The New Republic magazine published a list of the ten Most Important Women in American History.
T-10. Phyllis Schlafly The slayer of the Equal Rights Amendment, Schlafly mobilized “the housewife image to fulfill her deep political ambitions—a model for everyone from Ann Coulter in the 1990s to the tradwives of today,” wrote Vanderbilt University’s Nicole Hemmer.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly
The Supreme Court is 6-3 Republican-appointed, including three justices picked by President Trump. Yet as we reach the annual end of the Supreme Court Term, which customarily wraps up before July, there are remarkably few conservative decisions to halt the advance of the liberal agenda.
For example, the Santa Clara County Office of Education in Silicon Valley has imposed a teaching guide requiring teachers to be pro-LGBTQ+ even in math problems. One of the recommended books for young children is the “Pride Puppy,” which invites three- and four-year-olds to look for certain images at a pride parade including an “intersex” flag, and a drag “king” and “queen.”
Last year the Supreme Court decided in favor of religious rights for parents in Mahmoud v. Taylor, but the opinion was so weak that school districts continue to impose the transgender curriculum on unsuspecting parents without giving them a meaningful opportunity to opt out. Parents have just sued in California over this issue that should have already been firmly resolved in favor of parents by the Supreme Court.
Trial court judges have been overwhelmingly opposed to Trump’s position on the transgender and other issues. Language in some of their decisions have been scathing against Trump, as reported by CNN, while the Supreme Court has failed to rein them in.
The Supreme Court held only 58 oral arguments this Term, which is merely a third of the number of oral arguments heard annually when liberals controlled the Warren Court in the late 1950s and 1960s. During this entire current decade the Supreme Court has heard an average of only about 60 cases per year, the lowest average since the Civil War.
A vote of only four Justices is needed for the Supreme Court to accept a case and schedule it for oral argument, and then render a decision on its merits. In important petitions for Court review, conservative Justices Thomas and Alito have often voted to “grant cert” while the three Trump appointees failed to join them, thereby ducking important issues that should be addressed.
There is a pattern in the issues that the newer Republican-appointed Justices are avoiding. Abortion, transgender, vaccine mandates, and parental rights cases are all being avoided by them.
While the aging Justices Thomas and Alito, who are courageous, continue on the Supreme Court, now is the time to establish strong precedents that can last for decades. The younger Trump nominees need merely to vote silently with Thomas and Alito, yet too often are unwilling to do even that.
Most of the Trump-appointed Justices repeatedly voted against granting cert in a string of conversion therapy cases, until they finally took a case from Colorado and declared the therapy to be a First Amendment right. That decision should have been rendered years earlier to stop the widespread infringement on conservative counselors’ freedom of speech, and by delaying the Trump-appointed Justices allowed infringement.
Far from being the bold MAGA Court that Trump supporters campaigned so hard to attain, this Court has retreated to near irrelevancy. It treads water rather than swimming, thereby inviting future Democrat appointees to take charge.
Kamala Harris gave an interview to Don Lemon last week and called for Democrats to add four more Justices to the Supreme Court at the first opportunity. If that happens, the newly empowered Justices will not timidly avoid social issues as Republicans have.
In the most recent abortion case, all of the Republican nominees except Thomas and Alito sided with abortion pill manufacturers to allow them to continue to distribute their product widely in pro-life states without an in-person dispensing requirement. Neither the Trump nominees nor Chief Justice Roberts explained their ruling, for now, in favor of the abortion pill that causes two-thirds of all abortions.
Religious liberty is supposedly fashionable with this Court, but it declined to take the appeal of Amish grade schools hit with massive fines by New York for not requiring their children to be vaccinated. New York has eliminated the religious exemption from vaccines, and the Court punted this case back to an appellate court rather than uphold a religious right to decline vaccination.
The Court refused to “grant cert” in at least three appeals concerning the unfair transgender invasion into girls’ sports, until finally taking a pair of cases that it is deciding now. The Court has repeatedly declined to grant cert in cases concerning parental, particularly fathers’, rights.
The effect of the Republican Justices declining to grant cert in significant controversies is that bad decisions by liberal lower courts are left standing. The younger Republican Justices may be worried about possible impeachment by a future Democrat majority in Congress, but if so that would reinforce the need to nominate older justices willing to stand up against D.C. liberals.
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.
These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.
U.S.A. at 250 These 8 Americans Shaped History. We Just Don’t Agree on How. ...the other 7 historical figures profiled in this article were: the Minutemen; Charles Curtis; John Brown; Booker T. Washington; Madam C.J. Walker; D.W. Griffith; Ruth Bader GinsburgSchlafly presented an unapologetic vision of family values that resonates with many Americans to this day.
When Donald J. Trump eulogized Schlafly at her funeral in September 2016, he cast both himself and her as underdogs — perhaps reasonably. Mr. Trump looked like the most long shot presidential nominee in living memory. Schlafly, who gave him a rare early endorsement, had in the 1970s slayed the Equal Rights Amendment, which sought to give women equality under the Constitution — a seeming shoo-in, until she got involved.
By 2016, much of American life had turned nightmarish for someone like her.
Gay marriage: widely accepted. Abortion: legalized. Gender-neutral bathrooms: commonplace on many campuses. Many women no longer measured their success in marriage and children, but in financial independence and personal fulfillment.
These days, though, her arguments ring anew in our ears, as a new generation of conservative women challenges feminism’s gains.
Today, anti-feminists hold powerful roles in Washington. Social media has gone frilly with tradwives. Their reasoning echoes Schlafly’s: Homemakers enjoy special status, protected and provided for by their husbands. Why give it up?
Decades before battles erupted over unisex bathrooms for transgender people, Schafly warned that the Equal Rights Amendment would spawn co-ed bathrooms. Long before “America First” and “stop the steal,” the ultra-isolationist Schlafly accused shadowy “kingmakers” of conspiring to nominate “America Last” candidates for president. She tarred feminists as radicals, just as her heirs do now.
To combat the E.R.A., abortion and gay rights, she mobilized formerly apolitical evangelical Christians, helping to build the coalition of religious conservatives that propelled Ronald Reagan to victory and eventually ousted social moderates from the Republican Party.
The political divisions that defined those 1970s debates “only got more pronounced over the years,” leading to today’s hyper-polarization, said Marjorie J. Spruill, the author of “Divided We Stand.” “And Schlafly’s tone had a lot to do with it.”
Schlafly’s victories came wreathed in paradoxes: She presented herself as a model wife and mother, breastfeeding all six of her children, yet she had resources (her husband, a lawyer, came from wealth) and a housekeeper that allowed her to run political campaigns and churn out books, newsletters and commentary. While exalting homemaking, she lobbied (unsuccessfully) for a top post in the Reagan administration.
Calmly, she deflected accusations of hypocrisy, saying that she had raised her children before embracing what she called her “hobby” — politics. Career and homemaking, she said, came “at different times in my life.”
Feminists never tire of leveling similar charges today, against women like Erika Kirk, the conservative activist who now leads the influential organization started by her late husband, Charlie Kirk; and Katie Miller, the prominent Republican political operative who promotes motherhood as women’s highest calling.
Yet many young women are veering further left, and their conservative peers aren’t necessarily sticking to homemaking, either. At a recent Turning Point USA conference for conservative young women, several speakers openly discussed balancing family with high-powered careers. You could see Schlafly’s influence. You could also see feminism’s.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly
The UFC Freedom 250 gladiator fights on the White House lawn were not the only high-profile bouts this week. The conservative Attorneys General Kris Kobach (R-KS) and Ken Paxton (R-TX) faced off against each other in a high-stakes legal battle precipitated by the crisis of gambling on college sports.
At a cost of $5 million, Texas Tech had recruited a star quarterback named Brendan Sorsby for its football team. Then it was discovered that the 22-year-old athlete had gambled more than $90,000 on college sports, placing more than 9,000 bets including 40 on his own Indiana Hoosiers team while a freshman there.
Millions are wagered daily on sports due to the Supreme Court ruling in Murphy v. NCAA (2018), which invalidated the federal ban on sports gambling outside of Nevada. Some $167 billion is bet on sports annually now, most of it by young men, and the World Cup that just started is expected to become the most gambled-on sporting event ever.
Most parents would be shocked to learn that an estimated 30-50% of 16-year-old boys are placing bets through their phones today. Many of the college athletes of the future are betting on sports in high school.
The NCAA prohibits gambling on college sports by its players, but Brendan Sorsby is surely not the only college athlete who has been placing bets and the NCAA ban is difficult to enforce. He just happened to admit it, and the NCAA predictably reacted by banishing him permanently from competing in college football.
Not so fast, a Texas state court then ruled by reinstating him to play for nearly this entire season. The NCAA immediately appealed, while other colleges in its Big 12 athletic conference complained about the harmful impact on the integrity of the game.
Historically, players have been banned from competing if found to have gambled on teams in their own sport. The Chicago White Sox players who were caught fixing the 1919 World Series were banned from professional baseball for life.
Pete Rose was excluded from the Hall of Fame for the rest of his life after his gambling on baseball was discovered. His highly respected teammate, the Hall of Famer Johnny Bench, agreed with that ban based on Rose’s admitted gambling.
But as other colleges began threatening to boycott Texas Tech in their schedules, the conservative Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sprang into action. Epitomizing the sentiment of “Don’t mess with Texas,” Paxton indicated that his office would take action against any conference or college that ostracized Texas Tech.
The University of Kansas and Kansas State are members of the same Big 12 conference as Texas Tech. Their conservative Kansas Attorney General, Kris Kobach, then got into the game by saying that the conference and other colleges have the right to take Texas Tech off their schedules if Texas Tech allows an admitted gambler to play.
The Big 12 conference filed a federal lawsuit against Paxton and Texas Tech seeking a declaration of the athletic conference’s First Amendment rights to enforce its policy against gambling. Texas Tech had a state court order requiring the NCAA to allow Sorsby to play, but the conference sought a federal court order allowing it to discipline Texas Tech.
As all this drama unfolded, Texas Republicans were holding their biennial state convention in Houston. The delegates approved strengthening their platform against gambling, in a state where pro-gambling interests spent more than $10 million in the primaries to try to expand gambling there.
Sorsby has not been charged with any crime. Sports gambling is legal today in roughly 40 states, and in the other 10 states people are doing essentially the same thing on so-called prediction markets like Kalshi.
The NFL has been permissive about this issue, and allowed another player who bet on college sports, Kayshon Boutte, to play in the NFL without any suspension. He was accused of placing 8,900 bets while playing college football, and admitted that he bet until he “was completely broke.”
“I’d wake up early in the morning, and the first thing I'd do was bet,” Boutte explained. “I’d stay up late and bet. All day. All night. I had insomnia, so if I woke up in the middle of the night, phone next to the bed, I'd bet.”
On Monday, Brendan Sorsby entered the supplemental NFL draft, so that he might be selected to play for an NFL team rather than for Texas Tech. To become NFL-eligible he had to abandon his college eligibility and leave Texas Tech, moving the drama to the NFL.
But no one expects this to end the growing crisis caused by sports gambling. College athletes are kids and, as the pandemic of sports betting ensnares teenage boys and young men, it is bringing down the integrity of sports with them.
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.
These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.
Schlafly’s whole life was a tremendous leap, powered by the dedication to hard work she learned from her parents and her courage to serve Americans through her pen and speech. Relentlessly, Schlafly’s early writing evolved into writing and public speaking, warning against the dangers of Socialism and Communism and advocating for the life of homemakers, the natural distinctions between man and woman, and the dignity of human life. Phyllis Schlafly passed away on September 5, 2016.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly
There is a grim unemployment crisis for college graduates who majored in STEM – science, technology, engineering or math. An estimated 8% of recent STEM graduates are completely unemployed, which is double the national unemployment rate.
This is amid a high-tech boom producing billionaires nearly as often as coffee cups. Only a few hundred thousand American STEM graduates want a job in their field, and it should not be so difficult to make good jobs available to them.
Foreigners coming in on H-1B visas are being hired rather than Americans for many entry-level STEM jobs. There is supposed to be high growth in AI software development, but Big Tech has filled this field with H-1B foreigners, too.
The National Foundation for American Policy found that more than 80% of new H-1B applications and filings by Amazon, Apple, Facebook (Meta), Google, and Microsoft are for foreign workers to fill American jobs in AI and software development, and data science jobs.
Big Tech prefers H-1B visas because the workers become bound to the employer by the program and can then be paid less while prevented from switching to a competitor. If the visa holders want to quit to work for a rival, then they would typically lose their right to remain in the United States and could be deported.
The net result is that everyone is harmed by the H-1B program except the owners and executives of a few Big Tech companies, and the foreigners who steal the good jobs. American workers lose access to jobs taken by H-1B workers, American consumers are harmed by this interference with better competition that often results from job mobility, and entire communities are taken over by foreigners brought in on visas.
On Monday, federal Judge Leo Sorokin in Boston invalidated Trump’s long overdue reform of the H-1B visa system, by which Trump last year imposed a $100,000 surcharge on new visa applications. Liberals have been filing many of their anti-Trump lawsuits in Boston because that is now the most Democrat-appointed judicial venue in our country, reinforced by the nearly all-Democrat First Circuit Court of Appeals.
Judge Sorokin relied on the Supreme Court decision invalidating many of Trump’s tariffs by viewing them as taxes that needed to be considered first by Congress. “These federal judges are really giving us a hard time,” observed Trump.
“Between 2022 and 2023, the top companies using the H-1B program laid off 85,000 American workers, while simultaneously bringing in over 34,000 guest workers from abroad,” Sen. Bernie Sanders stated in a press release last year. He sought “to substantially increase the guest worker fees large corporations pay,” which Trump did but the federal judge in Sanders’ backyard struck it down.
Sen. Sanders claims that he’s opposed the harmful H-1B visas since his “first days as a U.S. senator,” but Phyllis Schlafly opposed this racket years before that. She wrote against H-1B visas in 2003 because they “allow corporations to displace U.S. citizens with skilled labor imported from foreign countries.”
Phyllis urged congressional Republicans to block renewal of the H-1B visa program back then. But politicians in D.C. caved to the lobbyists and voted to continue this harmful program.
The stunning upset last Tuesday in Iowa should send shock waves through every Establishment politician. Their favored candidate was Randy Feenstra, who did not even bother to participate in the debates with his primary opponents.
But Zach Lahn (pronounced Lane) seemingly came out of nowhere to win with a campaign ad promising to ban state government and universities from employing H-1B visa holders. He vowed to require disclosure in state contracts of how many Iowans would be hired, which he pointed out would “be inversely correlated to how many H-1Bs you have.”
“I reject the idea that our people won’t do these jobs,” Lahn said in criticism of the H-1B program. “We have some of the most hardworking kids in the country. I want to be hiring those Iowans here, that’s why we need to bring our kids back home, and that’s what we’ll be fighting for as governor.”
Texans are in an uproar over the H-1B program, as the fast-growing boomtown of Frisco, an hour’s drive north of Dallas, is being overrun by foreigners, many of whom arrived on worker visa programs. The enrollment by Asians is 44% of the Frisco Independent School District (FISD), and one-fifth of the town is Indian now.
There is a shortage of medical residency spots in the United States such that roughly 8,000 American medical school graduates are unable to find a place in a residency program, which is required to become a practicing physician. Yet 10,000 physicians working in the U.S., including some medical residents, are foreigners here on H-1B visas.
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.
These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly
The crisis in college sports is having a ripple effect, causing colleges to eliminate programs, which then decreases their enrollment as fewer students have a reason to go there. As enrollment declines, colleges go out of business, and at least a quarter of colleges teeter on bankruptcy even during good times.
In April, President Trump issued an executive order explaining that “financial perils” caused by the crisis in college sports “could impact [colleges’] capabilities and responsibilities as Federal contractors and grantees,” and also that the “health of the university system is integral to the Federal Government’s basic functioning.”
A federal court in California caused this crisis by allowing a class action on behalf of college athletes seeking compensation, and then approving a $2.8 billion payout to college athletes dating back to 2016. Known as the “House settlement,” this includes a whopping $750 million payout to attorneys which neither colleges nor the NCAA can afford.
With the exception of men’s basketball and football, college sports programs are money-losers that serve the purpose of attracting enrollment in the college. The judicial activism from a federal court against college sports is bringing down entire colleges in the collapse.
This class action lawsuit is on appeal to the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. Seven different groups of athletes are appealing, including women who receive almost none of the back pay, men in underappreciated sports like wrestling, and walk-on athletes who made their college team as many aspire to do.
College enrollment depends on the opportunity for all students to try to make the team in their favorite sports, without having been recruited in high school. The movie Rudy featured a walk-on who tried out and made the Notre Dame football team, and is considered one of the greatest sports movies ever made.
For more than a century, college sports worked well by keeping professionals out, and students played for the love of the game, not money. “I’d like to go exactly back to what we had and ram it through a court,” Trump said in March, and his instincts are right.
He could do that by intervening in the “House” litigation. Trump’s Solicitor General who represents the U.S. in the Supreme Court, John Sauer, was himself a “walk-on” college wrestler who became the team captain at Duke, and he could argue for a return to allowing colleges to keep compensation out of their sports.
The Senate Commerce Committee is holding a hearing on Wednesday for the misnamed Protect College Sports Act, which would mandate as federal law the opposite of what has long worked. This new federal law would force colleges to allow compensation for players by allowing them to take money for their name, image, or likeness (NIL), to the detriment of team spirit.
The Protect College Sports Act would micromanage college sports in additional ways, such as adopting team roster size limits, which makes it harder for a student to become a walk-on. This bill would place wage controls on the compensation of agents who will negotiate lucrative contracts for a few students, when there should not be any agents or compensation at all in college sports that thrived with amateur athletes.
This federal bill would prohibit the two most successful conferences, the Southeastern Conference (SEC) and the Big Ten, from expanding or merging. Never before has a federal law interfered with private associations like this.
A generation ago, college was part of the American Dream. College sports attracted students and donations by alumni, and millions of students obtained a good education and a solid foundation for the rest of their lives by attending college to play sports.
The federal lawsuit encourages NCAA Division I colleges to pay their players $20 million annually, but for most schools the money simply isn’t there. Most sports do not have a sizable television audience and will be eliminated, to save money to pay a handful of top basketball and football players who have little interest in academics.
Even before this court-ordered $2.8 billion burden on colleges, many were already going out of business. A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia predicted in 2024 that as many as 80 colleges might close in the next five years.
Last year 28 colleges went out of business, and during the past eight years more than 100 colleges have closed. The Huron Consulting Group found that roughly 25% of the private, nonprofit universities and colleges could close or merge in the next ten years.
Congress could help college sports by allowing a return to the amateur model, thereby ending what Trump has described as an “out-of-control financial arms race.” The Trump Administration could also stop granting visas to foreign athletes to play on college teams, which worsens this “arms race.”
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.
These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly
The draft Executive Order that Trump abruptly rejected last Thursday would have expanded federal power under the guise of pre-screening AI. Trump was right to cancel a blue-ribbon ceremony scheduled at the White House to sign this, which the heads of leading AI companies including Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg had found excuses not to attend.
The draft Executive Order has been leaked to the media, and it’s a Deep State doozy. Using AI slop like “Secure Frontier Model Deployment” and “covered frontier model,” the EO would have expanded federal power that is already far too great.
The EO would have prioritized prosecution for anyone who uses AI, empowering the federal police state which should be downsized instead. The EO would make the Department of War, which lacks any AI expertise, a Big Brother over all new AI breakthroughs by asking AI developers to submit to the Feds their innovations “for a period of up to 90 days before they plan to release such models to other trusted partners.”
“Other trusted partners”? The Deep State attempted, through the EO, to become the foremost trusted partner of AI developers, so that the federal government would receive all new AI developments in advance of everyone else.
This program would start as voluntary, but what begins as a voluntary government program usually becomes mandatory. The EO would have placed AI development under federal supervision, which has never been done before for any emerging industry.
The federal bureaucracy in D.C. is corrupt beyond repair. Giving it any authority over AI innovations, even if initially voluntary as the Executive Order proposed, would be an invitation to interfere with and thwart beneficial developments.
Thankfully, Trump said he was unhappy with the proposed EO and refused to sign it. The approach taken by whoever wrote it should be discarded and not revived in any form.
Military uses of AI are only a small part of its future, and the prominent AI developer Anthropic walked away from its profitable business with the Department of War rather than cave in to its demands that Anthropic remove ethical restrictions on its use. The War Department might take control of AI developments by declaring them to be national security risks, thereby stifling innovation without justification.
Rather than lobby the Department of War for business, a co-founder of Anthropic was at the Vatican, urging the Pope to include ethical limitations on the use of AI in his religious teachings. On Monday Pope Leo released a 42,300-word encyclical letter that condemned unethical uses of AI by militaries and to undermine jobs, and appeared to contain some of Anthropic’s ideas.
Graduating college students appear to agree with the Pope’s criticisms of AI, as commencement speakers were nearly booed off the stage whenever they praised AI. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was remarkably booed for minutes on May 15 during his speech at the University of Arizona graduation.
The booing was not limited to the Big Tech billionaires who are presumably profiting from AI. Boos greeted a music executive, Scott Borchetta, when he said about AI in his speech to Middle Tennessee State University, “It’s a tool. Make it work for you.”
Boos were the students’ response to even a real estate executive, Gloria Caulfield, when she told University of Central Florida graduates that AI is the “next industrial revolution.” College graduates are upset at the loss of jobs due to AI, and how their resumes are filtered by AI now rather than being read by real recruiters.
Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple who was the brains behind the engineering in its early products, has never put dollars above people and only he drew applause for his remarks to graduates about AI. “You all have AI—actual intelligence.”
“I was at a company where the engineers figured out how to make a brain,” Wozniak added. It “takes nine months,” he said, referring to the time we all spend in our mother’s womb.
Outside of college, ordinary folks are furious at how AI is causing unwanted data centers to build on hundreds of acres in their small communities, blighting the landscape, soaking up scarce water, and overloading the energy grid. In Festus, Missouri, a small town near St. Louis, citizens have initiated recall petitions against the mayor and three councilmen who approved a mammoth data center there.
The federal government is investing $2 billion in quantum computing, which is another reckless high-tech boondoggle. AI benefits from trillions of dollars in private investments, and there should not be any federal or local subsidies for AI at taxpayer expense.
Many feel that Covid was caused by taxpayer-funded gain-of-function research, which escaped from a laboratory. Actual intelligence should take priority over the artificial kind.
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.
These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly
On Monday the Colorado Supreme Court, by a wide 5-2 margin, ordered a Colorado children’s hospital to resume transgender treatments and surgeries on minors based on state law, even though the decision could force the hospital to lose its federal funding. The Trump Administration has taken strong action against the transgender movement, yet it marches on.
Last December the Trump administration threatened to withhold federal funding from facilities that provide transgender treatment to children, but a Biden-appointed federal judge in Oregon named Mustafa T. Kasubhai blocked that rule. Children’s Hospital Colorado had wisely suspended its program of applying hormonal treatments and puberty blockers to children due to the threatened loss of funding.
A lower court upheld the hospital’s decision against a legal challenge. Children’s hospitals depend heavily on federal funding, including their services under Medicaid, and thus ordering the hospital to continue with transgender treatment would do more harm than good.
The practice of medicine is historically regulated by state law, but since health care providers receive billions of dollars of federal funding, the Trump Administration said it would cut federal funding from facilities that continue to perform harmful procedures aimed at altering a child’s gender. Recently the American Medical Association and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons reversed their guidance on such procedures, urging a delay in transgender surgery prior to the age of 19.
Dominated by federal employees, Virginia has become like Colorado and other blue states in pushing the transgender agenda. When a police officer in Norfolk in southern Virginia objected to orders requiring him to use transgender pronouns, he was ordered to leave, stripped of his gun, suspended, and then fired.
Norfolk has historically been conservative, with many military veterans. It is alarming that police officers in Norfolk have been suspended and even fired for objecting to the use of the women’s locker room by a man purporting to be a transgender woman.
State courts in the mostly conservative states of Kansas and Montana are also imposing the transgender ideology on their residents. In Kansas last Friday, a county judge appointed by Democrat Gov. Laura Kelly issued a 117-page injunction against a good Kansas transgender law, which had been passed by the Republican legislature over her veto.
The ACLU brought this lawsuit against the Kansas ban on transgender operations and treatments for children. The county judge blocked the law based on an activist decision by the liberal Kansas Supreme Court, which invented a right of “personal autonomy” to expand abortion there even though those words cannot be found in its 167-year-old state constitution.
Meanwhile, the Montana Supreme Court has rendered multiple Leftist decisions, despite being in a red state that Trump won by 20 points in 2024. On April 14, the 5-2 court held that birth certificates and driver’s licenses must be changed to accommodate transgender demands.
The Montana Supreme Court ruled, based on its state constitution, that state agencies cannot refuse to alter birth certificates and driver’s licenses to accommodate transgender demands. Despite being born male, for example, a resident of the Big Sky Country can now change his birth certificate to state falsely that he was born female instead.
These Kansas and Montana decisions were based on their state constitutions, and the Colorado ruling was based on state law. This reasoning generally shields such decisions from review by the U.S. Supreme Court which, regardless, has avoided review of many important transgender cases that it could have decided.
The 7-2 decision last week by the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of abortion pill manufacturers was the result of all three Trump appointees crossing over to the liberal side of the Court, without explanation. Justices Thomas and Alito expressed their dismay at how well-established principles of law were disregarded to allow the continued distribution of the abortion pill without sensible safeguards such as in-person dispensing, and without compliance with a longstanding federal ban on abortion-by-mail.
The entire Democrat Party is lockstep in support of the transgender agenda, due to how Planned Parenthood supplements its revenue by offering transgender treatments. Only a few courts have been willing to defend children against harmful transgender procedures.
The U.S. Supreme Court indicated last year in the Skrmetti case that there is no right to transgender operations and treatments for children under the U.S. Constitution, but this good decision was silent about state constitutions. The Court upheld a law in Tennessee protecting minors against this harm, but this precedent does not protect children against pro-transgender state court decisions based on state law.
Under Skrmetti the federal government can act further to protect children against life-altering procedures and treatments pushed on them by the transgender ideology. In addition to withholding federal funds from facilities that promote transgender treatments, federal regulations could require transparency to the public about which facilities provide these objectionable treatments.
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.
These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.
"Feminism has changed the way women think, and it has changed the way men think, but the trouble is, it hasn't changed the attitudes of babies at all," said my mother, Phyllis Schlafly. I am so fortunate that my mother put babies first. In the 1960s and 1970s, a new ideology was fashionable: that women do not need or want either men or babies. Phyllis Schlafly lived a fulfilling life centered on her husband and children; which was in stark opposition to the idea that single women are happier alone.
I am so happy that she did put babies at the center of the conversation, because, as her child, I was the beneficiary of her putting babies first.
The current birth dearth is not due to lack of government money; it is due to a culture that tells young women to put career first and that men are expendable. Today, 40% of births in the United States are without the benefit of marriage. And marriage is definitely a benefit for the child. Children who are raised with a mother and a father married to each other are the most privileged group in America. These children are more likely to finish school, get employed, earn more money, be happier and healthier, and also to start their own families.
Intact families should be celebrated, not economically punished by bad tax policies. A true choice for mothers is the choice to nurture their own children, not to succumb to the economic and social pressures for them to farm them out to institutional day care. Mothers should never be economically punished for raising their own children.
Babies were always the first priority for Phyllis Schlafly. She especially liked to talk to babies. Whenever she saw a baby or toddler in public, she would immediately engage in an active conversation with the child. Today, digital interactions have replaced much face-to-face communications and our daily spoken word count has diminished. Texting is a poor substitute for talking! Babies need to hear a rich variety of words in order to develop speech, especially the sound and inflection of their own mother’s voice. Institutional day care cannot provide the same vibrant, nurturing chatter that comes from a mother.
Phyllis Schlafly rightly saw that feminist ideology devalued motherhood. She started an award for the Full-time Homemaker of the Year to honor women who prioritize their babies. Phyllis asked: would you rather be in an office instructed by a boss or managing your household from your own kitchen? She rejected the phrase "working mothers" to describe employed women, because, as she said, "all mothers work all the time".
The concept of taxpayer-paid day care for young children reflects a misplaced understanding of who is responsible for their care. Young children want and need their parents, not a nanny state, to look after them. Government welfare programs encourage the disintegration of the family by leading mothers to seek government support rather than support from fathers. Subsidized day care can undermine the family unit by diminishing the provider's role in the home. Americans consider whether it is wise policy to encourage mothers to leave their babies with government employees. What most mothers desire in paid work is to work inside their home or to work a flexible schedule that allows them to prioritize their family.
Americans spent $11B more on Mother's Day than Father's Day: ReportVideo At Eagle Forum, we believe in public and private virtue, meaning taxpayer money should be spent wisely and families should have control over their own households. If Congress truly wanted to help families, it should increase the dependent deduction on income taxes. Those savings would directly benefit families, without routing taxpayer money through a government intermediary.
Here is who loses under taxpayer-paid babysitting:
The child loses because what the child most wants is mother care, not day care. Day care may be expensive, but mother care is priceless.
The mother loses because no one cares more about her child than she does. The day care worker can never be emotionally invested in the welfare of the child.
The day care workers lose because wages are still low. Increasing the supply of day care will not raise workers’ wages.
The taxpayers lose because when the government pays, prices rise (as we have seen in the ever-rising prices of college education and health care). The subsidies will ensure that the day care businesses can raise their prices without losing customers.
Stay-at-home mothers lose as they do not receive any subsidy for choosing to remain at home and raise their own children. They have resisted the social pressure to return to paid employment and place their children in institutional babysitting.
However, there are some winners under taxpayer-paid babysitting:
Day care bureaucrats win because they can expand their business models. As in education, additional government funding often goes to administration rather than workers. Instead of supporting small family-run daycares, the industry will shift toward larger, institutional services.
Politicians win by pretending to give money to the people.
No job is more vital than motherhood. We honor all mothers who choose this important job.
Anne Schlafly is the Chairman of Eagle Forum and the daughter of Phyllis Schlafly.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly
As both political parties scramble for votes ahead of the upcoming midterm elections, even racing to do some last-minute redistricting, someone in the Trump Administration just committed an unforced error that could cost the GOP crucial men’s votes. On May 7, a “spokesperson” announced that the U.S. State Department would begin to revoke the passports of thousands of American citizens subject to child support orders from a family court.
Anyone whose passport is revoked while traveling abroad becomes unable to travel through international airports. The passport is the only official document proving that someone is an American citizen, and a birth certificate alone does not prove citizenship as demonstrated by the ongoing debate over birthright citizenship.
Soldiers and sailors, thousands of whom have child support obligations, could be hard hit by this new policy. While they can travel on official duty with a military ID, their dependents cannot, and thus our servicemembers need active passports to travel with their families.
In 1996, Congress inserted into the massive welfare reform bill a politically correct provision authorizing revocation of passports based on unpaid child support obligations, but administrations of both parties have wisely chosen not to enforce that law because it inflicts far more harm than good.
The State Department said it would initially revoke passports of men whose unpaid child support exceeds $100,000, which is impossible for most to pay, but subsequent revocations could be triggered by a debt of only $2,500. To restore their passports, the debts would have to be paid in full, and attorneys would be needed to clear the judgments in both the state and federal systems, a process that could take many weeks to accomplish.
In the meantime, the American men could be stranded abroad and subject to arrest by a hostile foreign government as unlawful residents. While much-needed deportations of illegal aliens appear to have dried up in the U.S., the State Department’s new policy could turn law-abiding Americans into criminals in foreign countries.
When an American citizen is accused of a crime in a foreign country, even murder, he can show his passport to the American embassy there and obtain support. Even if convicted, neither his American citizenship nor his passport is revoked, and a child support judgment is merely a financial obligation, and not a crime that justifies revoking American citizenship.
Men are the key demographic that Republicans need to attract to have a chance in the upcoming midterm elections, which makes the unexpected announcement of this new policy particularly senseless. It sounds like something Kamala Harris would have done if she were elected president, to pander to her feminist base.
Over 20 years ago the Bush Administration abruptly revoked the passport of the famed chess champion Bobby Fischer for having played a chess match in Yugoslavia, which violated a federal law that had never been enforced like that against anyone else. Fischer was then stranded with an invalid passport at Japan’s Narita airport as he tried to travel to the Philippines, and was detained for 9 months by Japanese immigration authorities.
As an American celebrity, Bobby Fischer was ultimately granted asylum in Iceland, where he had won the world chess championship against Boris Spassky in 1972. But no country is likely to grant asylum to many thousands of American men soon to be affected by this new passport policy.
Despite its misleading name, child support orders are not based on the actual needs of any child, do not have to be spent on a child, and often go to a welfare agency rather than the mom. The more that the father is denied custody and visitation, the higher his child support obligation is, and it can include above-market interest rates and attorney’s fees, non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.
States already have the means to try to enforce child support orders, such as imprisonment or denying occupational licenses or gun permits, but often decline to use such draconian tools because the father simply does not have the money. Moreover, unpaid child support obligations can result from denying the father visitation rights for his own children.
Roughly 70% of divorces are initiated by women, and among college-educated women the percentage is as high as 90%. Large child support obligations result from raising children in a fatherless home.
Revoking passports puts American citizens at risk of harm abroad. Without a passport enabling them to travel, these Americans can then be held and used as bargaining chips for a prisoner swap, as Russia did when it imprisoned a woman basketball player for alleged drug possession.
President Trump’s stated policy is to defend American citizens who are overseas. Putting American citizens at risk of being arrested in foreign countries, and held in foreign prisons, due to an arbitrary revocation of their passports is inconsistent with the goals of MAGA.
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.
These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly
We’re only six months from the midterm Election Day, and only four months from the start of early voting in September. In between are the slow summer months of June, July and August.
Time is running out for Republicans to hold on to control in Congress. In a half-dozen special congressional elections, voter support for the GOP candidate has declined by 6 to 10 points compared with 2024.
A loss by Republicans of the U.S. Senate, which is considered to be roughly 50% likely, would mean the inability to confirm a conservative nominee to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court. Every one of the 47 Democrats in the current Senate votes lockstep with liberals on social issues like abortion, and a net gain of 4 seats would give them control over new federal judges.
Up for grabs in November are five Senate seats currently held by Republicans: Democrats are predicted to win Republican-held seats in Maine and North Carolina and have an edge in Ohio and Alaska, while Texas is a toss-up. The Republican candidate for Senate in Ohio is handicapped by the unpopular Vivek Ramaswamy at the top of the ticket for governor.
Gasoline prices have risen to a national average of $4.46 per gallon, and traditionally voters have rejected the party in power when gas is above $4 per gallon. The cost of gas is up 30 cents per gallon in just the last week, so the impact of this on political polling is still to come.
At the state level, twice as many Republican-controlled legislative chambers are at risk of flipping to Democratic control, as vice versa. The legislative chambers most vulnerable to flipping are the Republican-held House and Senate in the swing states of Arizona and Wisconsin, and the House chamber in Michigan, all of which Republicans won in 2024 by promising peace.
Delivering a high-level indictment for the wrongful weaponization of the federal government against Trump could be a watershed moment for MAGA voters. By now MAGA expected indictments of Jack Smith and his ilk, after U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon found that Smith was unlawfully appointed to prosecute Trump.
Trump has tried to deport Haitians and other migrants, but it appears that the promise of mass deportations on which Trump was elected has been shut down by non-MAGA White House advisers. They've also blocked RFK Jr. from picking new members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which sets vaccine policy, or firing the members of the Preventive Services Task Force, which imposed costly health care mandates.
More attention to the needs of young men, who unexpectedly swung to the Republicans in 2024, is long overdue. An initiative to improve fathers’ rights in custody disputes, for example, would send a helpful message to the voters who could re-elect Republicans.
Young women, on the other hand, are the demographic that elected the socialist Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York City, and they are not voting Republican for the foreseeable future. There is a widening gender gap between young men and women, with Democrats consolidating their support from unmarried women while Republicans seem to be kicking away the young men who voted for them in 2024.
According to a recent poll published on Monday by Politico, “Just 58 percent of young Republicans say they’ll vote GOP — with nearly a third selecting ‘neither’ or ‘won’t vote.’” In contrast, 85% of young Democrats – who are mostly women – plan to vote for their party this fall.
Much of this is the result of an economy that is not doing well for Gen Z. College graduates face the toughest job market in a decade, with their unemployment higher than the national average and underemployment at an astronomic 42.5%.
Young men have been pulled into the pandemic of gambling on their cell phones, and a crackdown on the predatory practices of online casinos would be welcomed relief. Sports gambling has corrupted college and professional sports, and prosecuting the few who are caught neither solves the problem nor satisfies anyone.
When asked about the prosecution of an American special forces soldier for profiting from wagers based on inside information about the raid and capture of the Venezuelan dictator Maduro, Trump said “I’m not happy with any of that stuff” and “the whole world, unfortunately, has become somewhat of a casino.”
It would be helpful to see some Teddy Roosevelt-style action against corporate cronyism that is alienating young voters who struggle with low wages, high debt, and housing prices that are out of reach. Trump should take on Big Tech and tap into the groundswell of fury by voters against the monstrous data centers that are popping up all over the country, often overloading the electric and water utilities that Americans rely upon.
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.
These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.
