Free Republic

The anti–racial profiling juggernaut has finally met its nemesis: the truth. According to a new study, black drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike are twice as likely to speed as white drivers, and are even more dominant among drivers breaking 90 miles per hour. This finding demolishes the myth of racial profiling. Precisely for that reason, the Bush Justice Department tried to bury the report so the profiling juggernaut could continue its destructive campaign against law enforcement. What happens next will show whether the politics of racial victimization now trump all other national concerns. Until now, the anti-police crusade that...

David Harris is the University of Toledo law professor who provided much of the intellectual heft behind the war on racial profiling. His 1999 report for the American Civil Liberties Union, which has filed most of the anti-profiling law suits, was entitled "Driving While Black: Racial Profiling on the Nation's Highways." In 2002 he expanded his argument into a book. The national ruckus Harris helped stir up has, among other results, made it hard for security personnel to use intelligent profiles to uncover potential terrorists in airports, at our national borders, and at visa offices abroad. That is a mistake...

Recently, the National Conference of State Legislatures, a bipartisan research and consulting organization, reported that collectively, the states have a "$17.5 billion budget gap to fill before fiscal year 2003 ends, which for most states is June 30."Thereafter, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left of center nonprofit research organization, released a report stating that the "budget deficits now looming over state governments will likely reach $60 billion to $85 billion in state fiscal year 2004 and constitute the largest state budget gaps in half a century." The Center stated that these deficits represent 13-18 percent of state...

What do poor, minority kids need least? How about a public high school that will teach them to resist mainstream culture, feel sorry for themselves and write ransom notes to the president? Oakland's new School for Social Justice and Community Development is like a throwback to the '60s. And not the part with good music. The Contra Costa Times’ story opens with a class taught by rapper Boots Riley, author of Five Million Ways to Kill a CEO. In culture and resistance class, the assignment is to compose a rap about an important issue in the city of Oakland, a...

By George Weigel, VATICAN CITY -- Let the healing begin. This seems to be the consensus Catholic response, ranging from victims groups to the church hierarchy to the Catholic press. It is an entirely appropriate sentiment if the question is reconciling the victims of clergy sexual abuse to the church. But it is a hopelessly inadequate reaction if the question is fixing what is broken in the structures of Catholic belief and practice in the United States. The jargon of the therapeutic culture in which "fixated ephebophilia" masks the reality of homosexual molestation and "observe the boundaries" replaces "don't commit...

THE COUNTRY IS ON THE BRINK OF WAR, it faces the likelihood of another terrorist attack, and the New York Times is worried that Americans are not paying enough attention to race and gender. Two front-page articles on November 12--one on college diversity programs, the other on a golf club's all-male membership policy--offer a stunning demonstration of the loony irrelevance of Howell Raines's Times. The academic obsession with "racial difference" has been an exhaustively documented feature of campus life for over two decades, yet the Times offers its story on the alleged necessity of college diversity training as a scoop....

<p>On Nov. 18, a federal district judge ruled that Chief Justice Roy S. Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court had 30 days to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the back of the Alabama State Courthouse rotunda. Justice Moore had placed the monument there about 18 months ago, prompting a lawsuit from the Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of Steve Glassroth, a lawyer in Montgomery, Ala., whose business often took him to courthouse.</p>

School district changes its stance after lawyer threatens rights lawsuit LAFAYETTE - Pen and paper weren't enough for 11-year-old Elizabeth Johnson to do her book report. She needed a lawyer. Sixth-grade teachers at Peak to Peak Charter School initially rejected Elizabeth's choice of the biblical Book of Exodus for her report. The Boulder Valley School District changed its stance after an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund, which specializes in religious-freedom issues, threatened to bring a civil rights suit. Elizabeth, a born-again member of First Baptist Church in Broomfield, said she wasn't trying to push her religion on the other...

There is a deep silence across America's colleges and universities: the debris of departed students and subdued professors, of crumpled leaflets and wrinkled petitions; Harvard (or any other prestigious but morally blind institution) is on holiday. An intellectual ghost town remains, a place where colored chalk fills the pavement's skin -- a crooked lettering of relativism's slogan and terrorism's motto, "Destroy Amerika and Kill the Jews!" It is this ignorant refrain - a reflexive catchall to decency's query, "What did you learn in school today?" - that demands morality's review. For the privileged student believes, because he has no reason...

MARVEL COMICS IS ON A ROLL. First there was the blockbuster "X-Men" movie that generated almost $300 million worldwide. Then came "Spider-Man," which grossed more than $800 million. Coming in February, Ben Affleck will star in "Daredevil." In that same month, Marvel will be bringing back to comic book stores a cowboy hero known as the Rawhide Kid. From 1955 to 1979, Rawhide Kid battled the outlaws of the Wild West as part of a Western-themed series that included other heroes like the Two-Gun Kid and Kid Colt. At the time, nobody ever asked if Rawhide Kid dated any girls,...

When in 1955 I set out to publish a journal devoted to the interests of U.S. conservatism, I stressed in a preliminary circular pretty much what one would have expected on the subject. It was necessary then, and would be necessary for most of the balance of the millennium, to confront directly the challenge of Soviet-based communism; to explain, and to plead, that whatever the pains and dangers of resisting it, these were worth undergoing. In retrospect, it appears obvious that the effort was worthwhile, but it was less than obvious at crisis points, among them Hungary, Berlin, Cuba and...

Joined at the Heart: The Transformation of the American Family Al and Tipper Gore Henry Holt, 2002, 417 pages The family, writes scholar James Q. Wilson, is the foundation of public life. As that foundation weakens, so does every structure built upon it. When the cultural framework sags, the foundation must be strengthened. Wilson says that a family is the community formed by a monogamous, heterosexual union. Traditional marriage satisfies economic, biological, and social needs in ways that other relationships cannot. The traditional family is the safest place to raise children. Not true argue Al and Tipper Gore in their...

Upon learning that the Supreme Court had accepted the big affirmative action cases involving her campus, University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman said about the only thing that she could, which was that "we are looking forward to presenting our cases." Ms. Coleman's – and Michigan's – problem is the law, and the law tilts pretty plainly against the school's race-conscious admissions policies. Before the court are lawsuits challenging the policies used by the undergraduate and law schools. The undergraduate school awards applicants "points," with 100 (out of a possible 150) sufficing for admission. A perfect SAT score, for...

Tolerance for misbehavior -- especially by loud, unruly black students -- will doom Muir High School's attempts to raise test scores, wrote a white teacher to colleagues at the Pasadena school. The problem isn't teachers or curriculum, wrote Scott Phelps. It's students who don't care about learning and make it hard for teachers to reach students who do care. Not surprisingly, Phelps was called a racist. Surprisingly, some people are actually talking about culture and classroom success. Many blacks "felt an odd sort of gratitude," Los Angeles Timesreports. At a neighborhood meeting about the letter, Kitty McKnight, a former teacher,...

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." So wrote George Orwell many years ago. Currently hitching their star to those words is a Massachusetts-based student organization called Boston Mobilization (BM), whose members purport to be truth-tellers courageous enough to speak out against the immorality of a possible US-led invasion of Iraq. In conjunction with numerous other left-wing organizations across the country, BM has designated December 10 as the National Student Day of Action, where students at some 200 college campuses will participate in anti-war demonstrations under the motto "Shut Down The War." In the...

I'm often accused of overstating the case (as in the title I have chosen for this note). I have long argued that those who call themselves liberals in the contemporary political arena are really leftists, and that inside most leftists a totalitarian spirit lurks. Our universities are dominated by the political left and that means that intellectual diversity that includes viewpoints outside the leftist spectrum are anathema to them; that they are utterly ruthless in their desire to suppress dissenting thought, and that their political repression of conservatives in the academy is far worse than anything Senator Joseph McCarthy attempted....

The desire not to offend has stripped "the reason for the season " of all meaning. Advertisers and store employees have substituted the joyful and heartfelt wishes of "Merry Christmas " and "Happy Hanukkah " with the diluted and mushy greeting "Happy Holidays. " The stripping away of America's heritage continues as certain legal and cultural relativists pursue their goal of transforming us into moral and spiritual "Stepford wives " when we will see all ideas as mattering, or not mattering, and it not mattering whether that matters. Constitutional attorney John Whitehead brings to my attention a situation in New...

(UPI) HERZLIYA, Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon Wednesday accepted in principle the U.S. roadmap for Israeli-Palestinian peace that envisages the creation of an independent Palestinian state within a few years. Sharon, who has been vague on his ideas for peace with the Palestinians, Wednesday dwelt at length on the understandings he said he has reached in seven trips to Washington over the past year and a half. One of his listeners, the director of the American Jewish Committee's Israel/Middle East Office, Eran Lerman, told United Press International it was the first time Sharon spoke so explicitly about the creation of...

Los Angeles, with a body count of 612 as of Nov. 25, 2002, now owns the dubious distinction of murder capital of America. As always with crime, reasons remain complex. But let us salute the victicrat leadership of Los Angeles for its part. During the 1992 Los Angeles riots, for example, Congresswoman Maxine Waters provided aid and comfort to the rioters by bellowing, "No justice, no peace." Recently, a white police officer in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood slammed a black teenager against a squad car, and later punched the youth. The cop claimed that the young man grabbed...

Ibrahim Hooper, communications director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, is incensed at derogatory statements about Muhammad made by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson - the former referred to the prophet as a "terrorist," the latter as an "absolute wild-eyed fanatic." Hooper responded in kind, comparing the reverends to Osama bin Laden on the grounds that they seek to "divide the world into a religious war." The entire exchange would hardly be worth noting except for a final dig by Mr. Hooper: "Conservative evangelical leaders," he said, "would kill Muslims if given the chance." The assertion is ludicrous. Regardless of...