Reality On Judicial Activism

NOW WE CONSERVATIVES are all in a tizzy about the California Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage. How could they, we wail? How could they find the right to gay marriage in the Fourteenth Amendment? How could they turn upside down centuries of tradition and custom?

They found it because they regard the issue as a simple matter of dignity and equality. They found it because the Enlightenment proposes that anything that can’t be rationally defended ought to be regarded as a superstition. Of course gays should be able to marry if they love one another. Isn’t it obvious?

Conservatives have to understand that we are a subculture in the United States. The educated elite, which drives the culture, gets to set the agenda on most everything in the United States, and we should that’s the way it is.

What conservatives have the power to do is make life very uncomfortable for the educated elite.

Mostly, we can make it uncomfortable at the ballot box. Thus we have moved the chains on abortion and guns because Democrats have found that their support for abortion and gun control loses elections.

On gay marriage the media and the courts naturally follow the lead of liberal activists and enact their agenda. That’s what politics is all about. Conservatives only get a look in when a policy manifestly fails (and we are talking big-time failure like welfare) or because Democrats start losing elections.

Does gay marriage constitute an attack on heterosexual marriage? Will it lead to polygamy and bestiality as the alarmists insist? Nobody knows. And even if it does it may not make any difference unless the Democratic support for gay marriage starts losing them elections.

Think of this. The government education system is a mess and mostly hurts the children of minorities. But the Democrats don’t care. Because the victims of the lousy education system don’t turn around and vote for Republicans.

That’s the tragedy about the social issues. It is lower-class Democrats that suffer from the dumbing down of the culture, the sexualization of childhood, the decline of marriage. It is their lives that are blasted by social breakdown.

Surely we should be able to find a way to speak to them. But to communicate we’d probably have to talk the language of victimhood. And Republicans don’t do victimhood. We don’t believe in it.

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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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