Conservative leader Schlafly says `outing' of son was `strike at me'

By Mary Voboril 

Knight-Ridder Newspapers 

The ``nattering nabobs of negativism,'' to borrow a phrase from former Vice 
President Spiro Agnew, had lured Phyllis Schlafly to NBC-TV's ``Meet the Press'' 
to talk live about Republicans and politics. But at the outset Schlafly, 
doyenne of the conservative cause, was asked not about politics but about... 
her eldest son. 

Had John Schlafly's recent admission that he was gay changed his mother's 
attitude toward non-traditional lifestyles like homosexuality? (No.) 

Should her son be excluded from all government jobs? (Gays are entitled to 
equal rights, Schlafly said, but not ``preferential rights.'') 

Had the disclosure made Schlafly more sensitive to people who contract AIDS? 
(``I've always been sensitive.'') 

Schlafly, 68, recalled the September ``Meet the Press'' ambush during a recent 
speaking trip to Florida. Founder and president of The Eagle Forum, which 
promotes itself as ``leading the pro-family movement,'' Schlafly is the 
nation's best-known spokeswoman for traditional family values and its No. 1 
feminist-basher. 

In the 1970s she led the successful fight against the Equal Rights Amendment 
partly by claiming it would pave the way for gay weddings; today, the National 
Gay and Lesbian Task Force assails her as ``one of the top five most powerful 
anti-gay forces in the country.'' 

``Meet the Press''' focus on her son's gayness ``was obnoxious!'' she said 
during an interview. ``It didn't have anything to do with the subject. We were 
going to talk about the Republican convention and the future of the Republican 
Party, and Tim Russert,'' moderator on the show, ``just threw that in.... The 
only reason people bring it up is to embarrass me.'' 

Russert, however, brought it up in the context of the GOP convention, where 
television evangelist Pat Robertson warmly praised Schlafly as the woman who 
gunned down the ERA. ``If it were not for this lady,'' Robertson said, ``we 
would have had homosexual rights written into the Constitution.'' 

Schlafly's son John, 41, is a lawyer who lives with his mother in their 12-
room Tudor home in Alton, Ill. He was ``outed'' last year by the New York-based 
magazine Queer World, also known as QW, which has since suspended publication. 

``Nobody had anything against my son. It was a deliberate strike at me. It 
just shows how hateful those people are,'' Schlafly said of QW. She theorizes 
she was targeted in retaliation for her anti-abortion lobbying. The QW story, 
she says, ``shows the political alliance between the pro-choice movement and 
gays.'' 

As on Meet the Press, Schlafly stiffens but maintains a chilly smile while 
discussing her son. She is asked when she realized he was gay. 

``A long time ago,'' she replies. He never told her in so many words, and 
nothing remarkable happened to tip her off. ``I just knew.'' She never 
confronted her son; they discussed it only after the QW story broke. 

The media, liberal and otherwise, were attracted to the story like sharks to 
spilled blood. At home in Illinois, ``it was ugly,'' Schlafly recalls, smoothing 
the hem of her pink and navy Chanel-style suit. A bow was at her throat, a gold 
eagle pinned to her left shoulder. Journalists staked out her stately home, 
with television crews trying to shoot pictures through the windows. 

``Obnoxious,'' Schlafly says. ``You know how it is when the feeding frenzy 
starts. We made a decision that we would talk to the print media but not the 
TV media, because TV can't do a story if they don't have pictures, and we 
figured the print media would write something anyway.'' 

While acknowledging his homosexuality, John Schlafly refused to repudiate 
Robertson and other Republicans who publicly mock gays. Instead he attacked 
``a band of screechy gay activists and Washington-based pressure groups who 
get all the attention. The truth is, family values people... are not out to 
bash gay people.'' 

``I was proud of him,'' Phyllis Schlafly says. 

She hasn't a clue why her firstborn child is gay, unlike his three brothers 
and two sisters. 

``I don't know and he doesn't know,'' Schlafly said. ``He thinks he's always 
been. But about this thing of being born gay, he doesn't know that. I don't 
know if anybody knows that.'' 

She knows of nothing she might have done to start her son down the road to 
gayness. The presence of a strong mother and weak father, long used to explain 
homosexuality, especially doesn't fit: ``He had a very strong father,'' Schlafly 
says. The late Fred Schlafly, 15 years her senior, was a well-to-do lawyer who 
took an active role in anti-Communist issues. 

On the matter of admitting gays to the military, Schlafly said she defers to 
the judgment of Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and 
other Pentagon brass who oppose it. 

Maer Roshan, the QW editor who interviewed John Schlafly, said he ``had not 
been particularly closeted. He goes to gay film festivals, and he's been seen 
at meetings of gay Republicans.'' 

John Schlafly was cordial throughout their hour-long telephone conversation, 
Roshan said. ``He even asked us if we needed a picture of him.'' 

QW published the story, he said, to showcase the ``hypocrisy of a public 
figure.'' 

In Florida, Phyllis Schlafly freely offered opinions when asked about other 
matters: 

On U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor: ``She's a Republican 
feminist. `Republican' feminist. There's some softer edge to that than there 
is to `Democratic' feminist. But it's disappointing that a Reagan appointee has 
those views. You just wonder how much she misled him, because Reagan certainly 
didn't have any feminist views.'' 

On what Republicans must do to retake the White House: ``Clinton has to make a 
mess of things. I kind of think that'll happen. He's made a decision to go for 
big, big government in the way Lyndon Johnson did, in the way Franklin Roosevelt 
did.... The time has passed for that.'' 

On whether women of the 1990s are better off than in earlier decades: ``There 
are more horizons, more job opportunities, but at the same time divorce has been 
the worst thing that's happened to this country. It's meant devastation to so 
many families, so many women, so many children. The consequences of divorce and 
out-of-wedlock births, which for some people seem to be socially acceptable, 
have a tremendous effect on the lives and status of women.'' Divorce laws ought 
to be toughened, she says. 

On whether President Clinton has done anything right: ``No. Hillary is running 
the country. She's calling the shots on anything she's interested in, which 
means she's running the Justice Department, and health care links in with her 
two very close friends, Donna Shalala (Health and Human Services secretary) and 
Marian Wright Edelman,'' who runs the Children's Defense Fund and is one of the 
first lady's closest confidants. 

On whether she still agrees that ``sex harassment on the job is not a problem 
for the virtuous woman, except in the rarest of cases,'' as she said in 1981: 
``I'm sure there are some cases of men who are unacceptably slobbish. But in 
the ordinary course of human relationships, I think men do not persist in being 
turned down.''