TGR carries the final post in my series on MLK’s talk to Barratt Junior High, which culminates in his famous image of a street sweeper who sweeps his street like Shakespeare wrote poetry and like Beethoven composed concertos:

The street sweeper who sweeps with sufficient excellence may become an equal to Shakespeare, but we will never see this within the limited scope of the present. All we see in the present is a person of low social and economic status, doing a “menial” job.

To see the street sweeper’s dignity, we must see it from a viewpoint outside history…

For Shakespeare and Beethoven themselves, not the mostly-fictional characters whom we imagine in our heads but the actual men, living and breathing in their physical bodies, will be there when God pronounces “well done” over every faithful street sweeper and ditch digger and truck driver in history.

And Shakespeare may well say, “I only wish I could have written Hamlet as well as he swept that street.”

Have a thought about that? Write your comment like Michaelangelo painted pictures!

I’m delighted to report that you can now view my Acton Institute lecture and hear my National Review podcast on Whittaker Chambers’ witness for the 21st century.

I’m proud as I can be to have the opportunity to share this courageous man’s prophetic story with new generations; may we all attend to his testimony.

Speech micrometers only work on sexual speech, or something

In the 1980s, George Will mocked the Supreme Court’s hubris in thinking that judges armed with “constitutional micrometers” could micromanage religious displays in public spaces. But this year, he advocated exactly this outrageous approach when it comes to words written by bakers on wedding cakes – which are not even in public spaces, but are private speech acts.

In his column today on T-shirts worn into polling places, returning to his 1980s roots, Will shows exactly why you can’t engage in this kind of speech micromanagement:

The Supreme Court can try to enunciate what is unimaginable — clear standards concerning every conceivable language use in a hypersensitive America. Or the court can give its squint of strict scrutiny to all such polling-place laws, many of which will not pass muster. Otherwise, polling-place officials will have broad discretion to lay down the law, if it can be dignified as law, on an ad hoc basis concerning what is and is not a “recognizable” political view or “undue” influence.

So, constitutional micrometers don’t work on right-wing T-shirts; apparently they only work when the people whose rights are impaired are socially embarrassing not only to good liberal society but even to secular conservatives like Will.

It reminds me of another conservative jibe in the 1980s. As Democrats, for the sake of the cameras, hyped civil rights legislation that they knew to be both unconstitutional and politically impracticable, William F. Buckley commented that if he were in Congress, he would introduce a Civil Rights Act for Preemptive Nuclear Strike on the Soviet Union, just to bring an end to what he called “terminological right of way.”

Today, as the real challenges of ethnic minorities continue to languish without meaningful attention, the emptying out of civil rights language has reached its logical conclusion – and even the noblest conservatives (Will has sacrificed much to stand athwart Trump) can’t be counted on to protect the rights of those who dissent from progressive sexual orthodoxy.

Conservatism Death Watch, Part CCCLXVII.

Having recently nominated a candidate for the post of The New Billy Graham, I can think of no better way to mark the passing of the Original and Only Billy Graham than by introducing you to the above exchange.

It is without question the most amazing ten minutes of video on YouTube.

You’re welcome.

Well done, good and faithful servant.

I’m very excited to be giving a lecture and recording a podcast this week on what we can learn today from the profound Christian political thought of Whittaker Chambers. I have invested a great deal of work in digesting Chambers’ insights for the church and the world today, as we continue to struggle with the same “crisis of history” Chambers described, and the project has been very fruitful. I’m delighted to finally be able to share the fruits of that labor.

The lecture, taking place at the Acton Institute, will be livestreamed this Thursday, Feb. 22, at 12:00-1:00 Eastern time. Tune in here to watch live, or come join us if you’re near Grand Rapids. I’ll post a YouTube link when it goes up. I’m very grateful to Acton for inviting me to deliver a lecture on this critically important Christian thinker.

The podcast is with National Review’s podcast The Great Books, hosted by my old friend John Miller. I’ll post that link whenever the podcast goes live. It’s an honor to be working on Chambers with National Review, where he wrote at the end of his life.