Phyllis
Schlafly has been a national leader of the conservative
movement since the publication of her best-selling 1964
book, "A Choice Not An Echo". She has been a leader
of the pro-family movement since 1972, when she started her
national volunteer organization now called Eagle Forum. In a
ten-year battle, Mrs. Schlafly led the pro-family movement
to victory over the principal legislative goal of the
radical feminists, called the Equal Rights Amendment. An
articulate and successful opponent of the radical feminist
movement, she appears in debate on college campuses more
frequently than any other conservative. She was named one of
the 100 most important women of the 20th century by the
Ladies' Home Journal.
Mrs.
Schlafly's monthly newsletter called The Phyllis Schlafly
Report is now in its 38th year. Her syndicated column
appears in 100 newspapers, her radio commentaries are heard
daily on 460 stations, and her radio talk show on education
called "Phyllis Schlafly Live" is heard weekly on 45
stations. Both can be
heard
on the internet.
Mrs.
Schlafly is the author or editor of 20 books on subjects as
varied as family and feminism "The Power of the Positive
Woman", nuclear strategy "Strike From Space" and
"Kissinger on the Couch", education "Child Abuse
in the Classroom", child care "Who Will Rock the
Cradle?", and a phonics book "Turbo Reader". Her
most recent book, "Feminist Fantasies", is a
collection of essays on feminism in the media, workplace,
home, and the military
Mrs.
Schlafly is a lawyer and served as a member of the
Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution,
1985-1991, appointed by President Reagan. She has testified
before more than 50 Congressional and State Legislative
committees on constitutional, national defense, and family
issues.
Mrs.
Schlafly is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Washington
University, received her J.D. from Washington University Law
School, and received her Master's in Political Science from
Harvard University.
Phyllis
Schlafly is America's best-known advocate of the dignity and
honor that we as a society owe to the role of fulltime
homemaker. The mother of six children, she was the 1992
Illinois Mother of the Year.
(Back)
*****
Repeal The Bradley Amendment
March 15, 2006
When our
supposedly-compassionate federal government pokes its nose
into areas that, under our principle of federalism, should
be none of its business, the result is often unintended
consequences, gross injustices, and of course, massive
costs. A prime example is the 1986 federal Bradley
Amendment, which mandates that a child-support debt cannot
be retroactively reduced or forgiven, even if the debtor is
unemployed, hospitalized, in prison, sent to war, dead,
proved to not be the father, never allowed to see his
children, or loses his job, or suffers a pay cut.
The result of this
incredibly rigid law is to impose a punishment that makes it
impossible for any but the very rich to get out from under a
Bradley debt. Thousands of fathers are sentenced to debtor's
prison (a medieval practice we thought America had abolished
centuries ago), and thousands more have their driver's
license confiscated (making it extraordinarily difficult to
get a job).
There is no requirement
that, if and when the Bradley debt is paid, the money be
spent on the children, or that the debt be based on an
estimate of the child's needs, or even that the so-called
children actually be children (some states require the
father to pay for college tuition). The Bradley debt is
misnamed "child support"; it is a court-imposed judgment to
punish men, and extract money from them to support some
mothers, and a $3 billion federal-state bureaucracy.
Take the case of Larry
Souter, as reported recently in the Grand Rapids Press.
He was released after spending 13 years in prison after
being wrongly convicted of second-degree murder.
He was then summoned to
court to explain why he should not be convicted of contempt
for non-payment of his Bradley debt, that kept rising during
his years in prison: $23,000 in back support, plus interest
and penalties that raised the total to $38,082.25. The
ex-wife's attorney argues that Larry should pay because she
"has endured the substantial burden of raising her two
children, without defendant's contribution of child
support."
Since the children are now
adults, this case proves that the Bradley debt has nothing
to do with child support. It has to do with court-ordered
transfer payments, from which the state gets a cut.
This case is not an
anomaly. Clarence Brandley spent ten years in prison, before
he was exonerated and released in 1990, whereupon the state
hit him with a bill for nearly $50,000 in child support debt
that accumulated while he was in prison.
Many other cases prove that
men cannot escape the Bradley debt, even if DNA proves that
they are not the father. The law even forbids bankruptcy to
alleviate the Bradley debt.
Three years ago, a Maine
court ruled that Geoffrey Fisher no longer had to pay child
support, for a child that wasn't his. But, Maine
nevertheless demands that Fisher pay $11,450 in back child
support, and Maine took away his driver's license for
failure to pay up.
The Bradley debt makes no
allowance for the growing problem of paternity fraud
committed by mothers, estimated by some to be up to 30
percent of DNA-tested cases. Our compassionate government
demands that a mother seeking welfare identify the father of
her child, and, like greedy lawyers, greedy women often
target the man with the deep pockets.
A few states have passed a
recent law to end so-called child support if DNA proves a
man is not the father, but that doesn't get rid of the
Bradley debt accrued before DNA results came in. We haven't
heard of any women being prosecuted for paternity fraud,
and, of course, the man who was cheated doesn't get any
refund.
There is no excuse for
Congress and state Legislatures allowing these injustices to
continue. Court-ordered child support should not be final,
until DNA proves paternity.
Feminist defenders of the
Bradley Amendment claim that the Bradley debtor could have
reduced his debt by going into court and challenging the
amount of support when his income decreased. That argument
is legalistic cynicism taken to the extreme.
Most Bradley debtors cannot
possibly afford a lawyer to advise them about, and to defend
their rights, yet they are up against government or
government-paid lawyers; the system has built-in incentives
to set the support as high as possible, because collections
bring bonuses to the state bureaucracy; and, according to
the Los Angeles Times, roughly 70 percent of fathers
in L.A. County are not present when the court (not biology)
rules on paternity, and irreducible monthly obligations are
set in concrete.
President Bush's initiative
to promote marriage is a non-starter, so long as the Bradley
Amendment exists. Who would marry a man with a Bradley debt
hanging over his future?
Shakespeare famously wrote,
"The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft
interred with their bones." Since the author of the Bradley
Amendment, former Senator Bill Bradley (D-NJ), is still
alive, he should tell his pals in the Senate to terminate
his evil law, before any more injustices take place.
(Back)
*****
Time
to Terminate Foreign Language Ballots
By
Phyllis Schlafly
Led by U.S. Reps. Peter King, R-N.Y. and Steve King, R-Iowa,
56 members of the House of Representatives are urging House
Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., to
oppose the renewal of the section of the
Voting
Rights Act that mandates foreign-language ballots.
The two Kings say that these ballots "divide our country,
increase the risk of voter error and fraud, and burden local
taxpayers."
Their letter correctly explains that foreign-language
ballots encourage linguistic separatism - which would give
us problems like Canada has with the French language - and
"contradict the melting pot ideal that has made the United
States the most successful multiethnic nation on earth."
Foreign-language ballots don't make civic sense. Only
citizens can vote - at least legally. To become a
naturalized U.S. citizen, the law requires that a person
demonstrates "an understanding of the English language,
including an ability to read, write and speak ... simple
words and phrases ... in ordinary usage in the English
language."
Foreign-speaking citizens have the same legal protection of
their right to vote as have millions of English-speaking
U.S. illiterates. They can request assistance in the polling
place, or take a crib sheet or interpreter into the booth,
or get an absentee ballot and obtain help translating it.
The use of ballots in multiple languages greatly increases
the likelihood of errors because of difficulty in
translations. In a 1993 election, New York City mistakenly
printed Chinese language ballots with "no" in place of
"yes," and in a 2000 election, six polling places in Queens
reversed "Democratic" and "Republican."
Foreign-language ballots are an open invitation to fraud
because the Voting Rights Act requires foreign-language
election information, notices, forms, instructions, and
assistance in addition to ballots.
This, plus the widespread availability of voter pamphlets
and absentee ballot applications, gives unscrupulous party
operatives countless ways to deceive voters about issues and
candidates, and increases the likelihood that non-citizens
will vote illegally.
Foreign-language ballots are a direct attack on our "civic
unity," which the late Barbara Jordan said must be promoted
by public policies that override the problems posed by our
cultural and religious diversity. She added, "Such policies
should help people learn to speak, read, and write English
effectively." The right to vote should function as a
motivation to immigrants to learn English.
The 56 Congressmen are also correct that foreign-language
ballots are a burden on local taxpayers. Remember how the
Republican Congress elected in 1994 promised to rid us of
unfunded mandates?
Foreign-language ballots are a good place to start because
they function like a tax Congress imposes on state and local
taxpayers in the 466 local jurisdictions across 31 states
that must provide foreign-language ballots.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that Los
Angeles County taxpayers spent $1.1 million to provide
ballots and election materials in five languages in 1996,
escalating to $3.3 million in seven languages in March 2002.
In several counties, the cost of foreign-language ballots is
more than half the entire election expense.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965, which is coming up for
reauthorization next year, was an important civil rights law
because it eliminated barriers that historically had kept
many black citizens from voting.
Blacks didn't and don't need foreign-language ballots but,
during the law's reauthorization in 1975, it was hijacked by
those who wanted to pander to foreign-speaking minorities.
The choice of minorities is very discriminatory. The
foreign-language mandate was limited to Americans of
"Spanish Heritage," Asian Americans, American Indians, and
Alaskan Natives, while Italian, German, French and other
languages are excluded from the law.
Before each election, the U.S. Department of Justice issues
regulations that require states and counties to provide
foreign-language ballots if more than 5 percent or more than
10,000 citizens of voting-age belong to one of the favored
language groups.
The number and the complexity of languages makes the mandate
for foreign-language ballots completely impractical. For
example, there might be enough Filipinos to meet the
threshold for foreign-language ballots, but the Filipinos
themselves might speak any one of mutually unintelligible
languages.
The self-proclaimed National Commission on the Voting Rights
Act (a private group), which includes such partisan
activists as Bill Lann Lee, John H. Buchanan, and Harvard
Professor Charles Ogletree, slyly admits that it doesn't
want Congress to make the foreign-language section permanent
because it would be vulnerable to constitutional challenge
as "race conscious." These partisans just want to continue
the fiction that this section is "temporary."
The foreign-language sections of the Voting Rights Act
should be allowed to expire in 2007. This will be a major
step toward more honest elections and the achievement of our
national motto, e pluribus unum, out of many, one.
(Back)
*****
Is A
War Going On In Texas?
by Phyllis Schlafly, Feb. 15, 2006
If you
don't have access to Texas newspapers or the internet, you
may not have heard the sensational news about the enormous
cache of weapons just seized in Laredo, Texas. U.S.
authorities grabbed two completed Improvised Explosive
Devices (IEDs), materials for making 33 more, military-style
grenades, 26 grenade triggers, large quantities of AK-47 and
AR-15 assault rifles, 1,280 rounds of ammunition, silencers,
machine gun assembly kits, 300 primers, bullet-proof vests,
police scanners, sniper scopes, narcotics, and cash.
That
sounds like a war is going on in Texas! If bomb-making
factories and firearms assembly plants are ordinary
day-to-day business in the drug war along our southern
border, the American people need to know more about it.
The Val
Verde County chief deputy warned that drug traffickers are
helping terrorists with possible al Quaeda ties to cross the
Texas-Mexico border into the United States. A government
spokesman in Houston said "at this point there is no
connection with anything in Iraq."
We are not
so easily reassured. We wonder what our government is doing
to fulfill its duty to "protect each of them [the states]
against invasion," as called for in the U.S. Constitution,
Article IV.
The
Department of Homeland Security now admits that there have
been 231 documented incursions by Mexican military or
police, or drug or people smugglers dressed in military
uniforms, during the last ten years, including 63 in
Arizona, and several Border Patrol agents have been wounded
in these encounters. This admission comes after years of
pretending that such incursions were just "accidents."
Homeland
Security sent a confidential memo in January to our Border
Patrol agents warning that they could be the targets of
assassins hired by alien smugglers. The alert states that
the contract killers will probably be members of the vicious
MS-13 Mara Salvatrucha street gang (whose 17-year-old
killers will be protected from capital punishment by a
recent U.S Supreme Court decision).
There is,
indeed, a drug war going on between rival drug gangs, but
the U.S. government seems to be just a bystander without
manpower or weapons to take action. Are we going to continue
to leave our Border agents sitting ducks for Mexican
snipers?
Rep. Tom
Tancredo reported that sheriff deputies spotted a
military-style Humvee near El Paso, Texas, with a mounted
.50-caliber machine gun escorting a caravan of SUVs bringing
illegal drugs into our country. Our outgunned and outmanned
sheriff deputies and state highway patrol couldn't do
anything except take pictures.
The
Mexican government is unwilling or incapable of doing
anything to stop the wide-open lawlessness on the Mexican
side of the border. Our Border Patrol agents say they are
often confronted by corrupt Mexican military units employed
to protect and escort violent drug smugglers.
Meanwhile,
the news media have shown us pictures of the just-discovered
sophisticated 2,400-foot tunnel running under our border to
a warehouse in San Diego. U.S. authorities recovered more
than two tons of marijuana, and it is unclear how long the
tunnel has been in operation or how many tons of drugs
already passed through.
The Bush
Administration whines that it can't (i.e., won't) do
anything to implement border security unless its
guest-worker/amnesty proposal is part of the legislative
package, and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff
looked pathetically weak when interviewed on television by
Bill O'Reilly. When is our government going to protect us
from the crime, the drugs, the smuggling racket, destruction
of property, the endangerment to U.S. residents along our
border and our undermanned Border Patrol?
In charge
of protecting Americans against this war is 36-year-old
Julie Myers, to whom President Bush gave a recess
appointment after her Senate confirmation bogged down
because of her total lack of law-enforcement experience. Her
qualifications are her connections: she is the niece of
former Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers and the wife of
Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff's chief of staff.
Rep. J.D.
Hayworth (R-AZ) says that if you visit the border, you will
find that almost everyone who lives there is armed for
protection from illegals. Just imagine if you had to carry a
gun to go to the grocery store or take your kids to school!
For the
best up-to-date analysis of what our government should do,
read Rep. Hayworth's new book called "Whatever It Takes:
Illegal Immigration, Border Security, and the War on
Terror." He calls for a security fence, 10,000 border
agents, enforcement of penalties on employers who hire
illegal aliens, cooperation between the feds and our 700,000
local and state police officers to enforce our immigration
laws, more detention centers to keep illegals until they can
be deported, and an end to the racket of giving U.S.
citizenship to babies born to illegal aliens.
(Back)
*****
Census
has Grown Beyond its Bounds
By Phyllis
Schlafly
While the Patriot Act and National Security Agency
wiretapping have received enormous attention and criticism
from the mainstream media, another federal agency has been
quietly gathering far more personal information about U.S.
residents than those laws ever can. And this unreported
project affects thousands more people.
Our inquisitive federal government has been demanding that
selected U.S. residents answer 73 nosy questions. They are
threatened with a fine of $5,000 for failure to respond.
When I first
heard about this from a reader in Lake Geneva, Wis., I
thought it might be a joke or an anomaly. But when another
in Ishpeming on Michigan's Upper Peninsula received the same
questionnaire, I realized something is going on nationwide.
These nosy questionnaires come under the friendly name
"American Community Survey." But this is not a Gallup or a
Harris poll; the interrogator is the U.S. government and has
the power to compel and computerize your responses.
The U.S. Constitution authorizes the government to take an
"enumeration" every 10th year in order to reapportion the
seats in the U.S. House of Representatives to accord with
the "respective numbers" of each state's population. The
Constitution thus authorizes a count of people; it doesn't
authorize the government to find out with whom you share
your bed and board.
Beginning in 1960, the 10-year census-taking significantly
changed. The government began sending a long form with many
questions to a limited number of people, randomly selected,
and a short form with only six questions to all remaining
U.S. residents.
The government is jumping the gun on the 2010 census, and
without public announcement is already sending out an
extremely long form, starting with a few thousand mailings
each month to a handful of residents in widely scattered
small towns that don't generate national media. Recipients
can't find neighbors who received the same mailing, so it's
difficult to avoid the impression that the project was
planned to avoid publicity and citizen opposition.
The person filling out the new long form is labeled "Person
1." That person is required by law to list the name of every
other person in the household, giving his or her birth date,
sex, race, marital status and relationship.
Other people can
be husband, daughter, grandson, in-law, etc. Others can also
be "unmarried partner" (defined as a person "who shares a
close personal relationship with Person 1") or "roommate
(someone sharing the house/apartment but who is not
romantically involved with Person 1").
Person 1 must answer 25 questions about his residence and
the size of the property. What kind of a home, apartment or
condo do you live in, when was it built, when did you move
in, are you operating a business in your home, how many
rooms and how many bedrooms do you have, what kind of
bathroom and kitchen fixtures do you have, and what is the
market price of your residence?
The survey asks how much you pay each month for electricity,
gas, water, rent, real estate taxes, fire or flood
insurance, plus six very specific questions about your first
and second monthly mortgage payments. There are questions
about your telephone and automobile, and about how many
months of the year you and others occupy the residence.
The survey then gets really personal, seeking the answers to
42 questions about you and about every other person who
resides in your household. Person 1 is used like a private
investigator to extract the information from everybody else,
and warned that if anyone doesn't want to answer your nosy
questions, you must provide the name and telephone number of
such person so Big Brother can follow up.
The information demanded for you and every other person
includes very specific questions about what kind of school
you and each other one attended and to what grade level,
what is each person's "ancestry or ethnic origin" (no matter
if your ancestors came here hundreds of years ago), what
language you speak at home, how well you speak English,
where you lived one year ago, what are specific physical,
mental or emotional health conditions, and whether you have
given birth during the past year.
More questions demand that you tell the government exactly
where you are employed, what transportation you use to get
to work, how many people ride in the vehicle with you, how
many minutes it takes you to get to work, whether you have
been laid off or absent from your job or business, how many
weeks you worked during the last year, what kind of a job
you have (for-profit company, not-for-profit company,
government, self-employed), what kind of business it is,
exactly what kind of work you did, what was your last year's
wage or salary, and what was your other income from any
other source.
The Census Bureau warns: "We may combine your answers with
information that you gave to other agencies." (Does that
mean IRS? Social Security? New hires directory? Child
support enforcement? Criminal databases? Commercial
databases?)
The questionnaire promises that it will take only 38 minutes
to answer these questions. Of course, that estimate fails to
include the hours it takes to collect the required
information from so many different sources.
(Back)
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