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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.
So yesterday morning Jeffrey Lord of the American Spectator put up a long post claiming that Shirley Sherrod had lied when she said that a relative of hers was lynched in Georgia in 1943.
Specifically, Lord claimed that the term “lynching” refers exclusively to murder by hanging. Since Sherrod’s relative was merely arrested, handcuffed, publicly beaten for as much as half an hour by three police officers, dragged feet-first across a courthouse lawn, and then left to die, Lord said, he wasn’t lynched.
Informed that lynching does not refer, and has never referred, exclusively to hangings, Lord has tried a variety of new lines of attack in the last 36 hours. He’s argued that three assailants is too few for a lynch mob (it isn’t), that the Supreme Court refuted the claim that the crime was a lynching (they didn’t), and even — most recently — that because lynching wasn’t articulated as a specific criminal offense in the Jim Crow era, the term cannot be properly applied to any historical event.
Yeah. It’s a train wreck.
Lord’s comments on his and others’ posts on the American Spectator site have become increasingly erratic over the last two days, so I’m not going to even try to parse and refute them all. But his repeated references to a Supreme Court case that arose from the incident prompted me to take a look at the decision in question, and it turns out that it’s a fascinating and important one.
Grab a snack. This is going to take a while.
So the American Spectator has a piece up claiming that Shirley Sherrod of the USDA — the Shirley Sherrod who recently lost her job after Andrew Breitbart disseminated distorted clips from a speech she’d given to the NAACP — lied in that speech when she said her relative Bobby Hall was lynched in Baker County, Georgia back in the early 1940s.
Now, the Spectator is wrong about this, as has been noted. They’re wrong because they’re under the impression that lynching requires a rope, and that because Bobby Hall was beaten to death rather than hanged, “lynching” isn’t what happened to him.
Never mind that he was beaten to death while in police custody.
Never mind that he was a black man beaten to death by a white sheriff — Claude Screws — and his two white deputies.
In his hometown’s courthouse square.
While handcuffed.
According to the Spectator this extrajudicial murder, carried out in a public square by three law enforcement officers, was no lynching because there was no rope.
Andrew Serwer has the goods on this, including the text of the law that the folks at the Spectator cite in their argument, a law which they obviously didn’t bother to read, a law which utterly eviscerates their position.
But I just wanted to mention it myself, because as a white man I think it’s important for us white people to educate ourselves about this country’s past. Not out of a sense of guilt, but out of a sense of obligation. If we’re going to construct an identity for ourselves as white people that isn’t stained with the sins of our forefathers, we need to not just repudiate those sins but understand them. We need to align ourselves with the Leonidas C. Dyers of our history rather than the Sheriff Claude Screwses, and we need to do it in a concrete and substantive way.
We need to show our friends and colleagues of color, and our own children, and ourselves, the respect of learning the history of race in this country.
The Spectator embarrassed itself today. It embarrassed itself by seeking to use the history of lynching to score cheap political points against an honorable woman.
But more than that it embarrassed itself by proudly trumpeting its ignorance of a subject of which no decent American has the right to remain ignorant.
Update | The Spectator piece was written by one Jeffrey Lord, a former Reagan administration official, and it would be remiss of me not to point out that two of his colleagues have already disowned it. John Tabin calls Lord’s assertions “untrue” and “utterly bizarre,” while Philip Klein says he’s “rendered speechless” by the article’s wrongness.
Late Update | A third Spectator writer has disavowed Lord’s piece. Quin Hillyer says the article is “off base,” adding, “I just don’t get Jeff’s point, sorry to say.”
Still no correction on the article itself.
Tuesday Morning Update | Lord has posted to the Spectator’s blog to defend his piece. His defense is flat wrong, and I’ve told him why there. (My comment is the one by Angus Johnston, the second one in the thread as I post this.)
I have to sneak out for a media thing right now, but I’ll have more on this story later today.
Final Update | My last, long word on this subject.
The website Pro Publica has a great piece up about how for-profit colleges are luring in prospective students with misleading online ads about a mythical “Obama Mom” scholarship program.
The whole piece is really worth a read, but one fact stuck out for me — a quarter of all Pell Grant money now goes to for-profit colleges and universities. That’s $7.3 billion dollars a year. And that’s before you start figuring in all the federal student loans these students are taking out.
These are mind-boggling numbers, particularly when you consider the hijinks that some of the colleges are up to.
Seriously. Go read the whole story. (And read this USA Today piece on a separate coming Department of Education crackdown on scammy for-profit programs, while you’re at it.)
studentactivism.net 
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