THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

The Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that students may not have a voluntary prayer at a sports event. Please don't tell me the courts are abusing their power. They are using the power we gave them.

In 1968, the Supreme Court ruled that no state could have a law against miscegenation. The Court cited the Bill of Rights and the fourteenth amendment. Every state that proposed and ratified the Bill of Rights had anti-miscegenation laws. Almost every state that proposed and ratified the fourteenth amendment had anti-miscegenation laws. The court made no pretense that its decision had anything to do with the intent of those who wrote the Constitution.

In that decision, the Warren Court set a precedent like no other in history. It would do what the members of the court felt they should do, in open defiance of the Constitution's actual meaning. They justified it by saying that if you object to the anti-miscegenation law, it makes you a racist, and nobody dares object to that.

A lot of the people I knew in 1968 were conservative Catholics.

I warned them, with a Southerner's feel for the Constitution, that this precedent would mean a disaster for everybody in the near future. They explained patiently to me that Racism was an evil, evil thing, and that to make an omelet, you have to crack some eggs. In this case, the egg was constitutional intent.

Then came the abortion decision in 1973. The same people, conservative Protestant and Catholic, were outraged. How dare the Supreme Court invent this kind of "right of privacy" in the teeth of the meaning of the Constitution!

I could have explained to them that all the Court was doing was cracking an egg it had already cracked completely in 1968. They whine and they moan and they shout and they talk about the DRED SCOTT DECISION!!

They talk about the Dred Scott Decision because that way they can sound anti-racist. It was not a Supreme Court decision in 1857 that gave the Court a license for Roe vs. Wade or for its recent decision on prayer.

What gives the court the license to decide anything it feels like deciding is the 1968 decision to which no one dared object then, and no one but me dares to object to now. In that decision, I repeat, all precedents and all the clear meaning of those who wrote the Constitution was not merely ignored, it was OPENLY DEFIED.

The simple fact of the matter is, for all the shouts about "baby killers," the life of any child takes a back seat to these so-called Christians' desperation to avoid being called "racists." Until they object to the decision they dare not criticize, all critics of the Supreme Court should shut up.

National anti-abortion spokesmen and "Christian" conservatives are happy to shout down all other conservative issues in the name of "stopping the baby killers." But they are not willing to openly take on liberal opinion where it would really hurt, and to risk the label racist for those same babies.

Which makes them absurd. Unlike the 1973 Roe decision, the outlawing of anti-miscegenation laws was not merely a STRETCH of the Constitution, it was an OPEN rejection of constitutional intent. There is no question of a question that any of the Founding Fathers or even the authors of the Fourteenth amendment intended to prohibit states from having anti-miscegenation laws. If that is valid, the Roe decision is MORE than valid.

I am sick of listening to cowards bellyache.