From the WSJ Opinion Archives

by JAMES TARANTO
Friday, June 27, 2003 11:49 A.M. EDT

Thurmond, Plessy and Grutter
No one will ever say Strom Thurmond died an untimely death. The erstwhile segregationist not only lived to be 100 but died at the end of a week that began with a Supreme Court case that underscored just how much American attitudes toward race changed during his lifetime.

Thurmond retired from the U.S. Senate less than six months ago, having served longer in that chamber than anyone else. He was the only centenarian ever to serve in either house of Congress. His political career was the length of an ordinary man's lifetime: First elected to the South Carolina state Senate in 1932, he didn't call it quits for another 70 years. When he was born, on Dec. 5, 1902, Theodore Roosevelt was president.

Thurmond's longevity was his chief accomplishment. His legislative legacy is primarily one of obstructionism, most notably his record 24-hour, 18-minute filibuster in an unsuccessful attempt to block provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. On the other hand, he was a political pioneer of sorts, becoming in 1964 one of the first prominent Southern Democrats to switch to the Republican Party--a move that helped free the South from nearly a century of one-party rule.

In 1948, when Thurmond was governor of South Carolina, he ran for president as a "states rights"--i.e., segregationist--Democrat. His name appeared on the ballot in 15 states, and although he received just 2.4% of the popular vote nationwide, he carried four Southern states. Fifty-four years later, Thurmond's colleague Trent Lott lost his Senate leadership post after saying at Thurmond's 100th birthday party that had he been elected, "we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years."

Thurmond's segregationism seems to have been more a product of his times than a matter of genuine conviction. By the 1980s he had adopted moderate-to-liberal stances on some racial issues, voting for a national holiday in honor of Martin Luther King, for the 1982 extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and for the Civil Rights Act of 1991.

Even in his segregationist heyday, Thurmond's record was not all invidious, as his Washington Post obituary points out:

As governor of South Carolina in the late 1940s, he took the lead in abolishing the state's poll tax. He also increased expenditures on education, including education for blacks, and he established a higher minimum wage. He threw all the state's resources behind an effort to bring a lynch mob to justice.

But he was a fierce opponent of President Truman's civil-rights program, which he described as "the most un-American law ever proposed. It was borrowed from the communists, who know well that they can never gain control of America as long as our fundamental rights are preserved to the states."

To put in perspective just how much America changed during Thurmond's lifetime, consider this: Six years before he was born, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, embraced the doctrine of "separate but equal." Four days before he died, the court, in Grutter v. Bollinger, embraced what we might call the doctrine of "together therefore unequal," approving of racial discrimination in the name of "diversity." In the span of Thurmond's life, America went from an oppressive regime of discrimination against blacks to a purportedly benign one of discrimination in their favor.

But some things haven't changed. In both Plessy and Grutter, the court sanctioned a kind of racial discrimination that was fashionable at the time, defying the clear language of the 14th Amendment: "No State shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Then again, it was 58 years before the court reconsidered Plessy. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's majority opinion in Grutter foresees it expiring in a mere 25 years. That would be in 2028, when O'Connor will be 98--not even as old as Thurmond was when he died.

What Liberal Media?
Is it possible that Adam Clymer's New York Times obituary for Thurmond is just a wee bit biased? The headline reads: "Strom Thurmond, Foe of Integration, Dies at 100." This seems somewhat unfair; he was a foe of integration, but hadn't been one for decades. Then there's this lovely passage:

After President Truman announced a broad civil rights program and issued an executive order to integrate the armed services in 1948, Mr. Thurmond was not among the president's most strident early critics. He said nothing comparable to the analogy by Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia that using the Federal Bureau of Investigation on civil rights cases was comparable to Hitler's use of the Gestapo.

Why are we reading in Thurmond's obit about something he didn't say--other than because Clymer wants to remind us that he was on the same side as the guy who did say it?

Scalia Gets Dowdified
In an item yesterday, we had a little fun with a quote from Justice Antonin Scalia. CNN reported that Scalia, in dissenting from Lawrence v. Texas, a ruling declaring homosexual sodomy a fundamental constitutional right, had said he has "nothing against homosexuals." It turns out that although Scalia's dissent does contain this sequence of words, the network egregiously misquoted him. Here's what he actually wrote:

Let me be clear that I have nothing against homosexuals, or any other group, promoting their agenda through normal democratic means.

The object of the preposition against was not homosexuals but promoting. By presenting the fragmentary quote, CNN made it appear as if Scalia were issuing a defensive denial of personal prejudice, when in fact he was making a point about political philosophy. CNN has since corrected its story, and the original source of the error appears to have been an Associated Press dispatch that moved some 20 minutes after the court handed down its decision. The wire service has not issued a correction, though a list of excerpts from the opinions and a later dispatch on Democratic presidential candidates' reactions both include the full quote.

When the AP screws up, it reverberates around the world, as a Google search of today's news stories demonstrates. No one got it as wrong, however, as the New York Times' Joel Brinkley, a colleague of Maureen Dowd, who explicitly falsified the quote (emphasis ours):

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the dissent and took the unusual step of reading it aloud from the bench this morning, saying "the court has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda," while adding that he personally has "nothing against homosexuals."

Speaking of Dowd, another newspaper has corrected her misquotation of President Bush. From yesterday's News Tribune of Tacoma, Wash.:

In a column that appeared in The News Tribune May 18, Maureen Dowd omitted a significant part of a quotation from comments President George Bush made in Little Rock, Ark. . . . In a subsquent [sic] column, Dowd used the full quotation, but the first version was misleading and requires a correction.

Indeed it does. But the Times itself still hasn't offered one.

Day of Judgment
"The Supreme Court ruling that struck down a Texas law banning gay sex on Thursday will have a ripple effect on 13 other states across the country that have similar anti-sodomy laws," Fox News reports.

We've heard of "blue laws," which prohibit certain commercial activities on Sunday, but why would Texas ban gay sex on Thursday? Clarence Thomas is right: This was an "uncommonly silly" law.

Georgia on My Mind
In a lesser-noticed ruling yesterday, the Supreme Court in Georgia v. Ashcroft struck down a lower-court ruling that had rejected a Democratic redistricting plan for the Georgia state Senate on the ground that it "diluted" minority voting strength by spreading black voters our among more districts. What's interesting about this ruling is that it's a case in which most of the court's members can be said to have ruled on principle rather than party.

Republicans have often cynically supported racial gerrymandering, the practice of creating "majority minority" congressional districts, which works to the GOP's advantage by making nearby districts more Republican. Indeed, not a single GOP lawmaker in the Georgia Legislature voted for the redistricting plan the court upheld yesterday.

Yet it was the five "conservative" justices--the Republican appointees who decided Bush v. Gore in President Bush's favor--who upheld the Democratic redistricting plan. Dissenting were the four "liberal" justices, including the court's two Democrats. Only Republican appointees John Paul Stevens and David Souter voted with rather than against their party.

Our Friends the Saudis
"A key suspect the May 12 terror attacks in Riyadh has turned himself in," CNN reports from Riyadh. "Ali Abd al-Rahman al-Faqasi al-Ghamdi, who authorities said has deep ties to al Qaeda, surrendered Thursday to Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the third ranking official in the Saudi Interior Ministry, a Saudi official told CNN." Here's a rather stunning detail:

The Saudi official said he believed the break in the Riyadh case came after the June 14 bust by Saudi authorities of a suspected terror ring in Mecca, one of Islam's holiest sites.

During the bust, Saudi authorities discovered, among other things, what one official described as "booby-trapped Korans," the Muslim holy book.

That discovery, said this official, may have been a final straw of sorts for Saudi religious leaders, who denounced the plot for its double hypocrisy in allegedly plotting a terror attack in Mecca and in waging a holy war against infidels using Islam's holiest book.

Life is cheap, but you better not mess with the Koran.

Weasel Watch
Writing in Le Monde Diplomatique, French filmmaker Jeremiah Cullinane says he's worried about Christians making movies in the U.S.:

As the New Yorker points out, in these films, "The conversion of the Jews is what the Rapture, the seven years of Tribulation, the rule of the Anti-Christ, and Jesus' Second Coming all lead to." The Anti-Christ in the films is a lawyer, media mogul, movie executive, or United Nations leader (never an oil executive), areas perceived as under Jewish control. Distrust of centralised government is an element the Christians share with the US far right, and armed resistance is evoked as a option. It is difficult to say if such positions in mass-marketed films endanger tolerance and democracy.

It takes a lot of chutzpah for a Frenchman to fret about the dangers of anti-Semitism in America.

'I Don't Think That It Was Worth It'
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof appears to mean well, but the poor man just seems to be lost in an intellectual fog. Just back from Iraq, he acknowledges the brutality of Saddam Hussein's regime and tells the story (with a grotesque picture) of Mathem Abid Ali, an Iraqi man whose ear was cut off by Baathist thugs. But although he acknowledges Iraqis are enjoying a "giddy new freedom," he says of their liberation: "I don't think that it was worth it." Worth what, he never spells out, offering only one complaint:

If we were willing to rescue Iraqis, should we intervene (multilaterally) to stop the far worse bloodshed in Congo--where 3.3 million people have died since 1998? Or in Liberia, to try to shore up West Africa before it crumbles as well?

I'm suspicious of any answer that is too quick and too glib. But my fear is that the mistakes and poor planning that are now miring us in Iraq will unfairly discredit humanitarian intervention more broadly, even when saving people pleading to be liberated. That would be another terrible cost of Iraq.

So the argument against liberating Iraq is that it may end up making it harder to justify humanitarian interventions in places where America has no strategic interest?

Public Service Announcement
The Federal Trade Commission has established a Web site and phone number for people who don't want to hear from telemarketers. You can get on the federal government's "do not call" list by going to donotcall.gov or calling 888-382-1222. (Registration by phone is not yet available in all parts of the country.) Now if they'd only do the same for spam.

Not Too Brite--XCI
"The color of your home's walls can be a matter of life and death, as a German man found out when he was fatally stabbed by his wife after they had an argument about what color to paint them," Reuters reports from Berlin.

Oddly Enough!

Who Knew?
"Medical Care Often Not Optimal, Study Finds"--headline, Washington Post, June 26

That Must've Hurt
"Fire Pinned on Human"--headline, (Tucson) Arizona Daily Star, June 27

Leave No Child Behind
"Teachers Get Preliminary OK to Carry Weapons"--headline, Salt Lake Tribune, June 25

Zero-Tolerance Watch
"Students who call each other names or joke about someone's sexuality face suspension under a regulation passed this week by the Maryland State Board of Education," the Washington Times reports. Does this mean a high schooler who jokingly calls a classmate "gay" will be kicked out of school? It's not clear: "School officials would not specify . . . what would constitute verbal harassment."

Marilyn Maultsby, president of the board, seems to think bullies should leave gay kids alone and instead pick on the pimply-faced: "Harassment because of their sexual orientation is more egregious than for an issue such as acne." To the dermatologically challenged, that's a painful slap in the face.

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