From Andrew Sullivan, this link to a hit piece against Judge Pickering by Bob Herbert in the New York Times: A Judge’s Past
Mr. Pickering had a significant effect on his home state’s racist past as early as 1959 when he was a student at the University of Mississippi Law School. He felt it was important to bolster Mississippi’s anti-miscegenation law. A marriage between a black person and a white person was a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. But Mr. Pickering recognized there was a loophole in the law that could allow some interracial couples to fall in love and marry without being arrested and sent off to prison. He wrote an article in The Mississippi Law Journal explaining how the law could be fixed.
The state legislature took his advice, amending the law the very next year.
Herbert fails to point out that law student Pickering’s critique of the badly-written law went on to say that there was probably no point in correcting the statute since it was probably unconstitutional anyway (from Byron York🙂
…recent decisions in the fields of education, transportation, and recreation would cause one to wonder how long the Supreme Court will allow any statute to stand which uses the term ‘race’ to draw a distinction
This kind of one-sided spin is exactly what we’re talking about when we accuse Big Media of having a liberal bias; Pickering’s Law Review piece was nothing more than a classical “badly-written law” critique, a completely vanilla exercise to anyone who’s spent more than a nanosecond reading statute.
Just as bizarre as Herbert’s smear was the questioning of Teddy Kennedy in Thursday’s Senate hearing. He actually berated Pickering for writing words to the effect that the Civil Rights Act was not a guarantee of job security for black people, who could still, in Pickering’s obviously racist opinion, lose a job for good cause. Boy, I can see the pointy hat and white robe he must have been wearing when he penned that little gem, indeed. That Kennedy seemed to think this statement amounted to a smoking gun had me questioning the Senator’s sanity even more than his integrity.
Kennedy’s remarks are hardly a surprise as he clearly believes in the allocation of resources based on status rather than market value. So what is a person is a useless employee… if his status is that of a favoured group, he is entitled to favoured treatment. Yet you would think he would be in favour of more economically based relationships: after all, he bought his seat in the senate fair and square.