Category Archive

The draft Democratic platform that has just been released is about what you would expect on civil-rights issues, especially in the criminal-justice area.  The draft language condemns our nation’s “institutional and systemic racism” and our “mass incarceration,” and it affirms that “black lives matter.”  Felons should be allowed to vote, and our marijuana laws have an “unacceptable disparate impact” on African Americans.  There’s also plenty on LGBT rights, where “there is still much work to be done.”  Speaking of “Black Lives Matter” –  This USA Today op-ed explains how Black Lives Matter and anti-Israel Palestinian protestors are sharing notes — …

Yes, it’s a really bad idea to suggest that the way a judge does his job is inevitably determined by his skin color or national origin.  I’m just surprised that people who have long urged that judicial appointments should be made with “diversity” in mind have so quickly come around to this view …. Shame on the Washington Post  — The Washington Post had an editorial criticizing the lawsuit filed recently by Republican leaders of the state legislature against Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe’s recent executive order that restores the right to vote to all felons, no matter their crime. Let’s …

We are supposed to be excited because the Congress has passed, and President Obama has just signed into law, a bill that will get rid of “insulting” words like “Oriental” and “Negro,” changing them to more enlightened terms like “Asian American” and “African American.”  But wouldn’t it have been better if all references to race has just be taken out of the U.S. Code altogether, since the reason they’re in there these days is principally to advance race-based preferences and decision-making by the federal government? *          *          * The Chronicle of Higher Education — which, like it or not is …

That was the reason given by a St. Louis-area public school system for refusing to allow a black student to attend a school that he would have been allowed to go to had he been any other color. This discrimination was justified by a desire to achieve the right racial mix in public schools. So there you have it: Politically correct diversity trumps individual rights and educational opportunity.  Read all about it here. More on Race-Based Decision-Making in Education:  There have been a couple of newspaper pieces in the last week that make the (dubious) case for hiring fewer white teachers:  “Black teachers …

Once upon a time, “juvenile delinquent” was a nice way to say “young criminal.”  As often happens, however, eventually even the euphemism is thought to be too harsh, and so a better one has to be found.  And so one has:  This Obama-administration press release last week talked a lot about “justice-involved youth.”  Then, to top itself, the administration broadened the euphemism to include criminals of all ages, with Attorney General Lynch referring to “justice-involved individuals.”    And then, after that, it continued still further in this vein last week, referring to “justice-involved Veterans.”   After my noting it, the …

The White House had its annual science fair last week, but every week is political correctness week at the White House, so the president warned that we must work through some of the structural biases that exist in science.  Some of them — a lot of them are unconscious.  But the fact is, is that we’ve got to get more of our young women and minorities into science and technology, engineering and math, and computer science.  I’ve been really pleased to see the number of young women who have gotten more and more involved in our science fairs over the …

The Washington Post Magazine’s end-page is always a column by humorist Gene Weingarten, who’s very funny but extremely liberal.  His column this week, however, makes fun of Bowdoin College’s political correctness, which I recently wrote about, in the sombrero scandal.  Mr. Weingarten’s column is styled a plea for forgiveness and addressed to the Bowdoin student government; he wants forgiveness for his daughter having dressed up as an Indian (complete with feather, horrors!) many years ago. It’s very funny, and if even a big liberal like Gene Weingarten agrees things have gotten out of hand, then maybe there’s hope. Another funny …

I wrote at little about his earlier, but I’d like to add a couple of other thoughts regarding campus demands to rename buildings, statues, and the like commemorating individuals whose views on minorities and women have not stood well the test of time.  First, as I noted before, since none of us is without sin, requiring sinlessness for commemoration means no one will be commemorated.  Yet even those who were terrible sinners in one area might be visionaries in another.  So a Woodrow Wilson Civil Rights Center might be a bad idea, but not a Woodrow Wilson Center for Loopy …

The Center for Equal Opportunity often makes common cause with the National Association of Scholars, an organization of conservative academics.  Recently the good folks there asked me to contribute a short piece to their publication, Academic Questions, which was weighing the pros and cons of federal and state freedom-of-information (FOIA) statutes.  Below is a slightly edited version of what is appearing in that journal. The principal use that the Center for Equal Opportunity has made of state FOIA requests is to get information from public universities about the way that race and ethnicity are weighed in student admissions.  That includes …

It is impossible to overstate the love that conservative lawyers for over a generation have felt for Antonin Scalia.  When he was nominated by President Reagan to the Supreme Court in 1986, he and Robert Bork were not just the two people quickly left on the list being considered by administration officials at the Justice Department (a much younger yours truly was among them) — there was no third place on that list. As a justice, he transformed the importance given to constitutional and statutory texts, over not only over a judge’s selfish policy preferences but also over other nontextual sources …