Politics & Power Quote by Phyllis Schlafly

Schlafly’s sentence is built like a lab report, but it’s really a political warning label. “Strong correlation” borrows the prestige of social science to imply inevitability: accept evolution and you don’t just change your mind about biology, you slide down an ideological chute toward a whole package of “liberal views.” The rhetorical move is strategic bundling. Instead of arguing each issue on its own terms, she links them in a single chain, turning evolution into a cultural gateway drug.

The list is doing covert moral work. “Pornography” and “prayer in schools” aren’t adjacent by accident; they frame the battlefield as spiritual order versus permissive chaos. Abortion and gun control are there as the era’s high-voltage wedges, meant to activate reflexes. “Economic freedom” smuggles in a Cold War-flavored suspicion of government, while “even animal rights” is the tell: it paints liberals as so unmoored from human exceptionalism that they’ll elevate animals over people. Evolution, in this telling, isn’t just a theory; it’s the origin story of a politics that dissolves hierarchy, tradition, and divine authority.

Context matters. Schlafly’s career was forged in the post-1960s conservative backlash, when school curricula, the courts, and feminism were cast as engines of national decline. By making evolution the connective tissue between classroom science and a menu of cultural anxieties, she’s not trying to win a debate; she’s trying to discipline a coalition. Believe this, and you’ll vote like that.