printSonia Sotomayor’s Latina wisdom has come back to hurt and haunt her in the case of the New Haven Honkies, whose discrimination case she dismissed. So too is the Supreme Court’s blah blah Bader Ginsburg’s dissent noteworthy for its unwise quality. At least neither one of these Delphic ditzes carried the day. Reports the Christian Science Monitor:
“The US Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 on Monday that the Connecticut city violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by using race as the key criterion in refusing to certify a group of white and Hispanic firefighters for promotion.
City officials said they were afraid that if they promoted the white and Hispanic firefighters but no African-American firefighters, the city would be subject to a lawsuit by black firefighters. The high court disagreed.
“Fear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer’s reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion.
The high court’s action overturns the 2008 decision of a three-judge appeals-court panel that included Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s nominee to replace retiring Justice David Souter.
The New Haven firefighters case – and the Supreme Court’s view of it – are expected to play an important role in Judge Sotomayor’s Senate confirmation hearings next month.
The judge is believed to be a strong supporter of New Haven’s legal position in the case. In addition, it is unclear why her three-judge panel initially handed down a brief, unpublished, unsigned summary order disposing of the case without offering even cursory legal analysis.
Beyond the Sotomayor nomination, the decision is important because it provides guidance to employers that they may continue to rely on objective, work-related exams without facing a discrimination lawsuit from those who do not pass the test.
At the heart of the case were two competing provisions of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. One section bars discriminatory treatment based on race or ethnicity. A different section urges employers to avoid making job-related decisions that create a disparate impact on minority workers.
If, for example, a city conducts an exam to determine which workers will be promoted and then no African-Americans are identified for promotion – that disparate impact on black workers is presumed to be illegal. The city is expected to correct the situation.
But the law also forbids employers from using race as the sole or primary criterion for hiring or promotions – including decisions that disfavor white employees because of their race.
In this way, New Haven found itself in a Catch-22.
Justice Kennedy and the other majority justices resolved this dilemma by ruling that New Haven needed a “strong basis in evidence” to justify its discrimination against white and Hispanic firefighters. He said a mere statistical disparity alone could not amount to the strong evidence necessary.
Kennedy added that once a fair test procedure is set, employers may not invalidate the results based on race or ethnicity. “Doing so … is antithetical to the notion of a workplace where individuals are guaranteed equal opportunity regardless of race,” he wrote.
In a dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said New Haven had not engaged in illegal discrimination against the white firefighters because they had no vested right to a promotion.
She wrote that the majority justices ignored “substantial evidence of multiple flaws in the tests New Haven used.” She added that the court failed to acknowledge better tests used in other cities.
“The court’s order and opinion, I anticipate, will not have staying power,” she said.
[SNIP]
From “Beware of ‘Absolut’ Libertarian Lunacy”: “By petitioning the courts, when they should go gentle into that good night, white men like Ricci are seeking equality of results much as blacks do through coercive civil rights laws. … Ricci was wronged for excelling. He is not petitioning for special favors; he’s petitioning against them. If anything, Ricci is asking only that the city accept inequality of outcomes; accept that not all are created equal—and that he, more so than his less-qualified colleagues, is most suited to fighting fires and dousing departmental flames.”
I strongly suggest that people read the “concurring opinion” of Justice Alito [send link please] where he talked about the demagoguery and threats of this New Haven local Reverend Boise Kimber (the Sharpton of New Haven) and some of the local city officials (especially one Karen Dubois-Watson) in trying to overturn the written exams. It is basically a textbook guide on “How to do Racial Blackmail” which New Haven knuckled under. Ginsburg stated that the City of New Haven should have used “leadership presence” rather than written exams to
come up with less discriminatory results. Perhaps all grading should be determined by “leadership presence”
rather than racially biased tests asking such outrageous questions as: how many 50 feet hose lengths need to be strung together to make a 250 foot hose.
I think this is Alito.s opinion
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/pdf/07-1428P.ZC1
Thanks for the link. Proposed New Haven firefighter question – “A ‘wise Latina woman’ has passed out in a burning building. Should you send a typical white male like Samuel Alito to rescue her or a scrawny but ‘wise Jewess woman’ (redundancy alert!) to carry her out of the burning building?”
I guess it boils down to what part of “All Men are Created Equal” don’t people like Sotomayer, Kimber, Dubois-Watson understand.
If i need a firefighter, i would want some one like Frank Ricci, who put in the time to overcome his disability and pass the written test against all odds , than have to rely on some one who got the job for any other reason.
All men are created equal in regards to rights, but not outcomes.
I could never be a power forward in the NBA.
So, why does some imbecile like Sonia think she is capable of being a Supreme Court justice?
Recently The University of California changed it’s admission policy for all 9 of it’s campuses.
Flooded by Asian students who tend to do better than whites on test scores and school grades, the US regents decided to downplay the importance of tests and grades in their admission policy
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/economy/ap/48683642.html
“I like to call it affirmative action for whites,” said Ling-chi Wang, a retired professor at UC Berkeley. “I think it’s extremely unfair to Asian-Americans on the one hand and underrepresented minorities on the other.”
The new policy would eliminate the requirement that applicants take two SAT subject tests and reduce the number of students guaranteed admission based on grades and test scores alone. It takes effect for the freshman class of fall 2012.
Obviously I’d like to see a lot of white faces on campus, but not at the expense of those that deserve more to be there. If the entire MIT is flooded with Asians, then so be it. If the white kids leave their Xboxes alone during the week and concentrate harder, they’ll find that the Asian kids aren’t that much smarter after all, they just tend to work harder at the important things in life. Inequality can be overcome quite easily by hard work.
I applaud at Mr. Strauss’s last sentence about white ‘slackers’ that should work their way in instead of benefiting from free passes at the expense of more deserving candidates. One can wonder why such wisdom seems so rarely directed at Blacks and Latinos as well.
The fundamental danger posed by demagogues like Sotomayor is the notion that tests are “culturally biased,” which she has claimed publicly to be the case on more than one occasion. This anti-rationalist point of view posits that it is simply IMPOSSIBLE to measure intelligence and merit. I can’t think of anything more dangerous to a free society than the undermining of meritocracy. These Stalinitas loathe free competition because the outcome might not comport with their delusional worldviews. For them, only an omnipotent state (full of wise latinas) can ensure “fairness” and “social justice.”
Furthermore, if IQ tests, SATs, LSATs, MCATs etc etc are so “culturally biased” then why do East Asians, on average outscore Whites? Are Koreans more familiar with Euro-American culture than whites?
[Indeed. And Ashkenazi Jews score higher than the rest. Why?]
The 14th Amendment – Article 1 concludes with ” nor deny to ANY PERSON within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” – which means that human rights belong to an INDIVIDUAL and not to groups. However, the Ginsburgian Affirmative Action logic is that the worse whites in general do on a test and the better that blacks do, the more qualified Ricci becomes! In other words, the rights and performance of an individual are tied into the performance of the collective (in this case, a racial or language group). Now while it might be OK for New Haven to use a different race-neutral criteria for promotion (like promoting at random or more emphasis on carrying bodies out of buildings quickly) – to administer a test and then keep changing the rules repeatedly until the “correct” outcome occurs is inherently a pre-ordained denial of due process. Ironically, the crappy education that blacks and Hispanics get in the USA are partially due to the mediocre “public schools” foisted on the kids by the same collectivist idiots who wish to achieve power by elevating the mediocre at the expense of the elite {see Ellsworth Toohey in the Fountainhead}.
Funny how “equality” is always interpreted as “at the expense of the white man”.
Ricci etc. won’t hurt her at all. She unashamedly stuck it to Whitey. Thats why Obama picked her and it’s why the democrats in the Senate will confirm her. In fact, they will probably carry her from the room on their shoulders in triumph. Like a matador that just killed a bull and cut both ears.
James Huggins..
I was denied two jobs in the early 90s as a white male. At least the recruiters were kind enough to let me in on the secret so I’d stop wasting my time. It turned out to be the best thing to ever happen to me actually. The agency I was applying to got their unqualified minority to please the bean counter and I avoided a career that would have limited my growth and had me working as a tax parasite for the government. Looks like Affirmative Action does work after all!
As for the Wise Latina. Yes, I can clearly see the deep wisdom of the Latino culture in how they run all of South America, Central America, Mexico and (of course for Sotomayor) Puerto Rico. I can’t wait to experience what her kind of wisdom can do for our backwards and unwise country and culture.
JP Strauss is mistaken.
Here in Texas thousands of grossly overqualified white kids, many of them National Merit scholars or its equivalent, have been kicked to the curb so that Texas A&M and UT Austin can admit unqualified blacks and Hispanics. http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/education/stories/DN-braindrain_26met.ART.State.Edition2.4a67ed0.html
Left unmentioned: How poorly blacks and Hispanics do on standardized tests.
So, what was the crack about video games and (allegedly) hardworking Asian students?
Oh yeah, here’s some more evidence to support the view that whites are lazy. http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/education/stories/101209dnmetourecruit.7800dae.html