... Perriello explains why he thinks his brand of “conviction politics” can win over voters ... : “I don’t see the dividing line as liberal versus conservative. It’s populist versus corporatist. If we’re not standing up to the most powerful interests, where is the Democratic Party?” Perriello acknowledges that some in the conservative district may judge him harshly based on his votes for health care, cap and trade, and the stimulus.

Presumably as an example of his own standing up to powerful interests,

Perriello notes, “I’ve been incredibly critical of [White House economic adviser] Lawrence Summers as someone who wouldn’t know anyone making less than six figures, unless that person was driving him around.”

Don’t believe me? Then read this.

The song he is singing now, however, makes him the latest and perhaps the saddest exhibit of how far the remnants of the old civil rights movement have fallen from the values that animated that movement and led it to success. Speaking at the National Press Club yesterday promoting a “new coalition of conscience” to oppose Glen Beck’s gathering at the Lincoln Memorial tomorrow (the anniversary of King’s famous speech), Fauntroy said

“We are going to take on the barbarism of war, the decadence of racism, and the scourge of poverty, that the Ku Klux — I meant to say the Tea Party.... You all forgive me, but I — you have to use them interchangeably....”

Fauntroy said right-wing conservatives have “declared war on the civil rights movement of the 1960s....”

“I don’t want you to think I’m angry,” Fauntroy said. “[But] when this right-wing conservative exclusionary group comes to highjack our movement, we have got to respond. And I’m looking forward to that Coalition of Conscience, in defense of jobs and freedom for women.”

Do you believe the federal and state government should treat all Americans without regard to race?

For respondents who appear puzzled by the “without regard” concept, the following explication should be offered: it means no agency of government can discriminate against or give preferential treatment to any American based on race.

How do you think the answers of the Tea Party followers of Glenn Beck and the “Coalition of Conscience” followers of Walter Fauntroy would compare? Which would be closer to Martin Luther King’s dream?

If the Glenn Becks have “highjacked” that dream, it’s only because the Walter Fauntroys have abandoned it. [Query: can all the people like me, who agreed with King's dream then and agree with it now, be said to have “highjacked” it?]

But I do have one request. Can the president (or his speechwriters) at least now put to rest one of his most cloying verbal tics (much more grating, because more self-congratulatory, than “make no mistake” or “let me be clear...”).

I am referring to his incessantly repeated “I will not rest until....”

• businesses are investing and hiring:

• everyone has a job, a good wage, & benefits;

• YouTube compilation of 8 Obamian “I will not rest[s]...”

• 11 “I will not rest[s]” noted by CBS News

Now let me be clear: Mr. President, go ahead, rest, please! But make no mistake, change will not be easy, but yes [you] can change this irritating rhetorical habit even though

[t]here will be setbacks, and false starts, and sometimes we will make mistakes. But as hard as it may seem, we cannot lose hope.

For the past day or so the mainstream press has been all a-twitter (as have Twitter, the blogs, and the talk shows) with recent polls indicating a rising number of Americans think Obama is a Muslim and a falling number believe he is a Christian.

On August 18 The Pew Forum on Religion and Public life started the recent buzz by reporting that Growing Number of Americans Say Obama is a Muslim.

A new national survey by the Pew Research Center finds that nearly one-in-five Americans (18%) now say Obama is a Muslim, up from 11% in March 2009. Only about one-third of adults (34%) say Obama is a Christian, down sharply from 48% in 2009. Fully 43% say they do not know what Obama’s religion is. The survey was completed in early August, before Obama’s recent comments about the proposed construction of a mosque near the site of the former World Trade Center.

In all, just 47% of respondents believe Obama is a Christian; 24% declined to respond to the question or said they were unsure, and 5% believe he is neither Christian nor Muslim.

Since October 2008, the percentage of Americans who say the president is a Muslim has risen from 12 percent to 18 percent. The percentage of people who think he is a Christian has fallen from 51 percent to 34 percent.

A good argument can be made, however, that a wide swath of the public’s “perception of ‘otherness’” is not a “misperception” at all. Indeed, Dorothy Rabinowitz made not a good but a great, immensely powerful argument on this very point back in June, well before the current Muslim controversies. In The Alien in the White House, in the Wall Street Journal she argued that “[t]he distance between the president and the people is beginning to be revealed,” that

it was clear from the first that this president — single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival — was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans’ leader, a man of them, for them, the nation’s voice and champion.

They were a matter of identification with the nation and to all that binds its people together in pride and allegiance. These are feelings held deep in American hearts, unvoiced mostly, but unmistakably there and not only on the Fourth of July.

A great part of America now understands that this president’s sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe....

.... The beliefs and attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found everywhere — in the salons of the left the world over — and, above all, in the academic establishment, stuffed with tenured radicals and their political progeny. The places where it is held as revealed truth that the United States is now, and has been throughout its history, the chief engine of injustice and oppression in the world.

They are attitudes to be found everywhere, but never before in a president of the United States. Mr. Obama may not hold all, or the more extreme, of these views. But there can be no doubt by now of the influences that have shaped him. They account for his grand apology tour through the capitals of Europe and to the Muslim world, during which he decried America's moral failures — her arrogance, insensitivity. They were the words of a man to whom reasons for American guilt came naturally. Americans were shocked by this behavior in their newly elected president. But he was telling them something from those lecterns in foreign lands — something about his distant relation to the country he was about to lead.

Let’s start with Islam. Obama has made no secret — indeed, he has proudly proclaimed in his autobiographies and various speeches — that he chose his Muslim father’s name and race when he could have as easily chosen his mother’s and her parents’. He attended a Muslim school as a child in Indonesia, which he spoke of fondly in a 2007 interview with Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. Indeed, in a 2008 column Kristof took some of the blame for what he regarded as the successful attempt to “otherize” Obama:

Those who suggest that Mr. Obama is a Muslim — as if that in itself were wrong — regularly cite my own columns, especially an interview last year in which I asked him about Islam and his boyhood in Indonesia.

Mr. Obama recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them with a first-rate accent. In a remark that seemed delightfully uncalculated (it’ll give Alabama voters heart attacks), Mr. Obama described the call to prayer as “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.”

Moreover, Mr. Obama’s own grandfather in Kenya was a Muslim. Mr. Obama never met his grandfather and says he isn’t sure if his grandfather’s two wives were simultaneous or consecutive, or even if he was Sunni or Shiite. (O.K., maybe Mr. Obama should just give up on Alabama.)

More recently, during his campaign and as president Obama has devoted not inconsiderable efforts to “reaching out” to Muslims, even to the point of making improved relations with the Muslim world the “foremost mission” of NASA, the space (spaced out?) agency. According to NASA administrator Gen. Charles Bolden, the president “charged me with three things.”

One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering.

In June 2007, for example, Senator Obama told the national meeting of the United Church of Christ, that “some right-wing evangelical leaders have exploited and politicized religious beliefs in an effort to sow division.”

“But somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and faith started being used to drive us apart. Faith got hijacked, partly because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, all too eager to exploit what divides us,” the Democratic presidential candidate said in a 30-minute speech before a national meeting of the United Church of Christ.

“At every opportunity, they've told evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design,” he said.

“There was even a time when the Christian Coalition determined that its No. 1 legislative priority was tax cuts for the rich,” Obama said. “I don't know what Bible they're reading, but it doesn't jibe with my version.”

Let us also not forget Candidate Obama’s famous slur on rural rubes, that

they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

In short, the combination of Obama’s cultural distance from mainstream American, his special “sensitivity” to Muslims and the Muslim world, and his disparaging remarks about evangelicals along with his long sympathetic association with Rev. Wright could easily lead many quite reasonable Americans to be unsure about his religious identity. This is true, I think, especially because most suspicions that Obama is Muslim or is not Christian are not based on theological speculation. They are much more a comment about his cultural distance from themselves than a firm conviction that he worships Allah, that he bows down to Mecca every day, etc.

Obama, they believe, as Rush Limbaugh has suggested, may be our first Muslim president in the same way that Bill Clinton was regarded by many as our first black president.

Finally, there is an additional, unnoted (so far as I know) reason why so many Americans are skeptical of announcements such as this recent one from the White House:

White House says Obama is Christian, prays daily

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama is a Christian who prays daily, a White House official said Thursday, trying to tamp down growing doubts about the president's religion.

no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.

UPDATE

Byron York has more to say (and he says it well) about why the public can reasonably be confused about Obama’s religious identity.

UPDATE II

James Taranto disagrees with James Carville’s explanation of why so many people believe Obama is a Muslim — “there are a lot of stupid people out there” — and as evidence asks “What right-wing rag published” the following during the 2008 campaign:

As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother's Christian background is irrelevant....

The article, by Edward Luttwak, stated that “[i]n Islam . . . there is no such thing as a half-Muslim. Like all monotheistic religions, Islam is an exclusive faith.” It also noted that

Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian, and indeed has written convincingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how important his Christian faith is to him.

His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is “irtidad” or “ridda,” usually translated from the Arabic as “apostasy,” but with connotations of rebellion and treason. Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit, worse than murder (which the victim’s family may choose to forgive).

With few exceptions, the jurists of all Sunni and Shiite schools prescribe execution for all adults who leave the faith not under duress; the recommended punishment is beheading at the hands of a cleric, although in recent years there have been both stonings and hangings....

Because no government is likely to allow the prosecution of a President Obama — not even those of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the only two countries where Islamic religious courts dominate over secular law — another provision of Muslim law is perhaps more relevant: it prohibits punishment for any Muslim who kills any apostate, and effectively prohibits interference with such a killing.

At the very least, that would complicate the security planning of state visits by President Obama to Muslim countries, because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards. More broadly, most citizens of the Islamic world would be horrified by the fact of Senator Obama’s conversion to Christianity once it became widely known — as it would, no doubt, should he win the White House....

That an Obama presidency would cause such complications in our dealings with the Islamic world is not likely to be a major factor with American voters, and the implication is not that it should be. But of all the well-meaning desires projected on Senator Obama, the hope that he would decisively improve relations with the world’s Muslims is the least realistic.

On August 10 I discussed a misleading article about his campaign for re-election here. The next day the Charlotte Daily Progress reported that the embattled incumbent had banned political signs from his meetings.

Prior to the [Scottsville] town hall meeting, Steve Peters, a member of the Jefferson Area Tea Party, complained that Perriello’s office decided to prohibit political signs inside this year’s town halls.

“Last year we were allowed to have our signs,” said Peters, standing outside and holding an anti-Perriello sign. “We didn’t have to sit like little kids in a classroom where you have to raise your hand to ask a question.”
….
Perriello’s district director, Ridge Schuyler, said he chose to ban signs to ensure that the town halls are an opportunity for constituents to interact with their congressman without partisan politics getting in the way.

By John S. Rosenberg | Albemarle County
Published: August 19, 2010

The Daily Progress reports (“Praise, complaints and hard questions for Perriello in Scottsville,” Aug. 11) that Tom Perriello has prohibited political signs at his meetings with voters.

His district director explains that “he chose to ban signs to ensure that the town halls are an opportunity for constituents to interact with their congressman without partisan politics getting in the way.”

“Partisan politics” at campaign events? Who’d a thought?

Perriello has almost always voted down the line with Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership in his first term, a record that no doubt explains why, according to the campaign finance monitors at opensecrets.org, he has received well over twice as much money from Democratic campaign committees as the average House member. (See http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cidN00029339).

Heaven forbid that the congressman should have to deal with “partisan politics” when he attempts to explain and justify these votes to his constituents.

After facing criticism that he was stifling free speech, U.S. Rep. Tom Perriello will now allow political signs at his 10 remaining town hall meetings across the district.

Perriello’s office had banned signs at his 20 scheduled town hall forums during Congress’ recess after a number of constituents told them that the abundance of signs at last year’s town hall forums contributed to an overly charged and politicized atmosphere.

The Rutherford Institute, an Albemarle County-based civil liberties organization, chastised the freshman Democrat over the sign ban policy Wednesday.

“Your sign ban amounts to an act of outright censorship that raises grave Constitutional concerns,” wrote Rutherford Institute founder and President John W. Whitehead in a letter to Perriello.

is both a prominent and an impressive law professor at Harvard who has written both widely and deeply about race and the law. He is perhaps best known for his general support of color blindness in such areas as jury selection, where he has argued against insuring racial balance, and adoption, where he defends cross-racial adoption. These views are not common among tenured black law professors at leading law schools, and Kennedy has been roundly denounced by Derrick Bell, among others, who calls him “a critic of blacks,” and worse.

In addition to a big book arguing these themes, Race, Crime, and the Law (Pantheon, 1997), Kennedy has also written a number of controversial articles, such as “My Race Problem — And Ours” (Atlantic Monthly, May 1997), in which he argues against racial pride, racial loyalty, racial kinship, and even racial identity, celebrating instead what the philosopher Michael Sandel criticizes as “the unencumbered self.” Kennedy thus embraces what Sandel rejects as “shallow liberalism.”

Freed from the sanctions of custom and tradition and inherited status [Kennedy is quoting Sandel here], unbound by moral ties antecedent to choice, the self is installed as sovereign, cast as the author of the only obligations that constrain.

Examples from some of those writings:

• I disapprove of most forms of public affirmative action myself, on the premise that public authorities shouldn't be permitted to allocate burdens and benefits on racial grounds in the absence of an absolute emergency. (Reviewing Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, America in Black and White in SLATE, 10/14/1997).

• Opposing restrictions on cross-racial adoptions
  ... under our law, the drawing of racial distinctions, particularly by government officials, is and should be presumptively illegitimate.... Typically ... , our legal system rightly prohibits authorities from making decisions on the basis of racial generalizations, even if the generalizations are accurate. [Opposing the Metzenbaum bill, which expressly permitted adoption agencies to use race in placing children, “Orphans of Separatism, The American Prospect, Spring 1994).

• Opposing required racial balance on juries
  I’m against the deployment of racial distinctions in the law to create racially mixed juries. I’m for a strong and vigorously enforced anti-discrimination norm so that nobody is excluded on a racial basis. After that, I say, that’s enough. (Interview with Mother Jones, July 1997

• Opposing racial profiling by police
  Taking race into account at all means engaging in racial discrimination. [This follows several paragraphs where Kennedy takes issue with those who argue that lack of a bad intent, or the presence of non-discriminatory motives, or even the reasonableness of the action can justify taking race into account.]
  

  A disturbing feature of the debate over racial profiling is that many people, including judges, are suggesting that decisions distinguishing between persons on a racial basis do not constitute unlawful racial discrimination when race is not the sole consideration prompting the disparate treatment.... This dilution of the meaning of discrimination is troubling not only because it permits racial profiling to continue.... Even worse, this concession will likely seep into other areas of racial controversy, causing mischief along the way. [“Will likely seep???? Hellloooo. Looked at admission policy lately? — jsr] ... individuals should be judged by public authority on the basis of their own conduct and not on the basis —not even partly on the basis — of racial generalization.

  [Politicians must do more than end bigotry.] They must be willing to demand equal treatment before the law even under circumstances in which unequal treatment is plausibly defensible in the name of nonracist goals. (“Suspect Policy,” The New Republic, Sept. 20, 1999).
  

• Ubiquitous inconsistency
  

  Vocal supporters of racial profiling who trumpet the urgency of communal needs when discussing law enforcement all of a sudden become fanatical individualists when condemning affirmative action in college admissions and the labor market. Supporters of profiling, who are willing to impose what amounts to a racial tax on profiled groups, denounce as betrayals of “color blindness” programs that require racial diversity. A similar turnabout can be seen on the part of many of those who support affirmative action. Impatient with talk of communal needs in assessing racial profiling, they very often have no difficulty with subordinating the interests of individual white candidates to the purported good of the whole. Opposed to race consciousness in policing, they demand race consciousness in deciding whom to admit to college or select for a job. [“Racial Profiling,” Atlantic Monthly, April 2002]
  

an important, albeit merely partial, way in which our society is attempting to repair the gaping wounds caused by innumerable racist actions and inactions that have fundamentally betrayed America's most noble aspirations. Hopefully the policy will survive the right's grotesque attempt to strangle it judicially in the name of equality.

I still wonder because Kennedy is still inscrutable. So far as I know he has never rejected his eloquent objections to many racial preference policies while continuing strenuously to defend others, such as in his article a week ago in The American Prospect, “The Enduring Relevance of Affirmative Action,” where he argues that affirmative action was on the ropes until it was rescued by the brilliant “diversity rationale.”

The rise of the diversity rationale for affirmative action has not been costless, but it has ensured that appreciable numbers of racial minorities are in strategic positions, while dampening certain side effects that attend any regime of racial selectivity. Unlike affirmative action based on grounds of compensatory justice, the diversity rationale is non-accusatory. It doesn’t depend on an assumption of culpability for some past or present wrong, and it minimizes the anger ignited when whites are accused of being beneficiaries of racial privilege. Everyone can be a part of diversity.

Many are drawn to the diversity rationale because it frames affirmative action not as special aid for designated groups but as a way of producing better services and products....

The diversity rationale also facilitates the evasion of prickly subjects — for instance, the fact that racial minorities selected for valued positions sometimes have records that, according to certain criteria such as standardized tests, are inferior to those of white competitors.

Next, note that Kennedy actually acknowledges that the diversity rationale doesn’t respond to the objections to affirmative action, which he helpfully summarized earlier in his article:

Conservatives charged that affirmative action amounts to “reverse racism”; discriminates against “innocent whites”; stigmatizes its putative beneficiaries; erodes the incentives that prompt individuals to put forth their best efforts; lowers standards; produces inefficiencies; goes to those racial minorities who need it least; and generates racial resentments.

Kennedy does attempt, lamely I think, to look on the bright side of “diversity,” but I believe it falls flat.

The diversity rationale moves the spotlight from the perceived deficiencies of racial minorities to their perceived strengths. Unlike other justifications for affirmative action that seek to make exceptions to meritocracy, the diversity rationale is consistent with meritocratic premises. This is the most striking and historically significant aspect of affirmative action: It enables racial-minority status for the first time in American history to be seen as a valuable credential. Instead of the presence of blacks and other racial minorities constituting an expiation of past sins, the diversity rationale makes their presence a welcome and positive good.

The best thing that I can think of to say about Kennedy’s argument here is that most of Kennedy’s other writings demolish it and the principle-less puff it rides on. About Kennedy himself something better can be said: the slippery way the argument is stated suggests the possibility that even he doesn’t believe it. First, his defense is always of “the diversity rationale,” not diversity itself, which might require a substantive definition and argument. Next, it “moves the spotlight” to perceived strengths, not actual strengths that again would have to be identified. Finally — and this is its “most striking and historically significant aspect” — the diversity rationale enables minority status to be seen as a “meritocratic” credential.

The fact that the intellectual core of American liberalism has become so degraded that its leading lights can with a straight face point to "minority status," i.e., pigmentation and nothing more, as a "meritocratic" credential is depressing enough, but that Kennedy himself, who has so powerfully criticized the racializing of merit and even of identity itself, can do so is truly astounding.

This whole argument, in short, is devoid not only of principle — why is this racial profiling just but other racial profiling not? — but even of any actual substance. Forget about “the diversity rationale” frame; what about diversity itself? What is it that justifies the racial discrimination done in its name? What exactly are the “strengths” that it allows to be perceived, the meritocratic credentials that it allows to be seen?

Not only do I still find Kennedy inscrutable, but this tepid defense of “the diversity rationale” makes him even more inscrutable than he was before. That’s because, as I read his long list of trenchant, perceptive criticisms of taking race into account in criminal law, in juries, in adoptions, on the highways and in airports, and especially, in “My Race Problem — And Ours” (linked above), I think both “diversity” and its “rationale” not only contradict but actually violate the deepest concerns that I saw in those critiques.

Consider the Kennedy who shines forth from that noteworthy article:

Neither racial pride nor racial kinship offers guidance that is intellectually, morally, or politically satisfactory....

I ESCHEW racial pride because of my conception of what should properly be the object of pride for an individual: something that he or she has accomplished. I can feel pride in a good deed I have done or a good effort I have made. I cannot feel pride in some state of affairs that is independent of my contribution to it. The color of my skin, the width of my nose, the texture of my hair, and the various other signs that prompt people to label me black constitute such a state of affairs. I did not achieve my racial designation. It was something I inherited — like my nationality and socio-economic starting place and sex — and therefore something I should not feel proud of or be credited with....

I REJECT the notion of racial kinship. I do so in order to avoid its burdens and to be free to claim what the distinguished political theorist Michael Sandel labels “the unencumbered self.” The unencumbered self is free and independent, “unencumbered by aims and attachments it does not choose for itself,” Sandel writes.... [Kennedy embraces what Sandel rejects.]

One defense of racial kinship takes the shape of an analogy between race and family....

.... I want to accept the race-family analogy in order to strengthen my attack on assumptions that privilege status-driven loyalties (the loyalties of blood) over chosen loyalties (the loyalties of will)....

Am I saying that, morally, blood ties are an insufficient, indeed bad, basis for preferring one's genetic relatives to others? Yes....

SOME contend ... that the reason one should feel morally compelled by virtue of one's blackness to have and show racial solidarity toward other blacks is that preceding generations of black people did things animated by racial loyalty which now benefit all black people.... I agree that one should be grateful to those who have waged struggles for racial justice, sometimes at tremendous sacrifice. But why should my gratitude be racially bounded?

THUS far I have mainly argued that a black person should not feel morally bound to experience and show racial kinship with other blacks. But what do I say to a person who is considering whether to choose to embrace racial kinship . . . ?

I contend that in the mind, heart, and soul of a teacher there should be no stratification of students such that a teacher feels closer to certain pupils than to others on grounds of racial kinship. No teacher should view certain students as his racial "brothers and sisters" while viewing others as, well, mere students. Every student should be free of the worry that because of race, he or she will have less opportunity to benefit from what a teacher has to offer. [Query: Shouldn’t all applicants also be free of this worry? — jsr]....

.... [I]t is said with increasing urgency by increasing numbers of people that the various social difficulties confronting black Americans are, for reasons of racial kinship, the moral responsibility of blacks, particularly those who have obtained some degree of affluence. This view should be rejected. The difficulties that disproportionately afflict black Americans are not "black problems" whose solutions are the special responsibility of black people. They are our problems....

A second reason why the justification for outreach matters is that unlike an appeal to racial kinship, an appeal to an ideal untrammeled by race enables any person or group to be the object of solicitude....

.... I evaluate arguments in favor of exempting blacks from the same standards imposed upon whites and conclude that typically, though perhaps not always, such arguments amount to little more than an elaborate camouflage for self-promotion or group promotion.....

A second reason I resist arguments in favor of asymmetrical standards of judgment has to do with my sense of the requirements of reciprocity. I find it difficult to accept that it is wrong for whites to mobilize themselves on a racial basis solely for purposes of white advancement but morally permissible for blacks to mobilize themselves on a racial basis solely for purposes of black advancement....

.... [I]f one looks at the most admirable efforts by activists to overcome racial oppression in the United States, one finds people who yearn for justice, not merely for the advancement of a particular racial group....

is justified by the benefits it allegedly provides to those non-minoritiy students who are exposed to the “diverse” minorities who are preferentially admitted (those minorities, after all, would receive whatever benefits “diversity” has to offer even if they attended less competitive schools), there is an ugly, unstated element of exploitation associated with it.

I’m afraid “inscrutable” may be too weak a description of Randall Kennedy’s inconsistencies. Even more than racial profiling by law enforcement, racial balancing of juries, or racial restrictions in abortion, “the diversity rationale” rationalizes everything he otherwise eloquently claims to oppose.

Boasts of Most ‘Progressive’ Political Triumphs in Decades

while Gallup reports

New Lows in Job Approval.

I wonder if there’s a connection.

I also test your source-spotting skills by asking you to guess whether an article about that issue that I quote was news in the New York Times or a parody in The Onion.

Finally, I just noticed that Thomas Sowell discussed the same issue somewhat more soberly in Bean-Counters and Baloney.

But let me be clear. As a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America. And our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country and that they will not be treated differently by their government is essential to who we are. The writ of the Founders must endure.

What is interesting here is not this nod to originalism — a nod that is sure to be as temporary as it is insincere — but rather how the president chooses to defend the principle of religious liberty. “[O]ver the course of our history, he explains,

religion has flourished within our borders precisely because Americans have had the right to worship as they choose — including the right to believe in no religion at all. And it is a testament to the wisdom of our Founders that America remains deeply religious — a nation where the ability of peoples of different faiths to coexist peacefully and with mutual respect for one another stands in stark contrast to the religious conflict that persists elsewhere around the globe.

Never mind that few critics of that decision deny the right. What is fascinating here is how Obama defines the right that he defends: “In this country we treat everybody equally and in accordance with the law, regardless of race, regardless of religion.” [Emphasis mine]

Let’s ignore for now both the fact that this assertion is clearly not true — it is official government policy in this country to treat some people better and others worse because of their race — and even the fact that Obama himself supports preferential treatment based on race and opposes all efforts to prohibit it. What is noteworthy is that he is now on record as recognizing that both religious freedom and racial equality require governmental neutrality, a principle embedded in the Constitution by the “writ of the Founders” whose wisdom has been confirmed over “the course of our history.”

As it happens, I’ve written about the relationship between religious liberty and racial equality before, and I hope you will indulge me in quoting a long excerpt from this 2002 post (occasioned by the then-recent Cleveland school voucher case) where I argued that “the principle of neutrality ... derives not so much from the text of the Constitution as from something deeper in the very structure of our society,” the very thing identified by Obama in his recent comment:

That something is the overriding fact of religious pluralism, a pluralism that in the absence of official neutrality would lead to constant strife and conflict. The dissenters, in short, recognize that the small “c” constitution of American society of necessity dictates the meaning of the large “C” Constitution.

Race and Sects in American History

.... One of the most cherished myths of American history is that our foremothers and forefathers fled the Old World for the New to escape religious bigotry and build a new society based on religious freedom. In fact, the Puritans’ strongest complaint against the Old World was that it was too tolerant, that it was swimming in a sea of such moral sloth and corruption that it had lost all interest in purifying the church. The New World appealed to them because it was empty (except for the “heathens” ripe for conversion), and they could establish Godly communities the way they were quite certain God intended.

And yet within several generations religious toleration had broken out all over. Despite the best efforts of the Puritan divines, diversity could not be denied. The Baptists and Quakers proved irrepressible. Mennonites appeared, and Methodists sprouted like weeds in the wake of itinerant ministers. Even many Congregational churches split asunder as revivalist “New Lights” walked out and founded competing congregations.

What happened? Unintended and unplanned, America began to happen. What Voltaire said cynically about England came to be celebrated here: “If there were one religion . . . , its despotism would be terrible; if there were only two, they would destroy each other; but there are 30, and therefore they live in peace and happiness.”

Toleration developed not because it was valued but because it was necessary. “Freedom came to the Western world,” wrote Reinhold Niebuhr, one of our greatest theologians, “by the inadvertence of history. Toleration was an absolute necessity for a community which had lost its religio-cultural unity and could find peace only if toleration and freedom were accepted.”

America discovered, however, that toleration alone was not sufficient. Strict neutrality was also required, a prohibition against the state favoring any of the contending sects. As Justice Hugo Black wrote in Zorach v. Clauson (1952), “it is only by isolating the state from the religious sphere and compelling it to be completely neutral that the freedom of each and every denomination and of all nonbelievers can be maintained.” Or as the Court held in Abingdon School District v. Schempp (1963), “the government is neutral, and, while protecting all, it prefers none.”

But if the very structure of American society requires a principle of neutrality that in turn requires a separation of church and state (as the dissenters and I believe it does), should it not also compel a separation of race and state? After all, as the eminent Berkeley historian David Hollinger has written, in our time “ethno-racial affiliations have come to play a role similar to that played by religious affiliations at the time of the founding of the republic and throughout most of American history.” (POST-ETHNIC AMERICA, Basic Books, 1995, p. 123). Surely racial and ethnic preferences are at least as “divisive” today as debates over school vouchers, which seem to have bothered a few litigants and the courts much more than the society as a whole.

As a perceptive if fickle critic of affirmative action has written, racial and ethnic preferences predictably lead (and in fact have led) to

a real Balkanization, in which group after group struggles for the benefits of special treatment.... The demand for special treatment will lead to animus against other groups that already have it, by those who think they should have it and don't....

The rising emphasis on group difference which government is called upon to correct might mean the destruction of any hope for the larger fraternity of all Americans.

That was Nathan Glazer, in AFFIRMATIVE DISCRIMINATION (Basic Books, 1975), and if anything he underestimated the divisiveness of bestowing governmental favors on the basis of race and ethnicity. Now that liberals have abandoned the formerly core value holding that every individual is entitled to be treated without regard to race, creed, or color in favor of multiculturalism and group rights, the very idea of “the larger fraternity of all Americans” is regarded by many as nothing more than right-wing cant.

Or consider the current mantra of “diversity.” Harvard law professor Christopher Edley — former White House aide, co-author of President Clinton’s “mend it, don’t end it” review of affirmative action policies, advisor to Clinton’s race commission, fervent advocate of racial preferences (he described Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom’s AMERICA IN BLACK AND WHITE as “a crime against humanity”), and advisor to the 2000 Gore campaign — has written that “our rich religious diversity” provides a model for racial diversity. “We are fairly united as one of the most religious nations on earth,” Edley wrote, “but we worship differently, celebrate that fact, and recognize that religious differences should play only a limited role in our social and economic lives. Perhaps a model along these lines is what is needed in race.” (Edley, “Why Talk About Race?” Washington Post OpEd, 7 December 1997, p. C1.)

Indeed it is, but this “model” suggests a conclusion that Edley and other preferentialists will not like. If ethnic and racial groups are now analogous to religious sects, why should it be permissible for the state to grant preferences to the former when it is clearly prohibited from doing so to the latter?

Perhaps Justice Breyer and his like-minded brethren, on and off the Court, can be called on to explain why they fear “the risk” of “potential” divisiveness in what they see as religious preferences but not the clear and present divisiveness of racial and ethnic preferences. Or, in the alternative, they could explain why a principle that they believe justifies racial preferences does not also justify religious preference, for certainly they recognize that religion provides as good or better basis for “diversity” as race. Would they look on religious preferences in admissions and hiring with the same favor they bestow on racial and ethnic preferences? What is it precisely that would make a preference for Arabs acceptable but for Muslims unacceptable? Are not evangelical Christians “underrepresented” among the students and on the faculties of our elite, selective universities? Why must the Michigan law school have a “critical mass” of blacks and Hispanics but not of Missouri Synod Lutherans? Why was the old quota system that restricted the number of Jews in the Ivy League (presumably) wrong, but the de facto quota system that restricted the number of Asians admitted to Berkeley and UCLA under the reign of preferences not wrong?

In short, perhaps it is time to insist on a separation of race and state, to insist in the ethnic and racial sphere, as well as the religious, that government must be neutral, that it protect all of its constituent groups but prefer none — not because the First Amendment compels neutrality in this sphere, but because of the same social reality that led to the First Amendment in the first place.

President Obama seems, at least on this occasion, to understand the principle. Now let him practice it.

What she denies is that she “violated anything” in arranging government assistance to a bank in which her husband had a substantial financial interest.

In effect, Waters admits to the facts at the center of the House ethics committee report, which said that

Waters’s office improperly worked in September 2008 to press for aid to prevent the failure of Boston-based OneUnited Bank, which eventually stayed afloat with the help of money from the Troubled Assets Relief Program.

Waters’s husband, Sidney Williams, had served on the bank’s board. He owned stock in OneUnited that had declined in value from $350,000 in June 2008 to $175,000 two months later and would have been “worthless” without the bailout funds, according to the ethics committee.

attacked the media for covering her ethics scandals but not her longtime work in pressing for minorities to get more government contracts and other federal aid, which she says was the reason she aided black-owned banks during the financial crisis.

did not seek special treatment for OneUnited but rather tried to gain access to treasury for an association of minority-owned banks that otherwise couldn’t have gotten a meeting.

Indeed, as the Washington Post reports,

[e]ventually, the language in the TARP bill, which Congress passed in October 2008, included a provision that would aid small, minority-owned banks such as OneUnited, and the bank received $12 million two months later.

was written into the federal bailout legislation by [Rep. Barney] Frank, who is chairman of the financial-services panel. Mr. Frank has said he inserted the provision to help the only African-American owned bank in his home state.

Actually, that may have been a parody. A much better, and more entertaining, guide can be found here.

Now, in one sense it’s not clear why Harry Reid admitting that he doesn’t know something everyone else knows should be news, since it’s been clear for a long time that there are many well-known things Harry Reid doesn’t know. Mary Katherine Ham pointed out one of them in the Weekly Standard:

Maybe if Rory Reid weren’t having to distance himself from his father to the point of forgoing his last name, Harry Reid would be more familiar with the idea of a Nevadan, Hispanic Republican. In his quest for the Nevada governorship, Rory Reid is getting trounced in polls at the moment by Brian Sandoval, a former federal judge, Attorney General, and ... Hispanic Republican.

Would Senator Reid say the same thing about blacks? After all, a sizable cohort of his fellow liberals insist that all “authentic” blacks must be Democrats, their opinions assigned to them by the grievance elite.

Are the interests of Mexican-Americans indistinguishable from those of Cuban Americans? Are all Hispanics identical regardless of national origin? Are Hispanics nothing more than a fungible political commodity?

One of the things everyone knows about Harry Reid is what he thinks of Republicans: not much, to say the least. Hispanics he expects to know better than to associate with such low life (sort of like “Hispanics don’t let Hispanics vote Republican”), but he has no similar expectation of Jews and blacks.

Harry Reid would no doubt say in his defense, “No, no! You’ve got it all wrong. I don’t discriminate in what I don’t know! I don’t understand how any decent person, of whatever race or color, could be a Republican!”

As I said, the world is full of things Harry Reid doesn’t know.