States endeavor to bring definition to the civil rights issue of equal treatment under the law.
Rachel Alexander describes state initiatives to clarify the affirmative-action muddle created by ambiguous and contradictory Supreme Court rulings. Read Taking the Civil Rights Initiative on the Intellectual Conservative website.
No matter how you slice it, affirmative action is unequal, and therefore unconstitutional, treatment under the law. Moreover, it directly contravenes the explicit language of Congress’s 1960s civil rights legislation.
Liberals argue that diversity, a concept unknown in the Constitution or historical tradition of the United States, is a higher value than the principle of equal protection of all citizens under the law, embodied in the Fifteenth Amendment.
Liberals also use the condescending argument that affirmative action was necessary to create a black middle class. This contention is belied by the rapid ascendance of a black middle class in metropolitan locales such as Harlem in the 1920s, even in the face of blatant racial discrimination.
If large numbers of blacks since the 1960s have been unable to repeat their grandparents’ achievement, with far less racial discrimination, that is the fault of the mindset of welfare dependency fostered by liberal administrations.
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