It's hard to believe, but Phyllis Schlafly turned 90 in August. You'd have thought America's original loathsome right-wing granny would have hung it up now, right? Well, I suspect it may finally be time for her to step aside. It looks like a good number of people in the conservative movement that she helped build don't take her seriously.
On Monday, Schafly penned a column for WorldNutDaily in which she claimed to have found the root cause of the campus rape epidemic--there are just too many women on college campuses. To her mind, if colleges had to admit 50 percent men and 50 percent women, the rape problem would easily be solved. Translation--women are to blame for being assaulted because too many of them are getting into college, and college admissions officers share the responsibility by turning away too many men.
I ripped her to shreds in a piece I wrote for Liberal America--but when I posted it to a group on Facebook that's about 65 percent conservative and 35 percent liberal, most of the conservatives dismissed Schlafly as just "an old senile person." Even when I mentioned this was one of the godmothers of modern conservatism, they still blew it off.
That would be like some of us dismissing something said by the likes of Ted Kennedy or Barbara Boxer as the rantings of someone deep in senility. If you're hearing Schafly being dismissed by conservatives, it may mean that Schlafly may be fading into irrelevance. And that can only be a good thing. When you claim that the pay gap should actually go up, you definitely are a ghost from the past.