RIP Squire Lance

This anonymous comment has been added to a relevant post from 1st April:

This is very sad but I must report that Squire Lance passed away last Wednesday April 7th. His wake is this Thursday April 15th and the funeral mass is Friday morning. Check Chicago papers for more information. Squire was about 78 years old and got very sick in the last few weeks.

As I wrote in that post:

Alinsky's own chosen successor as Executive Director of the Woodlawn Organization was Squire Lance, who is still alive, still active in Civil Rights and in the Chicago Democratic Party, and still a stalwart of Opus Dei.

And as I concluded:

Squire Lance of the Woodlawn Organization and of Opus Dei was an Obama supporter and donor, lining him up with Bob Casey, Ben Nelson, Jim Webb, Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, Bart Stupak, et al. With General Jim Jones. With the hardly liberal Republicans Dick Lugar and Chuck Hagel, both more or less open supporters. With Christopher Buckley. With the conservative Catholic constitutional scholar Douglas Kmiec. With Donnie McClurkin, the ex-gay gospel singer whose presence on the Obama team infuriated the Clinton camp. And with those who voted for Obama on the same day as they voted in California and Florida to re-affirm traditional marriage, voted in Colorado to end legal discrimination against working-class white men, and voted in Missouri and Ohio not to liberalise gambling. Those who voted for Obama from coast to coast also keep the black and Catholic churches, especially, going.

Obama has signed healthcare into law after having promised not to do so if there were any provision for federally funded abortion, which there is not; would that there were a public option of a single-payer system alongside that ban, so as to make abortion practically impossible, but one thing at a time. Nor is their coverage for illegal immigrants, still less the amnesty being promoted by Senate Republicans. Traditional marriage is Obama's own stated view. He has kicked the Freedom of Choice Act into the long grass, and instead endorsed Casey's Pregnant Women Support Act as well as concentrating on the Employee Free Choice Act supported by pro-life stalwarts such as Stupak and Marcy Kaptur, who declined to endorse either Obama or Clinton because neither was offering enough to the victims of the the "free" trade agreements that she and Stupak are now prominent in seeking to repeal, not without White House encouragement.

This is where the Saul Alinsky movement has ended up. Such is grace. What a pity, then, that David Cameron has instead chosen to go right back to its source, ignoring the broader and deeper tradition of truly radical, because fundamentally orthodox, activism for Civil Rights, social justice and peace by, in, through and as which it has been redeemed.

Requiescat In Pace.