Where do I live? Until the Supreme Court decisions in Grutter and Gratz and the Lawrence case, I thought my home was the United States. After all, I pledge my allegiance to America, sing the Star Spangled Banner with brio and read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to remind myself of the nation's founding.
Now I believe I might be living in Malaysia or perhaps a South American country like Brazil. I'm confused. The principles I associated with the United States have been discarded by the Supreme Court in so cavalier a manner that this nation I love seems to have been transformed into a banana republic.
Take two fundamental ideas - ideas that served as a foundation stone for the national edifice: equal protection under the law and the precepts of a Judeo Christian society. With the Supreme Court decisions in question these principles have been shredded into confetti.
"Equal protection" once suggested, as the Fourteenth Amendment noted and the Civil Rights act of 1964 reaffirmed, that no one should be handicapped nor advantaged by virtue of his race. This was the idea behind the integration of races and what civil rights advocates fought for from the Civil War through the 1960's.
Notwithstanding all the claims to the contrary, from the 1970's on "equal opportunity" became confused with "equal results." A nation that often saw its principles honored in the breach, decided to overturn the principle and employ race as a proxy for "disadvantaged."
Thus was born the era of affirmative action. In this new age, diversity meant only racial diversity. As a consequence, admissions' officers in universities counted by race, denying along the way that this wasn't a quota system.
While the Supreme Court's Bakke decision in the late seventies said race could be used as one criterion for admission, state courts argued that race was an inappropriate criterion unless there was prior evidence of overt discrimination. In Grutter and Gratz race is officially valorized; it is the criterion for admission even though a weighted numerical standard for race was found unacceptable.
In the majority opinion written by Sandra Day O'Connor, the equal protection clause is officially negated, ascriptive standards of the kind reproved by the nation's founders are embraced and America - instead of the beacon of fair play - has been Latin Americanized through designated privilege.
The Lawrence decision may have even more insidious characteristics than Gratz and Gutter. In this decision state sodomy laws were reversed - a position with which I'm in accord. But the Court didn't stop there. It permanently ensconced "the privacy notion" mentioned in the Griswold decision and Roe v. Wade, but certainly not found in the Constitution. This is law by invention.
Moreover, the law now created reverses two thousand years of Judeo Christian tradition since a majority of the Court contends what is done in the privacy of one's bedroom is no one's business except the participants. In other words incest, prostitution, adultery, or any other perversion the mind can conjure, cannot be regulated. Morality is now officially an individual concern unrelated to social responsibility or biblical prescription.
The liberal idea has been transmogrified into the libertine ideal. "Go where you want to go, do what you want to do," the refrain of Woodstock generation, is the decisive position of the Supreme Court. It is remarkable that in a scant three decades two thousand years of tradition have been discarded. Sodom and Gomorrah are no longer an object lesson; they are sanctified in official fabricated legal theory.
I am indeed confused about where I live. Never did I think that principles as fundamental as "equal protection" and regulation against taboos could be so easily rejected. This is not the America I signed on to, nor is it the America our founders created.
In my judgment the Supreme Court has lost its way and it is taking the nation with it. Down the rabbit's hole goes legal precedent and common sense. All someone with my view can hope for is that someday - hopefully before the 25 years Sandra Day O'Connor indicated affirmative action should end - the nation will reclaim its heritage and recall what made America an exceptional nation and the hope for people in every corner of the globe.
Copyright 2003 Herbert London
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