Posted on 07/03/2003 5:45:39 AM PDT by stainlessbanner
Whenever the Supreme Court intends to contradict the Constitution or public law, it resorts to ambiguity in an attempt to cover up its misdeed.
That's what the Supreme Court did in a pair of decisions that said a university can't award points for skin color but can use race "as a factor" in making decisions about who gets in and who doesn't. What does that mean? Practically speaking, it means that some universities will continue to grant preferences based purely on race — only, like homosexuals in the military, they won't talk about it.
The Constitution and the 1964 Civil Rights Act are crystal-clear. There is to be no discrimination based on race. Period. End of discussion. No wiggle room available. Granting a preference, even a favor, to a student because he or she is black or any other color is both unconstitutional and a violation of the Civil Rights Act.
Look, the best any society can do is to make sure the law applies equally to everyone. The best any society can do is to make sure that there is one standard that all must meet. Affirmative action is a contradiction of that, both literally and in spirit. The fact that most Americans have been brainwashed into believing that there is some unnamed virtue or benefit in diversity does not change the law or the principle.
What the Supreme Court has done is what it has often done — made a mockery of the rule of law by saying a currently fashionable social good is so desirable that the law can be ignored. If equal rights before the law is no longer an American ideal, then by all means amend the Constitution and amend or repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That's the proper course of action when we want to change a law.
Otherwise, instead of the rule of law, we end up with the arbitrary rule of an oligarchy — in this case, five or more members of the Supreme Court who are not even elected. You can't get much more undemocratic than that.
Blacks, as a whole, don't do as well as whites academically. I didn't say that they couldn't do just as well. I'm just reporting something that is currently a fact, verifiable by innumerable test scores. The obvious and honest answer is to attack the reasons for this discrepancy, not ignore them. And in the meantime, there would be nothing wrong with universities sending out recruiters to find blacks who can qualify without any racial preferences.
Instead, we have a situation in which white students with higher scores are turned away in favor of black students with lower scores. This is just as unjust as in the old days when blacks, no matter how qualified, were turned away because they were black. If skin is not to be an issue, it must not be an issue for those with white skin either.
The argument made by liberals that without affirmative action we would end up with all-white universities is so blatantly a racist belief that it deserves the Ku Klux Klan Award as the best white supremacist statement of the year. There are plenty of smart black kids who don't need any help or favors from paternalistic white racists who get a cheap thrill out of doing a favor for someone they consider inferior.
If you white liberal racists crave gratitude, buy yourself a dog and feed it properly.
In the meantime, Americans should grow extremely intolerant of those who want to replace the rule of law with fashionable but arbitrary judicial opinions. Like fiscal irresponsibility, disregard of the rule of law can reach a tip point where it becomes impossible to restore.
Judges who apply the law as it is to the facts as they are is what we need. If we had those kinds of judges, it wouldn't matter if they were liberal or conservative. A conservative judge with a yen to legislate instead of adjudicate is just as bad as a liberal activist.
Shame on the current court.
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