaching in Women's Studies and in those courses is that women are victims and that marriage is unfair to women and that it makes them second-class, that men are naturally batterers and that if you get married you'll probably get beaten up. It's a dreary picture that they paint for women of the life of a married women or a mother.


Could you clarify some of the statements that you made in Maine last year about martial rape?

I think that when you get married you have consented to sex. That's what marriage is all about, I don't know if maybe these girls missed sex ed. That doesn't mean the husband can beat you up, we have plenty of laws against assault and battery. If there is any violence or mistreatment that can be dealt with by criminal prosecution, by divorce or in various ways. When it gets down to calling it rape though, it isn't rape, it's a he said-she said where it's just too easy to lie about it.

Right. The institution of marriage did not originate as a contract binding a woman to man in indentured servitude. And rape is all about sex and attraction, not violence against women--keep telling yourself that you amoral hell beast.

I can't be too hard on the old gal. I mean, it's fairly obvious she's been living with senile dementia for a long time and no one has had the heart to break it to her. But--and I don't know much about the woman--she seems to have had similar views for the good majority of her political career--campaigning for Goldwater, her work with the AEI, and of course her unnecessary zeal for killing the establishment of the Equal Rights Amendment. In which case, I'd have to say "Lady, you're lookin' mighty old there. Countin' the days when folks like you become extinct like the dinosaurs. And by the way, here's a little song I'd like to dedicate to you, hope you like it: