Carolina QuotesMartin Luther King’s legacy, as its keepers know, is profoundly at odds with the historic American order, and that is why they can have no rest until the symbols of that order are pulled up root and branch. To say that Dr. King are the cause he really represented are now part of the official American creed, indeed the defining and dominant symbol of that creed – which is what both houses of the United States Congress said in 1983 and what President Ronald Reagan signed into law shortly afterward – is the inauguration of a new order and the things they symbolized can retain neither meaning nor respect, in which they are as mute and dark as the gods of Babylon and Tyre and from whose cold ashes will rise a new god, leveling their rough places, straightening their crookedness, and exalting every valley until the whole earth is flattened beneath his feet and perceives the glory of the new lord.
Samuel T. Francis Connected to the Carolinas
Source
No citation is recorded for this quotation.
- work
- Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism (1994)
- year
- 1994
no citation recorded
Cite this record
“Martin Luther King’s legacy, as its keepers know, is profoun…” Samuel T. Francis. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-E949B644B3. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/e949b644b3
More from Samuel T. Francis
The laws that are enforced are either those that extend or entrench the power of the state and its allies and internal elites ... or else they are the laws that directly punish those recalcitrant and "pathological" elements in society who insist on behaving according to traditional norms—people who do not like to pay taxes, wear seat belts, or deliver their children to the mind-bending therapists who run the public schools; or the people who own and keep firearms, display or even wear the Confederate flag, put up Christmas trees, spank their children, and quote the Constitution or the Bible—not to mention dissident political figures who actually run for office and try to do something about mass immigration by Third World populations.
The lesson of 4,000 years of social history is that sexual behavior, consensual or not, has consequences for others, that it often affects (and hurts) others in ways society needs to control, and that unregulated sex renders social bonds, especially in the family but also beyond it, impossible. We can regulate it through law or through socially enforced moral custom or both, but we have to do it somehow. History knows of no human society that has not regulated sexual behavior and forbidden some kinds of it, nor is there any reason known to social science to suppose that a society that fails to do so is possible. A "society" that makes no distinction between sex within marriage and sex outside it, that does not distinguish morally and socially between continence and debauchery, normality and perversion, love and lust, is not really a society but merely the chaos of a perpetual orgy. It is an invitation to just such an orgy that the proponents of normalized and unrestricted homosexuality invite America.
The truth is that, for all their talk about social “roots,” conservative intellectuals in the postwar era were often rootless men themselves, and the philosophical mystifications in which they enveloped themselves were frequently the only garments that fit them.