How the anti-feminist leader Phyllis Schlafly eerily predicted the future

The mother of the conservative movement told me Roe v. Wade would be overturned. She also told me that marriage equality wouldn't hold, and gay rights wasn't "inevitable."

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Over drinks with my friend Tim Teeman from the Daily Beast last night, I got to thinking about my interviews with Phyllis Schlafly over the years.

The anti-feminist Eagle Forum leader rose up through the Christian right from the Goldwater era right through the Reagan Revolution, infamously leading the movement in the 1970s to derail the Equal Rights Amendment.

Tim had been asking me what were my most memorable interviews among the odious Republicans over the years with whom I’ve spoken. There have been so many, including a half-hour discussion with former Senator Rick Santorum that would have your head spinning. Then I thought about my interviews with Schlafly, who died in 2016 at the age of 92.

Shlafly was ubiquitous in the ‘90s, the aughts, and the teens when I covered events like the Values Voter Summit, the Conservative Political Action Conference, and the Republican National Convention, writing for The Advocate and Out, and later covering these events for HuffPost and for my SiriusXM program. I interviewed her on those occasions, including about her son, John, who’d been outed as gay back in 1992, even as his mother embraced a viciously anti-gay agenda. (This was a pathetic spectacle, as John, whom I also briefly interviewed, was subservient to his mother and continued working for her, promoting the very agenda that stripped him of his own rights.)

These interviews were always tense and sometimes heated. A few times, I got Schlafly pretty angry as I pushed her on her contradictions. But I have to give her a bit of credit for at least talking with me and sticking it out.

Schlafly told me several times that Roe v. Wade would be overturned. This was even after it was reaffirmed, and many (at least in the media and the GOP) believed it would never happen.

What made her so sure? She and her movement were resolute, she said, and never grew tired, while the left was "splintered." She believed in the long game of getting judges on the federal courts and on the Supreme Court who would do the bidding of the extremists. She knew there would be short-term losses, the optics of which would make it seem like she was losing. But she believed she was winning. And, well, on Roe v. Wade, she did win, even if it was after she went to her grave.

The last time I’d spoken with Schlafly, it was very briefly—perhaps five minutes—at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in 2016, when the party of course coronated Donald Trump. Schlafly was very frail, sitting hunched over in a wheelchair being pushed by her son, John. It was just three months before her death. But her mind was as sharp as a tack.

She had the most hope she’d ever had that victory was in her grasp, as she saw Trump as the great savior of the Republican Party and believed he would be the one who would in fact get Roe overturned and push back against LGBTQ rights. That’s because she believed his movement was an example of the "grass roots" (what we of course know to be the white supremacists, the hard-core misogynists, the Christian nationalists and the like) getting control of the party from what she called "the kingmakers," the GOP establishment.

It was the year before, in early March of 2015, at CPAC in National Harbor, Maryland, when I conducted my last lengthy interview with Schlafly, as she was hawking her new book, "Who Killed the American Family?"

This was even before Trump’s rise. He was considering running for president (and would announce it in June), but was seen as a joke for quite a while, even by most Republicans.

And yet, Schlafly foresaw what would become the MAGA movement and its triumphs even in that year in which LGBTQ rights activists and progressives were heady, on the precipice of securing marriage equality across the land. Oral arguments in Obegefell v. Hodges would be heard at the Supreme Court just a month after I interviewed Schlafly—after LGBTQ advocates had secured major wins in the lower courts—and of course the court would rule for marriage equality in June of that year.

The contours of the backlash, however, were already coming into view as states passed "religious liberty" laws and went after anti-discrimination statutes, gearing up for what might happen at the Supreme Court.

Here was how I opened the piece I wrote for HuffPost, where I was editor-at-large, about my interview with Schlafly for my SiriusXM program at CPAC that year:

Amid battles that have erupted over states banning local anti-discrimination ordinances and moving forward on "religious liberties" laws targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people--seemingly catching some LGBT activists off-guard--Phyllis Schlafly has a message for the LGBT community: Don't believe for a minute that the Supreme Court’s decision in June on marriage equality, no matter how positive, will diminish the crusade against LGBT equality. In fact, she says, it will only serve to reinvigorate the anti-gay movement.

Schlafly got that 100% right. And what’s most startling is that she was warning us, but most didn’t take it seriously.

"The gays have their argument about inevitability," she told me in that interview. "I don’t think that’s so. I’m extremely disappointed that the Republican Party, the conservative movement, even the Democratic Party, and the churches have been saying, ‘Well, soon the court will decide, and that will be it.’ Well, a lot of people thought that about Roe v. Wade, and we’ve seen the whole abortion movement turned around in the last ten years."

Schlafly explained that she’d been warning conservatives about the "kingmakers" and the "supremacists" (judges whom she called liberal activists) and the "threat" to "religious liberty" for years. But she told me she was now heartened by the new energy around religious liberty laws and other laws targeting gays.

"We should develop all kinds of strategies -- legal strategies, legislative strategies and public opinion strategies, in order to reject the rules of, in many cases, a single judge or just a simple majority of judges," Schlafly said, laying out the game plan for pretty much what we’ve seen over the past seven years, from "don’t say gay" laws to "groomer" narratives that have been thrust into the culture.

"I do believe the grass roots can take back the Republican Party," she said in that 2015 interview. "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."

Not the American way to "get along with everybody." The "adversarial concept." Sounds pretty brutal and authoritarian to me. And exactly where we are now.

Programming note: I’ll be taking a much-needed vacation at the end of July, the 20th through the 30th, and will likely not be posting here.