December 18, 2005
Fascism of the Left on Display in Michigan
By
Thomas Bray
Momentum continues
to build for a noisy showdown over racial preferences in Michigan.
Just how
ugly the issue could become was starkly demonstrated last week
in Lansing, the state capital. The state’s Board of Canvassers,
a four-person body split by law between Democrats and Republicans,
was meeting to decide whether to certify for the 2006 ballot a
referendum that would ban the use of race in state hiring and
admissions policies.
But no sooner
had the meeting started than a mob of mostly black students from
Detroit schools, led by a radical national outfit calling itself
By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), stormed the building, overturning
tables, jumping on chairs, stomping their feet and yelling “They
say Jim Crow – We say hell no.” When a black Democratic
member of the board dared to suggest that he might have no choice
under the law but to approve the measure – as a Michigan
Court of Appeals panel has twice ordered – he was shouted
down: “Be a black man!”
Cowed by
this show of force, the board once again failed to muster the
three votes to let the ballot go forward. In the end, few observers
doubt the courts will approve the measure. The state’s rigidly
nonpartisan Bureau of Elections has certified that the Michigan
Civil Rights Initiative, as it is called, received 465,000 valid
signatures, 150,000 more than necessary. And the three-judge appeals
court panel that ordered the Board of Canvassers to ballot the
issue included two judges who are widely viewed as left of center.
And if matters
get that far, the state Supreme Court is considered highly likely
to agree. It recently barred the use of race, color, sex, religion
or national origin in jury selection, explicitly adding that “discrimination
during voir dire…for the purpose of achieving what the court
believes to be a balanced, proportionate or representative jury…shall
not constitute an excuse or justification for a violation”
of its rule.
Not that
the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative is a lead pipe cinch to pass
at the ballot box. While BAMN and other radical groups provide
the shock troops, most of Michigan’s business, labor, religious
and political leadership, including the likely Republican candidates
for governor and the U.S. Senate, is arrayed against the measure
– as the same groups were in California in 1996 during the
fight over Proposition 209, a similar measure.
But Californians,
understanding that businessmen and politicians hate to risk being
portrayed as racist even when a legitimate cause is at stake,
voted 54-46 to approve the measure. And polls have consistently
showed even stronger support in Michigan for ending racial preferences.
A string
of recent debates on the issue also suggests the difficulty that
supporters of affirmative action are having in trying to mount
a reasoned defense of such policies. In a recent debate with Ward
Connerly, who led the successful California fight to end preferences,
the dean of Wayne State University’s law school asserted
that race-based admissions is a “civil right.” That
left even the veteran Connerly slack-jawed with wonder, ignoring
as it did the language of the Constitution and a century of efforts
to define civil rights as equality – not inequality -- before
the law.
Had a mob
of student conservatives invaded a meeting of state officials,
it would have been denounced as fascist. The fascism of the left
tends to be excused, even by those who know better, as a case
of overwrought idealism. But voters may not be so easily fooled.
Thomas
Bray is a Detroit News columnist.
