Andrew Schlafly

Early life

Andrew Schlafly is one of six children. His great-great-grandfather August Schlafly was a Swiss immigrant to the United States. His father John Fred Schlafly Jr. was an attorney, and his mother Phyllis Schlafly spearheaded the movement opposing the Equal Rights Amendment and was founder of the Eagle Forum.

Born and raised in Alton, Illinois, Andrew Schlafly graduated from Saint Louis Priory School and later received a B.S.E. in electrical engineering and certificate in engineering physics from Princeton University in 1981. After graduating from Princeton, Schlafly briefly worked as a device physicist for Intel in Santa Clara, California until 1983, when he became a microelectronics engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. In 1984, Schlafly married Catherine Kosarek, a medical student and fellow Princeton alum. Schlafly later worked for Bell Labs before enrolling at Harvard Law School.

Schlafly graduated from Harvard Law School in 1991 with a J.D. in the same class with future U.S. president Barack Obama. From 1989 to 1991, Schlafly was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Career

After graduating from Harvard, Schlafly served as an adjunct professor at Seton Hall Law School. In 1992, Schlafly ran as a Republican for the United States House of Representatives seat of Virginia's 11th congressional district; Schlafly came in last place in the primary.

Schlafly was an associate for the Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz law firm in New York City before moving to private practice, stating: "Large firms never do work [for conservatives] on homosexual or abortion issues." Additionally, Schlafly is General Counsel for the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and led its Supreme Court challenge of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In 2010, Schlafly wrote an article for the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons about the economic effects of the legislation.

In 2010, Schlafly became lead counsel for a group seeking to recall US Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey. The group, associated with the tea party movement, argued that the US Constitution permits political recall for federal offices, despite not explicitly mentioning so. On November 18, 2010, the New Jersey Supreme Court rejected Schlafy's arguments, finding that the New Jersey provision violated the U.S. Constitution. Later that year, Schlafly represented the group RecallND in a case before the North Dakota Supreme Court in another frustrated effort to recall Kent Conrad, another Democratic US Senator.

Conservapedia

Schlafly created the wiki-based Conservapedia in November 2006. He felt the need to start the project after reading a student's assignment written using Common Era dating notation, rather than the Anno Domini system that he preferred. Although he was "an early Wikipedia enthusiast", as reported by Shawn Zeller of Congressional Quarterly, Schlafly became concerned about perceived bias after Wikipedia editors repeatedly undid edits to the article about the 2005 Kansas evolution hearings. Schlafly expressed hope that Conservapedia would become a general resource for American educators and a counterpoint to the liberal bias that he perceived in Wikipedia.

In 2009, Schlafly appeared on The Colbert Report to discuss his Conservative Bible Project, a project hosted on Conservapedia that aims to rewrite English translations of the Bible in order to remove terms described as "liberal bias".

Dialogue with Richard Lenski

Richard Lenski, an evolutionary biologist who completed an experiment on evolution which showed speciation of E. coli bacteria over 10,000 generations, was engaged in correspondence by Schlafly about the results in 2008. Conservapedia supports creationism and Schlafly disputed that bacteria could evolve via beneficial mutations. The correspondence was commented on across the Internet. Schlafly was criticized by Lenski on sites such as Ars Technica for not reading Lenski's paper properly, for not understanding the experimental data he requested, and for not taking notice of people on Conservapedia itself who considered the paper well researched.