With yesterday’s passing of conservative icon William F. Buckley, mourners from both sides of the partisan divide have stepped forward to praise the man’s intellectual fervor and gentlemanly demeanor. The general consensus seems to be that whether you agreed with his political beliefs or not, you had to acknowledge his innate decency and fairness. Fair enough. And let’s not forget the history he stood athwart yelling “Stop!” Radar remembers some of the great man’s finest thoughts.
• “…[G]ay marriage, gay marriage, gay marriage—I wish more gays would move to Canada. Just kidding.”—National Review, July 28, 2003
• “Resentment is firm against homosexual advances toward children, but the question is not explored whether that crime—which was then, continues to be, and will be in the future, a sin—has increased in proportion to the toleration of the practice at an adult level.”—National Review, May, 6 2002
• “When it was black men persecuting white or black men—in the Congo, for instance—he was strangely silent on the issue of human rights. The human rights of Chinese, or of Caucasians living behind the Iron Curtain never appeared to move him.”—On Martin Luther King, Jr., 1979
• “Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto Nazi, or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”—To Gore Vidal, 1968
• “[The civil rights movement] called for nothing less, when analyzed, than the evanescence of color. Since no such thing could be brought about, can be brought about, there is a sense of disappointment among those civil rights workers who somehow permitted themselves to believe that the passage of a few bits and pieces of legislation would transform the life of the American Negro…”—National Review, July 19, 1966
• “New York should undertake to quarantine all addicts, even as smallpox carriers would be quarantined during a plague.”—The Unmaking of the Mayor, 1965
• “The Beatles are not merely awful…. They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of antimusic.”—September 8, 1964
• “But whatever the exact net result in the restricted field of school desegregation, what a price we are paying for Brown! It would be ridiculous to hold the Supreme Court solely to blame for the ludicrously named ‘civil rights movement’—that is, the Negro revolt…. But the Court carries its share of the blame.”—National ReviewJune 2, 1964
• “[T]he White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”
“The South confronts one grave moral challenge. It must not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness to preserve the Negro as a servile class…. Let the South never permit itself to do this.”
“[T]he South’s premises are correct…. It is more important for the community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.”—National Review, August 24, 1957