> Would you have preferred that judges didn’t rule the way they did in the case of Brown vs Board of Education?
As a matter of law I would have preferred that political decisions about public schools were made by legislatures, not judges, as they are supposed to be. The idea that the purpose of government is to get our favored policies in place, by hook or by crook, is going to be the death of our republic sooner or later. The government is supposed to uphold the rule of law, and the law of the land in the US, the Constitution, does not give judges the power to make political decisions.
As a matter of policy, I would have preferred that the whole public school system in the US have either not been developed at all, or developed along very different lines. The people who put the US public school system in place were quite explicit that their purpose was to indoctrinate children. I think the government has no business indoctrinating children. But that policy question is way past any hope of repair.
As a matter of law I would have preferred that political decisions about public schools were made by legislatures, not judges, as they are supposed to be.
I wonder if you would have had the same preference if you had had to send your kids to separate schools, drink from separate water fountains, give up your seat on a bus for someone who was the right color or be forbidden to marry the person you love because they were a different color?
Would you also be in favor of a national religion if the majority passed such a law?
A republic that legalizes discrimination deserves to die.
> I wonder if you would have had the same preference if you had had to send your kids to separate schools, drink from separate water fountains, give up your seat on a bus for someone who was the right color or be forbidden to marry the person you love because they were a different color?
Regarding having to send kids to separate schools, I've already given my opinion on the US public school system in general. Given how messed up I think that whole system is, having to send kids to segregated schools instead of integrated ones would rank pretty low on my list of things to complain about. I'd be far more worried about how the school was trying to indoctrinate kids than what the demographics of the student body were.
I can see the obvious equal protection argument for requiring public schools not to be segregated, which of course was basically the argument the Court used when it said "separate is inherently unequal". (Similar arguments could of course be made, and were made, for the other cases you describe.) However, if we are going to talk about equal protection, I would think having equal quality of schools available to all would be the chief requirement to impose on the government if the government is going to provide public schools at all. And even if we grant that having the demographics of the student body be representative of the community is one aspect of school quality, it certainly is not the only one or even the primary one; surely what the students are actually being taught in the classroom should count, and count for more. If all the inner city integrated schools are bad and all the suburban integrated schools are good, that's not equal protection even if the demographics of the student bodies in both cases are the same.
Once we get into considerations like that, it should be obvious that we are talking about political policy decisions that have to be made legislatively, since they involve public funds, and are fraught with difficulty even then. Nobody knows how to ensure good quality schools everywhere, or even what "good quality" really amounts to or how to judge it. Having courts try to dictate policy in this area is not likely to be helpful. And in fact, the Supreme Court in Missouri v. Jenkins explicitly ruled that courts cannot dictate policy in this area; Brown vs. Board of Education only outlaws de jure segregation, not de facto inequalities in school funding and quality that impact different races differently. In other words, the only thing the Court found itself able to enforce was the thing that, judging by how our public schools have fared since Brown was decided, has by far the least impact on the actual quality of education that public school students receive.
This is what happens when courts try to make policy: you get a symbolic victory without the substance. I think most people, if they thought about it, would prefer the substance; but the only way to get that in a democracy is by doing the hard work of changing how citizens are willing to vote.
Given how messed up I think that whole system is, having to send kids to segregated schools instead of integrated ones would rank pretty low on my list of things to complain about. I'd be far more worried about how the school was trying to indoctrinate kids than what the demographics of the student body were.
You really don’t know much about how bad that whole “separate but equal” thing worked out in practice? I bet a years salary that your parents never told you how bad Jim Crow laws were for minorities. Nor did they have to grow up under them.
This is what happens when courts try to make policy: you get a symbolic victory without the substance. I think most people, if they thought about it, would prefer the substance; but the only way to get that in a democracy is by doing the hard work of changing how citizens are willing to vote.
It’s easy to argue theory when you aren’t personally effected. No matter how much money I made, I wouldn’t have been allowed to buy a house in the area that I now live because of racial covenants 50 years ago. I wouldn’t have been able to move into the “good neighborhoods” where I could send my son to the “good schools”.
Sorry, I’m not fond with waiting for the “democratic process” and beg racists (speaking hypothetically if the court hadn’t overturned the laws) to vote to outlaw Jim Crow laws.
> You really don’t know much about how bad that whole “separate but equal” thing worked out in practice?
I never said "separate but equal" wasn't bad. Remember I said that I think the whole US public school system should either not have existed at all, or should have developed along very different lines.
> I’m not fond with waiting for the “democratic process”
Then you don't want to live in a democracy. Democracy means that you change the law using the democratic process, and that all the people, even the ones whose views you abhor, have a voice in that process.
If people who take your view would admit straight up that they don't want democracy and want to abolish our democratic form of government and replace it with something that better suits them, that would be one thing. But, as I pointed out upthread, the very same people call themselves "Democrats" and say democracy is wonderful and argue that everything they are doing is perfectly consistent with the form of government we are supposed to have according to our Constitution and laws. What they mean is that democracy is wonderful as long as it does what they want, and the Constitution and laws can be set aside whenever necessary in order to achieve their policy objectives. That's not democracy, and it's not the rule of law. It's just arbitrary exercise of power according to personal opinion.
So I should want to live in this great theoretical democracy where the will of the majority means the government can legally discriminate against me? Or as late as 2013 , there were cases where gay people were being arrested for “sodomy” because they were having sex in their own homes? (https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/08/gay-people-are-stil...) just because those are the laws passed by the “democratic process”?
I have a strange feeling you wouldn’t feel the same way if the Democratic process infringed on your liberties.
Do you agree that I shouldn’t have been able to buy a house in a certain neighborhood because the “Democratic process” allowed racial covenants? Or that my son shouldn’t have been able to go to the school that he was zone to and instead wait on people to decide that it was okay with them even though I was paying taxes too?
> So I should want to live in this great theoretical democracy where the will of the majority means the government can legally discriminate against me?
What kind of society you want to live in is up to you. Just don't pretend that you want to live in the kind of society that our Constitution and laws describe, if you actually don't.
> I have a strange feeling you wouldn’t feel the same way if the Democratic process infringed on your liberties.
According to our Constitution and laws, it can't. The fact that it often does is a sign that our so-called "Democratic process" is actually not respecting our Constitution and laws, but is instead based on arbitrary exercises of power. Adding more arbitrary exercises of power to the mix does not help fix that problem.
> Do you agree that I shouldn’t have been able to buy a house in a certain neighborhood because the “Democratic process” allowed racial covenants?
Do you think such covenants are allowed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights?
> Or that my son shouldn’t have been able to go to the school that he was zone to and instead wait on people to decide that it was okay with them even though I was paying taxes too?
Do you think that policy is consistent with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights?
I didn't ask what they thought. I asked what you think.
If your answer is that you just accept whatever the "activist judges" think as a corrective to what the "democratically elected representatives" think, then you are just as much at the mercy of what the "activist judges" believe as a black person in the Jim Crow South was at the mercy of what the "democratically elected representatives" believed. The "activist judges" did something you agree with this time, but they could just as well do something you disagree with, or that prevents you from doing something you want to do or takes away something you think you have a right to, next time.
I trust “activist judges” who aren’t subject to the whims and votes of “religious people” who believe that a book written over two millennium ago means that if they allow homosexual acts and “race mixing” that they will damn the country to hell.
As a matter of law I would have preferred that political decisions about public schools were made by legislatures, not judges, as they are supposed to be. The idea that the purpose of government is to get our favored policies in place, by hook or by crook, is going to be the death of our republic sooner or later. The government is supposed to uphold the rule of law, and the law of the land in the US, the Constitution, does not give judges the power to make political decisions.
As a matter of policy, I would have preferred that the whole public school system in the US have either not been developed at all, or developed along very different lines. The people who put the US public school system in place were quite explicit that their purpose was to indoctrinate children. I think the government has no business indoctrinating children. But that policy question is way past any hope of repair.