The Great Debate

Gays win, blacks lose. That’s the upshot of this week’s landmark Supreme Court decisions.

“It’s an exciting day for civil rights in America,” a young gay man standing outside the Supreme Court told the Washington Post. “I am a significant step closer to being an equal citizen under the law.” That sentiment was not shared by African-Americans. The day before, Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, called the court’s voting rights decision “an egregious betrayal of minority voters.”

Why did the Supreme Court treat the two minorities so differently? Because the two minorities face significantly different problems. Since the civil rights laws were passed in the 1960s, inequality has become a bigger problem for African-Americans than discrimination. For gays, the problem is discrimination. The U.S. legal system is far better equipped to deal with discrimination than inequality.

In the movie “Lincoln,” there was a dramatic moment when Thaddeus Stevens, a radical Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, is being goaded by his enemies to declare that African-Americans are equal to whites — a sentiment that, in 1865, would have exposed him as an “extremist.”

Representative George Pendleton of Ohio, the recently defeated Democratic candidate for vice president, confronts Stevens, saying, “You have long insisted, have you not, that the dusk-colored race is no different from the white one?”

America finds itself exactly where Iran was four years ago. Back then, America had just elected a new, articulate president who offered hope and promised a new approach to the world and Iran. His election was a direct rejection of the foreign policy of his predecessor, President George W. Bush, whose favorite tools of statecraft appeared to be military force and confrontational rhetoric.

The question Iran grappled with in 2009 was whether this new president — Barack Obama — really represented change or if it was merely an act of electoral deception.

Today, the roles are reversed. Iranians have elected a new, articulate president who is promising both the Iranian people and the world community hope and a new approach. His election is seen as a direct rejection of his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s confrontational policies and rhetoric. Iranians wanted hope and change and they went to the ballot boxes to obtain it.

President Barack Obama addresses supporters at his election night victory rally in Chicago, Nov. 7, 2012. REUTERS/Adrees Latif

Barack Obama, America’s first black president, can be credited with many milestones — a comprehensive federal healthcare bill, taking down the world’s most wanted terrorist, signing the Fair Pay Act for gender pay equality, to name a few.

The obliteration of the Voting Rights Act, however, was certainly unintended. Despite the Justice Department’s zealous defense of the act’s constitutionality in Shelby County v. Holder, a divided Supreme Court voted 5-4 to strike down Section 4, the core of the act, on the grounds that it is not justified by “current needs.” Substituting its judgment for Congress’s, the court ignored a more than 5,000-page record of “current needs” that Congress relied on in 2006 when if reauthorized, with overwhelming support, the act’s challenged provisions.

ILLUSTRATION: Matt Mahurin

As Tuesday’s decision gutting the heart of the Voting Rights Act made clear, it is June and a slim conservative majority of Supreme Court justices is again impatient with race.

Judging from President Barack Obama’s initial tepid, nonracial reaction, the first black president — whose reelection hinged in part on an expanded minority voting base — is impatient with the Supreme Court, race or both. And Congress is, well, stuck on Congress.

What we’re seeing from the Roberts Court’s recent race decisions, however, is an aggressive colorblindness, cloaked in hubris and federalism – or states’ rights. Working to do away with race at all costs, this colorblindness is administered through the court’s growing demands that any civil rights remedy be tailored with a narrowness approaching oblivion.

Reader holding a copy of George Orwell’s 1984, June 9, 2013.  REUTERS/Toby Melville

When the Guardian and the Washington Post revealed details about the National Security Agency collecting phone data from telecommunications companies and U.S. government programs pulling in emails and photographs from internet businesses, suddenly “George Orwell” was leading the news.

The British essayist predicted it all, commentators asserted, and the United States now seems straight out of 1984, Orwell’s novel about a dystopian future. “Big Brother” had arrived.

Iranian President-elect Hassan Rohani speaks with the media in Tehran June 17, 2013. REUTERS/Fars News/Majid Hagdost

Almost two weeks have passed since Hassan Rohani, the mild-mannered cleric often described as politically and socially moderate, was elected president of Iran by a landslide — surprising virtually every expert and foreign government as well as many Iranians. The postmortems have been fast and furious — mostly from the same experts who got the elections wrong in the first place, which makes one wonder whether the proverbial monkey with a typewriter can predict Iran better than those with iPads.

Iran watchers now appear to be falling over themselves trying to parse Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s intentions in “allowing” a free election that defied every expectation. For it is Khamenei who reigns supreme over the land. When he wants to, that is.

An oil tanker is anchored in New York Harbor, Oct. 31, 2012. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

The American “shale boom” is poised to revolutionize global energy markets. It could transform the nation from a longtime net oil importer into an export powerhouse. Consider that the 2012 increase in U.S. crude oil production, announced last week, was the largest not just in U.S. history but the world.

To help this transformation, a bipartisan swath of federal and state officials is pressing for new infrastructure, like the Keystone XL pipeline, to move a glut of domestic oil from the center of North America to Gulf ports. This is a crucial step, but unless Congress reforms archaic restrictions on crude oil exports, all that black gold’s going nowhere.

Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, speaks at a summit in Rome, Nov. 16, 2009. REUTERS/Alessandro Bianch

Nothing was trivial about the moment: Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani gave up his post as emir of Qatar to his son at the pinnacle of his influence, in an act as rare and surprising as his ascending to power through a bloodless coup against his own father in 1995.

The very brevity of the emir’s abdication speech and the remarkable absence of boasting about his transformation of Qatar was itself a rarity in an Arab world accustomed to long, windy addresses on even trivial matters.

The Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision on Tuesday essentially cast aside the key component of the nation’s most important civil rights legislation.

The five “conservative” justices castigated Congress for putting too much emphasis on history by failing to update the “coverage formula” in Section 4 of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Section 4 specifies which states and local jurisdictions must “pre-clear” with the Justice Department or the Washington district court all changes in election laws – anything from adding voter ID regulations to redistricting. Areas now subject to this federal oversight have had a substantial history of voter discrimination.

I didn’t expect to cry on my wedding day. But there I was last September, in my Cape Cod backyard, trussed up in suit and tie, waiting for my soon-to-be husband at our makeshift altar, and the tears came. I wish I could say they were two camera-ready teardrops, wending their way down my left cheek. But no. In reality, I got a monsoon — I was a sobbing, near-hyperventilating mess. The importance of what we were doing had just hit me: We were pledging, in public symbol and sacred promise, to build and sustain a life together.

When I began to read what Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court’s majority, I realized that he agreed. In eviscerating DOMA, he also wrote a stirring defense of the very institution that many conservatives believe is threatened by gay marriage: the American family.

The announcement of the Supreme Court’s decision comes three days before Kennedy’s 50th wedding anniversary (he married fellow Sacramento, California, native Mary Davis on June 29, 1963), and what’s striking in his writing is the high regard that Kennedy has for what couples, gay and straight, assemble. He writes of same-sex couples’ “pride in themselves and their union.” He repeatedly deploys the word “dignity.” He argues that DOMA “places same-sex couples in an unstable position of being in a second-tier marriage.” And more than that, he writes, “the differentiation demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects.” (His choice of the word “demeans” echoes his diction in Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 case in which Kennedy, again writing for the majority, struck down a Texas sodomy law and argued that this kind of invasive legislation “demeans” gay people.)