Daily Dolt: Phyllis Schafly

Lying twice wasn’t enough over at Illinois Review, they pulled in Phyllis Schlafly to lie a third time about the ERA and Social Security.

The passage Eaton and Schlafly are lying about is on page 206 in Sex Bias in the U.S. Code

Here is what they claim supports them on page 206:

“Congress and the President should direct their attention to the concept that pervades the Code: that the adult world is (and should be) divided into two classes – independent men, whose primary responsibility is to win bread for a family, and dependent women, whose primary responsibility is to care for children and household. This concept must be eliminated from the code if it is to reflect the equality principle.”

This, of course, is out of context given directly following this passage is:

Underlying the recommendations made in this report is the fundamental point that allocation of responsibilities within the family is a matter properly determined solely by the individuals involved.  Government should not steer individual decisions concerning household or breadwinning roles by casting the law’s weight on the side of (or against) a particular method of ordering private relationships.  Rather, a policy of strict neutrality should be pursued.  That policy should accomodate both traditional and innovative patterns.  At the same time, it should assure removal of artificial constraints so that women and men willing to explore their full potential as human beings may create new traditions by their actions.

I also cited page 45 and since Eaton and Schlafly continue their lie, let’s cut and paste pages 45 and 46 of the report.

1. Revise social security law to provide father’s benefits in all cases where mother’s benefits are provided under present law;

2. Eliminate the dependency requirement for husband’s or widower’s benefits;

3. Provide derivative social security benefits to divorced husbands;

4. Make the age 62 computation point applicable for men born prior to 1913;

5. Eliminate the 20-of-4O quarter work test required now to qualify for disability
benefits;

6. Establish an occupational definition of disability for workers 55 years and older;

7. Make eligibility for benefits available all disabled widows and disabled surviving divorced wives regardless of age, and make the benefits not subject to actuarial
reduction;

8. Provide benefits to disabled spouses of beneficiaries;

9. Define dependents to include relatives live in the home;

10. Reduce the duration of marriage requirement from 20 to 5 or 10 years for a divorced spouse to qualify for benefits on the basis of the wage-earner spouse’s earnings record, and remove the requirement of consecutive years of marriage. In the alternative, divorced wife’s right to receive benefits should be based on the economic relationship between the parties and not the length marriage;

11. Allow additional dropout years to relate benefits more to current earnings;

 12. Compute primary benefits and spoused benefits to increase the primary benefits for workers by approximately one-eighth, and reduce the spouse’s proportion from one-half to one-third, maintaining thereby the current total benefit of 15 percent for a couple while at the same time improving the protection for single workers, working couples, and surviving spouses; and

13. Amend the Social Security Act to eliminate separate references to men and women.

Phyllis Schlafley is lying and doing it badly.  When the report (it wasn’t a book by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, it was a report to The United States Commission on Civil Rights) was issued men did not receive the same survivor benefits women did.  That was changed not long after the report actually and as such, the lie at the center of this scare tactic was made moot nearly 30 years ago.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg wasn’t arguing that survivor and spouse benefits should be eliminated to make individuals more equal, she was arguing that men should receive the same benefits in the same situation.  The reason for this is that families should decide upon the proper roles within the family, not the government. The point was to increase liberty while still providing the same level of benefits–which is what the system has done over this time.

That Eaton and Schlafly would so boldly lie isn’t terribly surprising.  Schlafly is still touting unisex bathrooms. The issue is why does anyone give them any attention or space to print this crap other than on wingnut blogs.  Eaton took her lie to the Southtown Star and got it pubished presumably because it was an opinion piece. It was an opinion piece, it just had several facts supporting the claims wrong.  And not just wrong, but the opposite of her claims.