(Clarence Manion - an eye for interesting "tableware")

I had always wondered just when it was the conservative movement took a dramatic, screeching shift to the right. What was that moment, who was the spark. I have on a number of occasions heard that the catalyst was a fellow named Dean Clarence Manion (the Dean comes from his tenure as Notre Dame Law Professor) and it was Manion who gave us Barry Goldwater and was quoted as saying Ronald Reagan was the perfect example of the Modern Conservative Movement.

But I had never heard him speak - as I am sure most readers haven't either. So needless to say, when I discovered this disc (sadly not complete and partially deteriorated) I was pretty excited to hear just who this guy was.

I wasn't disappointed.

Clarence Manion: “Now we have heard a lot about American equality. We have been twitted with it by our subversive enemies. Taunted with the alleged hypocrisy of what we profess to be equality and which is, in their jargon ‘not equality at all’. We hear a lot about the rich and the poor and the exploiters and the exploited,, and the malefactors of great wealth and the underprivileged and the this and the that. Let’s see what the doctrine of America is as it is stated and set forth in the blueprint. All men are created equal, they are equal in God’s sight. And for that reason and for no other reason that I can ever find in any law book, they are equal before the law of the land. Equality before God and the equality before the laws of this country. That is the sum and the substance, the beginning and the end of American equality.

”

I have heard some strange interpretations of the Bill of Rights, but this interpretation nails it on the head why there is so much misguided righteousness floating around. It all came from someplace.

Unfortunately, there is only part one and two and the address goes on, I suspect for at least another half hour, but the rest of it is missing and I don't think recorded. So we don't get to hear the summation of this argument and I'm not going to venture to guess where it goes. Important to at least hear part of where so much of our confusion comes from. And just how ingrained it is. Remember, this address was made on December 17, 1951, almost sixty years ago.

That is a very long time to misrepresent something.