Schlafly in context

In a post here, I began to examine the background of a quotation attributed to Phyllis Schlafly of the conservative group Eagle Forum.

I promised an update following my investigation of the source used by Michael Lienesch, and my investigation went smoothly and quickly, with results exceeding my expectations.

Michael Lienesch emerges with a bit of a black eye to his reputation. I located his book and looked up his reference. Here's the relevant excerpt from "Redeeming America":

Phyllis Schlafly takes the argument to its logical conclusion. The atomic bomb, she said as recently as 1979, is "a marvelous gift that was given to our country by a wise God."
(Lienesch, "Redeeming America")

The problem for Lienesch is not the manner in which he used the quotation (though I shouldn't rule out questionable use of Schlafly's statement by Lienesch--it just wasn't my focus, here). The problem is that Lienesch drew the quotation from a secondary source, specifically Carol Felsenthal's "The Sweetheart of the Silent Majority: The Biography of Phyllis Schlafly."

Good researchers avoid using secondhand sourcing.

Felsenthal provided no bibliographic references in her work.

This is how she employed the quotation:

In 1979, calling it essential that the United States remain the number one nuclear power, she described the atomic bomb as "a marvelous gift that was given to our country by a wise God."
(Felsenthal, "Sweetheart of the Silent Majority" p. 51)

Returning to periodical research, the earliest reference I could find was in a 1982 New York Times story by Lynn Rosselini.

Stymied by the poor documentation by these authors, I contacted Phyllis Schlafly directly (how's that for initiative?).

The statement is more or less true; I don't remember when I said it. But the context was speculation about how different the world would have been if the Germans or the Soviets had gotten the bomb first -- and both countries were working on it. In U.S. hands, the world could have peace. If the Germans or the Soviets had gotten it, they would have used it for world conquest. I don't know how anyone could dispute the fact that it was one of history's most important events that the bomb came to America first and not to a world conqueror. And, yes, I do think America has been divinely blessed, in so many ways. Count our getting the bomb first as one of those ways.
(Phyllis Schlafly, January 2007)

This explanation, if it accounts for the context of the statement, seems at odds with way Joseph S. Nye Jr handles it in his book "Understanding International Conflicts."

Moral arguments are not all the same. Some are more compelling than others. We ask whether they are logical and consistent. For instance, when the activist Phyllis Schlafly argued that nuclear weapons are a good thing because God gave them to the free world, we should wonder why God also gave them to Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China. Moral arguments are not all equal.
(Nye, "Understanding International Conflicts" p. 21)

Nye, in what appears to be a well-reasoned book overall, seems to have constructed a straw man version of Schlafly's argument for his purpose of illustrating a flawed moral argument--though a clear reference to the original context would settle the matter more definitively.

There seems little reason to doubt Schlafly's account, however. Unless and until the full context of the quotation comes to light, a handling such as Nye's should be regarded with skepticism.