{"id":10835,"date":"2012-02-09T05:22:22","date_gmt":"2012-02-09T11:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/deaconsbench\/?p=10835"},"modified":"2016-09-30T17:34:32","modified_gmt":"2016-09-30T21:34:32","slug":"meet-maggie-gallagher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/deaconsbench\/2012\/02\/meet-maggie-gallagher\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet Maggie Gallagher"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Salon<\/a><\/strong> has a long profile of the woman who is one of the most vocal proponents of traditional marriage, and how she got to be where she is today:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In September 1978, Yale freshmen would not have voted Maggie Gallagher<\/a> the member of the Class of 1982 most likely to get pregnant before graduation. Gallagher was the third of four children from a close family in Portland, Ore. When she was young, her parents, a financial planner and a housewife, had been active in their local Catholic parish, and Gallagher and her siblings spent some years in Catholic elementary school. As Gallagher got older, her parents began to drift away from the church, and Gallagher\u2019s mother became something of a spiritual seeker (\u201cShe once took me to an Up With People concert,\u201d Gallagher now recalls, ruefully.) But Gallagher herself moved to the right in high school. Like many precocious girls, she fell for Ayn Rand\u2019s novels, including \u201cThe Fountainhead\u201d and \u201cAtlas Shrugged,\u201d and for Objectivism<\/a>, Rand\u2019s capitalist, acquisitive philosophy. (Gallagher\u2019s other formative influence was the science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein.) When she got to Yale, she only gingerly embraced the secular mores, the drinking and the drugs and the hookup culture, that defined life on liberal campuses in the late 1970s. She tried marijuana once and did not like it. She smoked cigarettes but, afraid of becoming addicted, never inhaled.<\/p>\n

Gallagher\u2019s earliest acquaintances at Yale remember a somewhat sheltered young woman, polite and likable, a bit startled by what she saw. One of the freshmen who shared Gallagher\u2019s suite of rooms, Bird Jensen, now a musician in Australia, remembers Gallagher as \u201ca born-again Christian\u201d \u2014 which Gallagher was not, but the mistake is telling. She remembers Gallagher, who after all was from a progressive, metropolitan area, as if she were from a small town in the middle of the plains. \u201cIt was very different for her to have Jewish people celebrating Shabbat, or have a bunch of hippies strumming guitar, or punk people playing music in our room,\u201d Jensen says. \u201cThat was all very new to her. But Maggie was friendly. She had strong views on things, but we all got along.\u201d Another freshman suitemate, Faith Stevelman<\/a>, now a professor at New York Law School, remembers Gallagher as intellectually provocative \u2014 \u201cShe was introducing me to ideas nobody else would introduce me to\u201d \u2014 but a bit of a killjoy. \u201cI think she was somewhat socially immature.\u201d Although Gallagher recalls being totally happy to be at Yale \u2014 \u201cIt was the first time in my life I was surrounded by many intellectuals,\u201d she says \u2014 Stevelman remembers a young woman who stiffened at everything risky about college in the 1970s: sex, drugs, radical politics. \u201cShe was not easygoing,\u201d Stevelman says of her suitemate. \u201cShe wasn\u2019t what you would call a fun roommate.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a freshman, Gallagher joined the Party of the Right, a debating society affiliated with the Yale Political Union<\/a>. The YPU is a very large campus organization, with hundreds of members, whose main activity is to bring speakers to campus several times a month. But it is organized into \u201cparties,\u201d smaller clubs that meet for meals, pub nights and informal debates. Each party has its own flavor, political and cultural. The Tory Party is right-of-center and high Anglophile (the men wear tweed, the women plan to take their future husbands\u2019 last names); the Liberal Party is left-of-center, earnest and wonkish. The Party of the Right has the deepest culture of the half-dozen or so parties. Its membership is diverse, comprising libertarians and monarchists, Catholic traditionalists and Objectivists, monetarists and distributivists. But they share a passionate, if often pretentious, reverence for the life of the mind. Members of the Party of the Right often major in philosophy, and they prefer debating questions about God or the Good to mundane matters of policy.<\/p>\n

The party\u2019s intentional eccentricity \u2014 when I was at Yale, in the 1990s, several Party of the Right men affected hats and trench coats \u2014 helps explain its reputation for cultishness. For many members, the party becomes their entire social world, and so it is not surprising that party romances are common. As a senior, Gallagher began seeing a fellow party member, a sophomore who wrote conservative editorials for a campus magazine and dreamed of being a doctor.<\/p>\n

Today, they have different memories of the relationship \u2014 how long they had been dating, how close they were \u2014 but on one fact they agree: 30 years ago this spring, months before she was supposed to graduate, Gallagher discovered she was pregnant.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read more. <\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Salon has a long profile of the woman who is one of the most vocal proponents of traditional marriage, and how she got to be where she is today: In September 1978, Yale freshmen would not have voted Maggie Gallagher the member of the Class of 1982 most likely to get pregnant before graduation. Gallagher […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":132,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marriage"],"yoast_head":"\nMeet Maggie Gallagher<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Salon has a long profile of the woman who is one of the most vocal proponents of traditional marriage, and how she got to be where she is today: In\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/deaconsbench\/2012\/02\/meet-maggie-gallagher\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Meet Maggie Gallagher\" \/>\n<meta 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