You are currently browsing the daily archive for July 28, 2010.
By now everyone who might remotely have an interest already knows that Jeffrey Lord’s attack on Shirley Sherrod was utterly wrongheaded. His attempt to discredit her story of a relative’s lynching was both factually erroneous and morally obtuse. He’s been rightly vilified by commentators from across the political spectrum, from Media Matters to Radley Balko to his own colleagues at the American Spectator. This kind of brouhaha has a life cycle, and this one has reached its end.
So why did I take the time to write a 1700-word exegesis of an obscure 1945 court case last night, and why am I back at it today?
Because lynching, as it turns out, matters.
Race is, of course, a vexed topic in America today. And it’s one on which reasonable people may disagree. People of goodwill can differ sharply on affirmative action, on the use of race in the census, on the place of the NAACP in the country’s national discourse, on the extent of racism in contemporary society.
But if we’re going to have a productive dialogue on race in the 21st century, we need to understand how it operated in the 20th and before. The history of race is, as I said in my first post on the Spectator scandal, a subject of which no decent American has the right to remain ignorant.
A federal judge this morning blocked enforcement of the most controversial components of Arizona’s SB 1070 immigration law, just one day before the law was to go into effect.
SB 1070 has been the target of considerable student protest and organizing nationally since it was passed this spring, and is expected to be a flash point for activism when students return to campus in the fall.
Judge Susan Bolton found a “substantial likelihood” that legal residents would be subject to wrongful arrest under the law, and ruled that the statute would thus “impose a ‘distinct, unusual and extraordinary’ burden on legal resident aliens that only the federal government has the authority to impose.”
Update | Here’s the text of the judge’s order.
Last year I reported on the story of Julea Ward, a counseling student at Eastern Michigan University who was expelled from EMU’s counseling program after she declined to treat a gay client and refused to comply with the American Counseling Association’s ethical guidelines on how to address homosexuality within a therapeutic relationship. (See also my follow-up piece here, in which I addressed the two sides claims in greater detail.)
Ward sued, and her case became a huge cause celebre among Christian conservatives. But yesterday a federal judge ruled in EMU’s favor.
I’ve downloaded a copy of the decision, and I’ll be reading and commenting on it soon.
