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Dr. Laura Schlessinger wowed the crowd of college interns gathered in the Rayburn
House Office Building as Michelle Easton, president of the Clare Boothe Luce Policy
Institute, presented the talk-show host with the institute’s Conservative
Leadership Award for 2001.
“There will be a million opportunities to sell your soul in large portions and little bites,” she told the interns. “Do not do it.”
Schlessinger, whose radio show has a weekly audience of 18 million, urged the young people to recognize that they cannot do everything in life.
“I don’t balance my life,” she said. “I don’t believe in balance. I make choices. When you say, ‘I can be a parent and a this and a this,’ no you can’t. And usually, it’s your kids that pay the price, or your spouse.”
Declaring herself a “recovered feminist,” she said that she believed “religion is crucial to avoiding divorce. People today talk about my right, my right, my rights. You can avoid divorce when two people are putting their own rights secondary. … I get lots of letters from young men who are afraid because they fear that if they get married, a few years later their wife will want to ‘find herself.’ That usually means in the arms of another guy. And then she can move to California with the kids and a judge will say, ‘He can e-mail them twice a day. That’s enough fathering.'”
Schlessinger described the feminist movement as “white rich girls in East Coast schools complaining to their female professors.”
In presenting Dr. Laura with the award, Easton said, “Feminism has come to stand for the opposite of what I believe in. The suffragettes of 100 years ago would not be feminists today. They wanted equal legal rights with men. … Feminists have to deny the existence of women like me: married, a mother and with a successful career.”
She said that her institute is named after Clare Boothe Luce because “she was the most influential woman in modern American history and in the history of the American conservative movement.” A congresswoman, playwright, ambassador, and editor of Vanity Fair, Luce (1903-1987) stood against communism abroad and for freedom at home.
Former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick also spoke at the forum. The vote that removed the United States from the U.N. Human Rights Commission, she said, “is just one of several moves within the U.N. to block the discussion of repression and oppression.”
Christina Hoff Sommers, author of “Who Stole Feminism?” and “The War Against Boys,” told the interns: “Overall, it is ridiculous to refer to American women as an oppressed class.”
Bay Buchanan, sister of former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, gave a speech on the abortion issue.
“It has been 28 years since the Supreme Court said abortion on demand would be the law of the land,” she said. “Very little has been done to roll back that decision.” She said that the worst aspect of the abandonment of the Republican Party by Sen. James Jeffords, I-Vt., was the loss of control of the Judiciary Committee, making it very difficult to get conservative appointees approved. She said that President Bush must take a hard line on Supreme Court nominees.
“He should nominate one pro-lifer after another until they approve one,” she said.
House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, gave the final speech. In response to a question from an intern from the peanut-heavy state of Georgia, Armey explained why he began the “peanut wars” in 1990.
Taking out his House ID card, he said, “If you want to sell peanuts in this country for human consumption, you must have an electronic card that has a quota that is deducted from every time you deliver a load. … That is un-American. The American price for peanuts is twice as high as the world price.”
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