Mlk Roe And Conservatism - Road to the Middle Class

A WEEK AGO presidential candidate Hillary Clinton got herself into hot water by making the point that it is presidents like Lyndon Johnson that write the laws and not activists like Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

She has a point. Politicians do tend to come along at the last minute and suck up all the oxygen in the room when they take credit for movements that have been decades in the making.

In my view it is not politicians that count. It is the people who think thoughts and the actors who lead movements and activist organizations.

But never mind. Maybe we want people like Hillary Clinton to believe that it is politicians that count, not ordinary people and not extraordinary people like the Rev. King.

This day is not just Martin Luther King Day. It is also the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. And it is also a day to think about the importance not of changing the law but of “changing hearts and minds.”

When the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade it changed the law of the land. But it did not change the culture. Initially, the pro-life movement that arose in opposition took the same road. It worked on changing the law.

But we can see now that the important work for the pro-life movement is not changing the law, it is changing hearts and minds. When you have changed hearts and minds the work of the politicians in writing new laws is merely an afterthought.

And anyway, in my view the important thing is not to make abortion illegal, but to make it “safe, legal, and shameful.”

As conservatives face a rebuilding year, it is important, as John O’Sullivan wrote ten years ago in National Review, that conservatives work to reduce the amount of law in society. For the intensive law and bureaucracy regime is inherently anti-conservative. All that law, he asserts,

[I]t discredits the dispersed moral sentiments of traditional society — such virtues as duty, fidelity, and chastity — which enable that society to work spontaneously without too close a bureaucratic supervision.

That is what liberals don’t understand. When you kick away the props of society, the virtues of duty, fidelity, and chastity, then you have to do everything with expensive law and bureaucracy. And the truth is that there just isn’t enought bandwidth to do that successfully. The social emotions, shame, guilt, love, and generosity, are much more efficient in ordering society.

So we don’t want women to fear doing something illegal when they have an abortion. That is so liberal and so bureaucratic. We want them, and the fathers of their children, to fear the shame of it: killing the fruit of their union.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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