Chicago City Wire

Following is an address given by Richard Porter, the National Committeeman of the Republican Party of Illinois and retired partner at Kirkland & Ellis, during his acceptance of the Chicago Sunday Evening Club's "Clifford Barnes Award" on March 12, 2024 at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago:

---

Mike told me that I should discuss how Christ has shaped my practice and civic activities.  

And, as some of you know, talking about myself is something I really enjoy.

But, hey: I sacrificed for Lent and gave up talking about myself!

Sorry Mike!

So, instead, I would like to talk about the state of affairs in our city – and how they are informed, or not, by Christ.

After all – the Chicago Sunday Evening Club is a faith-focused organization of business and civic leaders that seeks the revival, and promotes the moral and religious welfare, of the city.

It serves as a spiritual catalyst to inspire people to build a good and great city.  

Let’s do that.  Let’s consider how to revive Chicago and make it into a good and great city.

Chicago is a city of great physical beauty – our sky scrapers are world famous and we attract citizens from all over the world.  

If Chicago were a house, we would say “it has great bones, but it needs work”. It’s not what it was just 20 years ago, or even 5 years ago.

We all know the basics: crime is up – and so are vacancies in the Loop and on Michigan Avenue. Taxes keep going up too, and property values are falling in real terms, as businesses and their leaders fly off to more hospitable states and cities.

So, with Palm Sunday less than 2 weeks away, let’s ask: what Jesus would do?

Shortly after his grand entrance into Jerusalem, the day after he visited the temple and threw out the money changers, Jesus came back to the temple to engage in a cantankerous debate with city leaders.  

As Matthew records in Chapter 22 one of the “lawyers asked him a  question, tempting him, and saying,

Master, which is the great commandment in the law?

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.

This is the first and great commandment.

And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Jesus kept things simple.  Pulling from  Deuteronomy and Leviticus, he told us everything we need to know about the law of a just city: “Love God, and Love they Neighbor as thyself.”

He didn’t convince the temple elders, of course, and so we have the Passion of Christ and the Easter miracle.

But, our Founders were listening – and Thomas Jefferson incorporates the two commandments into the Declaration of Independence, where he asserts as a self-evident truth “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” and that the purpose of government is to secure these rights.

Pause on that for a moment – do you see the structure Jefferson sets forth?

God our Creator is above Man – He is after all the Creator, and it is He who endows Man with Rights.

But, he also created man equal.  So, there are two tiers: God is above man, but all men are equal.

In what way are men, or as we would now say, humans equal? We differ in every way imaginable.

We are equal in our standing relative to God and to each other – and that equal standing is a manifestation of the second Great Commandment, to love thy neighbor as thyself.

Love, love of thy neighbor, equalizes us.  Love puts us on the same level – it’s a level that’s commanded by God and, when we live into the commandment, Love becomes the logic of just law.

No King or elite rules over us and each of us, being equal, has individual moral standing.

The equal status of human beings relative to each other, under and under only God, is the moral justification for freedom and self-determination.

Jefferson said all that in one sentence: All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with the right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Our nation is the first and still the only nation founded on Love – love of thy neighbor – and the equality that love creates and the freedom that love and equality justifies.

Why is this important?  

Because, and this is the first fundamental problem plaguing Chicago, our leaders have abandoned Equality for Equity.  

“Equity” is a word with medieval roots, and it means to make something right, to do justice. In practice, “equity” was something that the King (or his Chancellor) did when he concluded that a “wrong” result occurred under law.

Historically, “equality” was the standard of “justice” employed by the Christian King, so “equity” was an extension of and bounded by “equality”.  However, today “equity” is employed by the “Social Justice” movement of the Left as a critique of our traditional concept of equality; equity mocks equality; equity is the antithesis of equality.

These are the conceptual features of “equity”:

equity is TRANSACTIONAL (a state of affairs is changed);

equity is ROOTED IN ANGER (the petitioner believes something legal is unfair);

equity is HIERARCHICAL (the intervention is by a higher power (historically, the King) acting based on his conscience, not law);

equity is CONCEPTUALLY UNBOUNDED (it depends on whatever the higher power thinks is right or wrong);

and as deployed by today’s social justice advocates, equity adheres to GROUP IDENTITY instead of individual moral agency.

Compare the modern usage of Equity to the conceptual features of “Equality” in the American tradition:

equality is a STATUS inherent to our creation as human beings – it’s relational, not transactional;

equality ARISES FROM LOVE (the love of God and His commandments, including to love others as we would have them love us);

equality is NOT hierarchical (God is superior, but not any man, and not any group);

equality is BOUNDED by the the concept of RECIPROCITY;

and equality is the moral basis for INDIVIDUAL AGENCY (rights and obligations are individual and not class or caste based).

Martin Luther King’s theory of nonviolent resistance was centered on the two Great Commandments as well.  He believed equality for Black Americans would become manifest through Love, not anger.

In his treatise “An Experiment in Love”, MLK explains that America is and experiment in “understanding [the] redeeming good will for all men… Agape [one of the forms of love] is disinterested love… It begins by loving others for their sakes. It is an entirely “neighbor-regarding concern for others,” which discovers the neighbor in every man it meets.”

Equality – a status arising from Love – is a more durable, moral foundation for justice than Equity.

Who wants to live in a place where anger is encouraged (so you get more of it), where government believes it must rule over you because you’re inherently evil and where your ancestry matters more than who you are and what you do?

Now, for guidance on the second big problem in Chicago, I turn to the rock band the Eagles who sang:

I got a peaceful easy feelin'

And I know you won't let me down

'Cause I'm already standin'

On the ground

This song is actually about picking up a girl, but I am stealing the chorus to make this point.

We need more pragmatism and less ideology in Chicago’s government.  

For example, a few weeks ago, Chicago’s rulers voted to remove the school resource officers from all Chicago Public Schools.  They are removing cops from schools in the wake of three murders on the front steps of schools this year alone.

This is the latest example of the “Defund the Police Movement” that’s part of why crime has exploded in the city – and crime is a big reason why Chicago is languishing.

This is not a decision that anyone standing on the ground would make. It’s simply not pragmatic. It’s so obviously a bad idea, it makes me realize that many folks in the urban-based intersectional Left are living an Artificial Reality, something I wrote about in RealClearPolitics last week.

If the government were filled with people standing on the ground, who were serious about dealing with Chicago’s problems, wouldn’t it give us all a peaceful easy feeling?  

Now, this is where all of you come into the picture.

The purpose of this Club is to mobilize civic leaders to help make Chicago a good and great city.

But, this club was largely abandoned until Mike revived it as part of his efforts to renew Chicago.

Indeed, over the course of my 30-year career at Kirkland, I have observed a steady decline in the civic engagement and influence of the pragmatic people who run our businesses.

Frankly, they’ve been scared away and silenced by merchants of equity as today’s “Social Justice” movement gained adherents in the Democrat Party.

Many business leaders, being practical people, have concluded that there’s just no upside in engaging with activist ideologues on the left.

It’s easier to go along or go away to avoid uncomfortable conversations with misguided, angry people.

So, the streets are emptying out, as leaders stay put in the tall buildings where they work and live. And, as a result, the city’s future is ceded to anger and hate.  

But, Chicago needs you; Chicago needs your love and your pragmatism.

The folks ruling this city are increasingly ideological. They are not practical and there is no way on God’s Green Earth that they will make this a great and good city without your guidance.

Together, we need to push back with love and pragmatism on those who would rule over us with anger and ideology to make Chicago a great city and a good place for our children to pursue their happiness.

Chapter 22 of Matthew verses 35-40.  Chapter 23 is interesting – disarray for not following commandments

Deuteronomy 6:5 And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength

Leviticus 19:17-18 You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him.  

You shall not take vengeance or ear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.