Thomas Oliphant: Liberal Sycophant

Thomas Oliphant, the Boston Globe columnist, is a reliable bellweather of which way the liberal winds are blowing. Modestly calling himself “a civil rights purist,” he has a column criticizing Kerry (mildly) and Bush (harshly) for lagging on civil rights for gays.

His criticism of Kerry for not forthrightly affirming what Oliphant is sure he believes comes across as clearly praising with faint damns. Bush, however, he in effect calls a hypocrite who is too dumb to recognize that his praise of Brown v. Board of Education conflicts with his call for an amendment banning gay marriage.

With one statement, Bush used boilerplate language to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the decision in Brown v. Board of Education as a victory for the idea embodied in the Constitution that every citizen has the right to the equal protection of law. And with another, he used boilerplate language to repeat his call for an amendment to that Constitution which would create an exception to that basic right so that gay people can be discriminated against.

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As for Bush, it is too much to ask why he doesn’t see the contradiction between his views on Brown and his lip-service support for the antigay marriage amendment. However, it is not too much to note that he has a nasty habit of “balancing” a pro-civil rights message with a clear message to his supporters who oppose equal rights — as often as not on the same day….

Last year, for example, Bush chose Martin Luther King’s birthday, Jan. 15, as the date to file his administration’s brief opposing all of the University of Michigan’s admissions policies designed to promote diversity fairly.

And this year, he chose the day after the Rev. King’s birthday, on which he laid a wreath at his tomb in Georgia, to take advantage of Congress’s absence from Washington to make a so-called recess appointment of Charles Pickering of Mississippi to a federal appeals court.

From my perspective, however, Oliphant’s position is no portrait of purity. In fact, it is he and not Bush who strikes me as inconsistent. Indeed, Oliphant himself at one point seems to recognize that his Bush bashing has run off the road (and even off the cliff, in the manner of Wile E. Coyote chasing the Roadrunner). Thus he acknowledges:

The fact is that Bush’s endorsement of the constitutional amendment strategy of antigay activists on the right has at least a substantive validity. Without it, the status quo confronting gay people in the United States is flagrantly unconstitutional: It is literally a denial of equal protection to one group of Americans that even the current, conservative court might not be able to support if challenged.

“At least a substantive validity“? What does Oliphant want? A superficial, non-substantive validity?

Bush believes, as Oliphant recognizes, that Brown stands for the proposition “that every citizen has the right to the equal protection of law.” It is certainly consistent with that view (as you know, I would argue that it is mandatory) to believe that racial preferences violate that principle because they require discrimination based on race.

By contrast, Oliphant, self-described “civil rights purist,” purports to agree that “every citizen” has the right to be free from discrimination but is an ardent defender of racial preferences, i.e., distributing benefits and burdens based on race.

I guess it is just “too much to ask why he doesn’t see the contradiction….”