Philadelphia Society Memories from Grand Rapids

For several years now, I have been honored to be a member of a group known as the Philadelphia Society. The Society of leading conservative intellectuals was formed in 1964 in the wake of the Goldwater defeat.

While I would never self-identify as an intellectual, I fall back on what the Sisters of St. Joseph used to tell us in grade school: “There’s two kinds of knowledge: knowing something and knowing where to find it.”

You can gain a lot of insights at Society meetings. Here are just a few highlights from the Society’s regional meeting in Grand Rapids last week:

• “You are not Greek. You are not French. We expect more from you.”—British Conservative Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Daniel Hannan
• “Those persons who seek and hold power generally want to extend it and they do it through benefits.” –Joseph F. Johnston, president, Philadelphia Society
• “If you want to see what is wrong with liberalism, hold a conference in Detroit.”—Harry Veryser, University of Detroit Mercy
• “I see no evidence that people on welfare are lazy but they’re not stupid. If you pay them more to not work, they will not. I love my job but if you paid me more not to do it, I’d be willing to discuss retirement.”—Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute
• “President Obama’s approach to the rule of law is to figure out what he wants to do and then bend the law to do it.”—Harry Hutchison, George Mason University School of Law
• “Those who’ve only had one sexual partner (men and women) in their first marriage are still married. The [still married] rate goes down when the number of sexual partners increases. When I saw this, I concluded that those Mediterranean cultures that insisted on a chaperone knew what they were about.” Patrick Fagan of the Family Research Council, wryly discussing his latest research
• “When I think of the war on women, this is the real war on women—births to single mothers. Where did we go wrong? We went wrong when we made the government the husband.”—Maura Corrigan, director, Michigan Department of Human Services. She also made a charming Freudian slip when she referred to Milton Friedman as Milton Freedom
• “Seventy-nine percent of the children born in Detroit are born to single mothers. The flip side is that 79 percent of those children are born to irresponsible fathers.”—Clark Durant, Cornerstone Schools

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