Via BuzzFeed and the Charleston Post and Courier, we learn that the Citadel invited Phyllis Schlafly to guest-lecture in a course entitled “The Conservative Intellectual Tradition in America.” OK, so Ayn Rand and Jeane Kirkpatrick are dead. Were Condoleezza Rice, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Amity Shlaes, all real intellectuals, all conservatives, all female, unavailable?
On closer examination, the course-12 lectures, one female speaker-brings in quite a few conservative political movers and shakers-which would be fascinating-but few of what I would call intellectuals. Maybe Arthur Laffer, Burton Folsom, and Doug Feith count. And then there’s American historian Newt Gingrich, PhD. But, umm, if disgraced GOP operative Ralph Reed counts as an intellectual, the conservative movement is in bigger trouble than I thought.
More amazing, however, is Schlafly thinking that any 18-year-old cadet has any idea what Bella Abzug looked like, or who she was, so that saying that feminists “don’t all look like Bella Abzug” is a good way to suggest that we’re mostly ugly, while they of course would only date pretty women. (And for the record, Abzug was an attractive enough (oh, Barack Obama) young lawyer at the age where she could’ve dated Citadel cadets except that, oh, by the way, she got married at age 24 and stayed married until her husband’s death 42 years later. Oh, and I bet it was not so cool for Citadel cadets in the 1940s to date Jews. But I digress.) If you don’t know who Abzug was, for G-d’s sake look her up.
Schlafly’s other advice to the cadets: “Feminism is bad and everything they stand for is bad” and for that reason they should “Find out if your girlfriend is a feminist before you get too far into it.” All I can say is, if that’s what 18-year-old men are worried about before they “get too far into it,” things sure have changed since I was an 18-year-old feminist. BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray thinks that Schlafly, who once called feminism “the most dangerous, destructive force in our society today” might be softening on us in
