This past Saturday, Phyllis Schlafly hosted former House GOP Majority Leader Tom DeLay on “Eagle Forum Live” to discuss the alleged threat of gay marriage. Schlafly segued into the topic of gay marriage by describing an open letter to the Supreme Court, signed by conservative pastors and politicians, pledging to defy any Court decision which strikes down state bans on same-sex marriage.
DeLay lamented that “people don’t understand the constitution. We haven’t taught our children now for three or four generations what the Constitution is, and the separation of powers, and what our Founding Fathers had in mind as this brilliant understanding of how you can limit government and limit the tyranny put on us through people or oligarchies.”
Because of this supposed constitutional ignorance, DeLay claimed, “right now, the American people don’t understand that the Supreme Court, when it makes a ruling, it’s just an opinion if no one enforces that ruling. The Supreme Court doesn’t have a police force; the Supreme Court doesn’t have an army; the Supreme Court doesn’t have people that can enforce their ruling.” Therefore, if conservatives “stand up to them and invoke the Constitution, then we don’t have to accept a ruling on marriage that redefines marriage. And that’s basically what this ad is all about. We’re sending a message to the Supreme Court that, number one, it’s illegal that they have this case before them; it’s not in their jurisdiction.”
Proving his Constitutional prowess, DeLay argued that “it’s not in their authority to write law by ten unelected, unaccountable people, lawyers, and if – this is a red line that we’re drawing. If they rule against marriage, we will all defy them.”
Further along in the show, a caller, responding to the overreach of the Supreme Court, noted that “civil rights laws, such as Brown v. Board of Education and Virginia v. Loving [sic], were put on us by courts legislating from the bench and presidential executive orders. And back then even one-third of the black people did not want integration. And Governor George Wallace warned about the tyranny now happening under the Obama administration.”
Responding to this lecture, Schlafly observed, “Well, lots of mistakes have been made along those lines.”
DeLay concluded his time on Schlafly’s show by commentating on the “danger” of the potential imposition of martial law by pointing to the stand-off at Bundy Ranch in April 2015, where Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy refused to pay grazing fees for using federal land. “He stood up to them and backed them down,” DeLay said.
