Free Republic

While all Americans enjoy civil rights, civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) are hitting speed bumps. According to Joseph Perkins of the Joplin Globe in Missouri, as the black population has doubled, both organizations have suffered from declining membership. Kweisi Mfume resigned as President of the NAACP and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth resigned his post with the SCLC, complaining that, "deceit, mistrust and a lack of spiritual discipline and truth have eaten at the core of this once-hallowed organization." While these organizations have increasingly become stooges of the Democratic National Committee, more than one...

The United States Commission on Civil Rights cannot legislate or regulate. What it can do is hold hearings and make a terrible racket if the government is not enforcing the laws of the land forbidding discrimination in voting, employment and housing. The panel is a watchdog, exactly as President Dwight Eisenhower intended when he persuaded Congress to establish it in 1957. Mostly it has been run on a part-time basis by academics like the first chairman, John Hannah, then president of Michigan State; the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, who was president of Notre Dame; and, most recently, by Mary Frances Berry,...

In a rare gesture of transparency, a majority of the eight commissioners on the United States Commission on Civil Rights voted in 2002 to put the agency's staff reports on the Internet as soon as they are completed. That way, the public can read them before the commissioners hold public hearings to discuss the staff's findings. The latest report - an assessment of President Bush's civil rights record - was put on the agency's Web site last September. But at the commission's October meeting, less than a month before the election, the commissioners declined to discuss it. Objecting to the...

<p>For as much as they oppose President Bush's call for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and his crew wasted no time spinning it their way.</p> <p>They even see Bush's move as having given the pro-gay marriage forces a tactical advantage -- one that takes a bit of the national heat off Newsom himself.</p>