by Chad Groening
(AgapePress) – The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the right of a college or university to use race as a factor in its admission decisions.
The case centered around three white applicants to the University of Washington School of Law who claimed reverse discrimination after they were denied admission in 1997. But a federal judge — and then a U.S. appeals court — upheld the university's use of race in admissions, under a policy which had been in effect at the time.
Curt Levey is with the Center for Individual Rights, which represented the white students. He says affirmative action is still racial discrimination.
“'Racial preferences' is maybe a nice word [sic] for reverse discrimination,” Levey says. “Anytime you give a preference to certain minority groups, you are discriminating against the groups that don't get that preference.”
Ward Connerly of the American Civil Rights Institute agrees with Levey. “It is the height of racism for us to believe that our black kids and our Hispanic kids cannot excel at the same level academically as Asians and whites,” he says.
“[T]o say to them that [they] need affirmative action so that [they] can get in, that, in my view, is the ultimate expression of racism,” the black founder of ACRI says. “What we need to say to them and mean it is, 'You're going to have to compete alongside everybody else.'”
Levey says the high court's ruling last week in favor of the law school does not end the dispute over affirmative action. His group has several more cases in other states, which he hopes will eventually reach the high court.
(This update courtesy of Agape Press.)
Former Home School Critic Now Advocates Movement
by Fred Jackson
(AgapePress) – One of America’s best known talk show hosts has apologized to home schoolers.
For years, Dr. Laura Schlessinger has been one of the leading public voices for moral values in America. She has not been afraid to tackle tough issues such as denouncing homosexuality. But as The Washington Times notes, in recent years Dr. Laura has been openly critical of what she described as the narrow focus of home schooling, offering concerns that home educators were not teaching major science and math to children, and were keeping young people from being properly socialized.
Now, Dr. Laura says she has had a change of heart. She says whether through becoming more enlightened herself, or because the movement has grown, or both, she finds herself recommending it constantly.
In an interview with The Times, Dr. Laura describes herself as an enemy of the public school system “because of the [progressive] forces that have taken it over and are determined to do social engineering there, foisting upon people notions of behavior and philosophy … sexual behavior, that have nothing to do with reading, writing, and arithmetic.”
