The Washington Post published an absurd column by Max Boot, who is also a CNN contributor, claiming that the FX/Hulu series Mrs. America provided insight into why America elected a president that would encourage people to ingest disinfectant.
The column uses fictionalized scenes from Mrs. America to support his false claims about conservatives. The column provoked an excellent response from John Hirschauer entitled Max Boot’s Shoddy Attack on Phyllis Schlafly.
The Washington Post refused to print the op-ed here written by Eagle Forum Vice President Colleen Holcomb and the following letter to the editor by Chairman Anne Schlafly Cori.
A historian should get his facts right before drawing conclusions. Max Boot is factually incorrect on “Mrs. America”, which is a fictional drama designed to rewrite history and defame an intelligent woman only because of her conservative opinions.
Boot asserts that Schlafly's statements on the Equal Rights Amendment were "far-fetched", but her facts on ERA came directly from "Sex Bias in the U.S. Code," written by Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1977, which detailed the changes that ERA would force in the military, family law, education, and privacy laws. Boot also slimes Schlafly with the charge that her followers were racist, using a fictional character mouthing Hollywood dialogue. In fact, Eagle Forum's bylaws, written by Schlafly in 1975, prohibited discrimination "for all persons regardless of race, creed, gender, age, or national origin".
Max Boot uses the following words to describe Phyllis Schlafly: incendiary, extreme, paranoid, irrational, wing nut, and unhinged. As Phyllis Schlafly said in response to a verbal attack from Betty Friedan, “If you are weak on both the law and the facts, abuse your opponents.”
