The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law is “highly troubled” by John Roberts’s views (or what they take to be his views) on civil rights. It thinks his record on civil rights issues reveals “a disturbing hostility towards core civil rights legal principles,” and it has just released a statement expressing its “serious concerns.”
The Lawyers Committee is especially concerned that Roberts has “opposed busing for school desegregation”; that the has “attacked affirmative action as ‘quotas’ [even the Lawyers Committee’s own quotes do not support this charge]; and that he has refused to regard all minorities and all women as victims, insisting on “relief only for individual victims of discrimination instead of relief for the classes of victims such as racial minorities and women. ”
The Lawyers Committee “Statement” linked above give a few examples of what it objects to. Referring to the Bob Jones case that I’ve discussed several times (here and here, for starters), it criticizes, for example, the Reagan Administration’s opposition to “denying tax-exempt status to charitable entities whose conduct violates public policy.” If the country should be so fortunate in the future as to have the IRS and the Justice Department declare that distributing benefits and burdens based on race violates “public policy,” I will watch with interest as the Lawyers Committee defends the denial of tax exemptions to any private schools that continue to practice racial preferences.
Here’s another example of something in Roberts’s record that highly troubles and seriously concerns the Lawyers Committee:
Mr. Roberts argued for changing the Department of Labor
