The world hardly needs a Jewish Press commentary on the affirmative action and gay rights rulings handed down by the United States Supreme Court last week. There have already been
millions of words written about them, and there will certainly be millions more.
We do, however, urge our readers to sit back and contemplate how it came to pass that the custodian of a Constitution requiring all Americans to be treated equally under the law endorsed the principle that public decisions may be made based on race. Or, after all these years of legislative history to the contrary, how our nation’s highest court was able to find
authority in the Constitution to effectively bar our federal and state governments from restricting conduct simply because it’s consensual.
We do however, think it important to draw attention to the spin these decisions were subject to in the pages of The New York Times, which attempted to portray them as eminently logical and unremarkable.
In its editorial roundup this past Sunday on the Supreme Court Term – matter-of-factly titled “A Moderate Term of the Court” (emphasis ours) – the Times cited in its opening paragraphs the Court’s “endorsing the consideration of race” in college admissions and that “gay sexual relations are constitutionally protected” because they are consensual.
Yet on Tuesday, in a front-page story headlined “In a Momentous Term, Justices Remake the Law, and the Court” (emphasis ours), the Times’s longtime Supreme Court reporter and resident constitutional law expert, Linda Greenhouse, wrote:
The Supreme Court term that ended last week will leave as big an imprint as any in recent memory – not only on the country, but on the court itself in ways few would have expected when the term began….
In an amazing final week, the court preserved affirmative action in university admissions, providing a safe harbor for a policy that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s majority opinion described not as something to be grudgingly tolerated but as close to a moral imperative. Then the court found in the Constitution’s due process guarantee a demand for gay men and lesbians to be accorded dignity and respect for their private sexual behavior.
The Times – and the Left for which it speaks – may think all of this is no big deal. But it is really a very big deal for millions of Americans who refuse to be swayed by ideological trends and political fashions.
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