Rev. King's Speech
Court Adds 25
Beating racism is a moral fight, not a legal one.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.--Martin Luther King Jr., Aug. 28, 1963
Not yet.
"The Court expects," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote this week, 40 years after Rev. King's famous speech, "that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today."
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
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Washington and Lincoln can certainly be claimed as great conservative presidents. Yet Washington was also, literally, a revolutionary, and Lincoln vastly expanded the government, levied an income tax, debased the currency and often violated civil liberties. You can justify Washington's revolution as a response to tyranny and Lincoln's big government as a response to rebellion, and argue that they were conservatives in a larger sense. But they're not a perfect fit for the Reagan template, any more than Jackson was a perfect fit for the New Dealers' FDR template.
James Taranto at Opinion Journal says the combined result of the two cases is to push racial preferences further down the road to extinction. He is especially impressed by Justices Ginsburg’s and Breyer’s concession that “one may hope, but not firmly forecast, that over the next generation's span, progress toward nondiscrimination and genuinely equal opportunity will make it safe to sunset affirmative action.”
Major issues expected to be decided by the Supreme Court on Thursday:
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed 50 years ago, on June 19, 1953. The Rosenbergs were blamed for espionage in favor of the Soviet Union. The people would have been justified if the story happened in some other time in a different country, especially that the Rosenbergs' guilt wasn't proved. However, no other scenario was possible in the USA at the height of an epoch that was later called "the times of scoundrels". That was a period when people were under suspicion not only for sympathies to the USSR but also for any criticism in the address of that-time political system. The Rosenbergs were awfully unlucky. At the same time the couple became some kind of a symbol of that epoch.
For almost 20 years before imposing the Final Solution, the German Nazi Party openly advocated the extermination of all Jews. And Western and American political and business leaders did business with these German Nazis - despite their clear and unashamed anti-Jewish views.