We do not know whether the killer of Reverend Pinckney and eight others knew all of this history.  But he surely sensed the meaning of his violent act.  It was an act that drew on a long history of bombs and arson and shots fired at churches, not random, but as a means of control, a way to terrorize and oppress.  (Applause.)  An act that he imagined would incite fear and recrimination; violence and suspicion.  An act that he presumed would deepen divisions that trace back to our nation’s original sin.
    
Oh, but God works in mysterious ways.  (Applause.)  God has different ideas.  (Applause.)  

He didn’t know he was being used by God.  (Applause.)  Blinded by hatred, the alleged killer could not see the grace surrounding Reverend Pinckney and that Bible study group -- the light of love that shone as they opened the church doors and invited a stranger to join in their prayer circle.  The alleged killer could have never anticipated the way the families of the fallen would respond when they saw him in court -- in the midst of unspeakable grief, with words of forgiveness.  He couldn’t imagine that.  (Applause.)  

The alleged killer could not imagine how the city of Charleston, under the good and wise leadership of Mayor Riley -- (applause) -- how the state of South Carolina, how the United States of America would respond -- not merely with revulsion at his evil act, but with big-hearted generosity and, more importantly, with a thoughtful introspection and self-examination that we so rarely see in public life.

Blinded by hatred, he failed to comprehend what Reverend Pinckney so well understood -- the power of God’s grace.  (Applause.)  

This whole week, I’ve been reflecting on this idea of grace. (Applause.)  The grace of the families who lost loved ones.  The grace that Reverend Pinckney would preach about in his sermons.  The grace described in one of my favorite hymnals -- the one we all know:  Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.  (Applause.)  I once was lost, but now I’m found; was blind but now I see.  (Applause.)  

According to the Christian tradition, grace is not earned.  Grace is not merited.  It’s not something we deserve.  Rather, grace is the free and benevolent favor of God -- (applause) -- as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings.  Grace.  

As a nation, out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us, for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind.  (Applause.)  He has given us the chance, where we’ve been lost, to find our best selves.  (Applause.)  We may not have earned it, this grace, with our rancor and complacency, and short-sightedness and fear of each other -- but we got it all the same.  He gave it to us anyway.  He’s once more given us grace.  But it is up to us now to make the most of it, to receive it with gratitude, and to prove ourselves worthy of this gift.

Labels: civil rights, gay marriage, Joe Biden, kvelling with naches, President Barack Obama, racism

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Outside of the -­ outside of the marriage context, can you think of any other rational basis, reason, for a State using sexual orientation as a factor in denying homosexuals benefits or imposing burdens on them? Is there any other rational decision-making that the Government could make? Denying them a job, not granting them benefits of some sort, any other decision?

MR. COOPER: Your Honor, I cannot. I do not have any — anything to offer you in that regard. I think marriage is -­

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: All right. If that -­ if that is true, then why aren't they a class? If they're a class that makes any other discrimination improper, irrational, then why aren't we treating them as a class for this one thing? Are you saying that the interest of marriage is so much more compelling than any other interest as they could have?

MR. COOPER: No, Your Honor, we certainly are not. We — we are saying the interest in marriage and the — and the State 's interest and society's interest in what we have framed as responsible pro -­ procreation is — is vital, but at bottom, with respect to those interests, our submission is that same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples are simply not similarly situated.

But to come back to your precise question, I think, Justice Sotomayor, you're probing into whether or not sexual orientation ought to be viewed as a quasi-suspect or suspect class, and our position is that it does not qualify under this Court's standard and -­ and traditional tests for identifying suspectedness.

The — the class itself is — is quite amorphous. It defies consistent definition as — as the Plaintiffs' own experts were — were quite vivid on. It — it does not — it — it does not qualify as an accident of birth, immutability in that — in that sense.

Again, the Plaintiffs -­

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: So you — so what — I don't quite understand it. If you're not dealing with this as a class question, then why would you say that the Government is not free to discriminate against them?

MR. COOPER: Well, Your Honor, I would think that — that — I think it's a — it's a very different question whether or not the Government can proceed arbitrarily and irrationally with respect to any group of people, regardless of whether or not they qualify under this Court's traditional test for suspectedness.

And — and the hypothetical I understood you to be offering, I would submit would create — it would -­ unless there's something that — that is not occurring to me immediately, an arbitrary and capricious distinction among similarly situated individuals, that — that is not what we think is at the — at the root of the traditional definition of marriage.

JUSTICE KAGAN: Mr. Cooper, could I just understand your argument. In reading the briefs, it seems as though your principal argument is that same-sex and opposite — opposite-sex couples are not similarly situated because opposite-sex couples can procreate, same-sex couples cannot, and the State's principal interest in marriage is in regulating procreation. Is that basically correct?

MR. COOPER: I — Your Honor, that's the essential thrust of our — our position, yes.

JUSTICE KAGAN: Is — is there — so you have sort of a reason for not including same-sex couples. Is there any reason that you have for excluding them? In other words, you're saying, well, if we allow same-sex couples to marry, it doesn't serve the State's interest. But do you go further and say that it harms any State interest?

MR. COOPER: Your Honor, we — we go further in — in the sense that it is reasonable to be very concerned that redefining marriage to — as a genderless institution could well lead over time to harms to that institution and to the interests that society has always — has — has always used that institution to address. But, Your Honor, I -­

JUSTICE KAGAN: Well, could you explain that a little bit to me, just because I did not pick this up in your briefs.

What harm you see happening and when and how and — what — what harm to the institution of marriage or to opposite-sex couples, how does this cause and effect work?

MR. COOPER: Once again, I — I would reiterate that we don't believe that's the correct legal question before the Court, and that the correct question is whether or not redefining marriage to include same-sex couples would advance the interests of marriage as a -­

JUSTICE KENNEDY: Well, then are — are you conceding the point that there is no harm or denigration to traditional opposite-sex marriage couples? So you're conceding that.

MR. COOPER: No, Your Honor, no. I'm not conceding that.

JUSTICE KENNEDY: Well, but, then it — then it seems to me that you should have to address Justice Kagan's question.

MR. COOPER: Thank you, Justice Kennedy. I have two points to make on them.

The first one is this: The Plaintiffs' expert acknowledged that redefining marriage will have real-world consequences, and that it is impossible for anyone to foresee the future accurately enough to know exactly what those real-world consequences would be.

And among those real-world consequences, Your Honor, we would suggest are adverse consequences.

But consider the California voter, in 2008, in the ballot booth, with the question before her whether or not this age-old bedrock social institution should be fundamentally redefined, and knowing that there's no way that she or anyone else could possibly know what the long-term implications of — of profound redefinition of a bedrock social institution would be. That is reason enough, Your Honor, that would hardly be irrational for that voter to say, I believe that this experiment, which is now only fairly four years old, even in Massachusetts, the oldest State that is conducting it, to say, I think it better for California to hit the pause button and await additional information from the jurisdictions where this experiment is still maturing.

JUSTICE BREYER: As long as you are on that, then I would like to ask you this: Assume you could distinguish California, suppose we accept your argument or accept Justice Scalia's version of your argument and that distinguishes California. Now, let's look at California. What precisely is the way in which allowing gay couples to marry would interfere with the vision of marriage as procreation of children that allowing sterile couples of different sexes to marry would not? I mean, there are lots of people who get married who can't have children. To take a State that does allow adoption and say — there, what is the justification for saying no gay marriage? Certainly not the one you said, is it?

MR. COOPER: You're -­

JUSTICE BREYER: Am I not clear? Look, you said that the problem is marriage; that it is an institution that furthers procreation.

MR. COOPER: Yes, Your Honor.

JUSTICE BREYER: And the reason there was adoption, but that doesn't apply to California. So imagine I wall off California and I'm looking just there, where you say that doesn't apply. Now, what happens to your argument about the institution of marriage as a tool towards procreation? Given the fact that, in California, too, couples that aren't gay but can't have children get married all the time.

MR. COOPER: Yes, Your Honor. The concern is that redefining marriage as a genderless institution will sever its abiding connection to its historic traditional procreative purposes, and it will refocus, refocus the purpose of marriage and the definition of marriage away from the raising of children and to the emotional needs and desires of adults, of adult couples. Suppose, in turn -­

JUSTICE KAGAN: Well, suppose a State said, Mr. Cooper, suppose a State said that, Because we think that the focus of marriage really should be on procreation, we are not going to give marriage licenses anymore to any couple where both people are over the age of 55. Would that be constitutional?

MR. COOPER: No, Your Honor, it would not be constitutional.

JUSTICE KAGAN: Because that's the same State interest, I would think, you know. If you are over the age of 55, you don't help us serve the Government's interest in regulating procreation through marriage. So why is that different?

MR. COOPER: Your Honor, even with respect to couples over the age of 55, it is very rare that both couples — both parties to the couple are infertile, and the traditional -­

(Laughter.)

JUSTICE KAGAN: No, really, because if the couple — I can just assure you, if both the woman and the man are over the age of 55, there are not a lot of children coming out of that marriage.

(Laughter.)

MR. COOPER: Your Honor, society's -­ society's interest in responsible procreation isn't just with respect to the procreative capacities of the couple itself. The marital norm, which imposes the obligations of fidelity and monogamy, Your Honor, advances the interests in responsible procreation by making it more likely that neither party, including the fertile party to that -­

JUSTICE KAGAN: Actually, I'm not even -­

JUSTICE SCALIA: I suppose we could have a questionnaire at the marriage desk when people come in to get the marriage — you know, Are you fertile or are you not fertile?

(Laughter.)

JUSTICE SCALIA: I suspect this Court would hold that to be an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, don't you think?

JUSTICE KAGAN: Well, I just asked about age. I didn't ask about anything else. That's not -­we ask about people's age all the time.

MR. COOPER: Your Honor, and even asking about age, you would have to ask if both parties are infertile. Again -­

JUSTICE SCALIA: Strom Thurmond was — was not the chairman of the Senate committee when Justice Kagan was confirmed.

(Laughter.)

MR. COOPER: Very few men — very few men outlive their own fertility. So I just -­

JUSTICE KAGAN: A couple where both people are over the age of 55 -­

MR. COOPER: I -­

JUSTICE KAGAN: A couple where both people are over the age of 55.

MR. COOPER: And Your Honor, again, the marital norm which imposes upon that couple the obligation of fidelity -­

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: I'm sorry, where is this -­

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: I'm sorry, maybe you can finish your answer to Justice Kagan.

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: I'm sorry.

MR. COOPER: It's designed, Your Honor, to make it less likely that either party to that — to that marriage will engage in irresponsible procreative conduct outside of that marriage. Outside of that marriage. That's the marital — that's the marital norm. Society has an interest in seeing a 55-year-old couple that is — just as it has an interest of seeing any heterosexual couple that intends to engage in a prolonged period of cohabitation to reserve that until they have made a marital commitment, a marital commitment. So that, should that union produce any offspring, it would be more likely that that child or children will be raised by the mother and father who brought them into the world.

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Mr. Cooper, we said that somebody who is locked up in prison and who is not going to get out has a right to marry, has a fundamental right to marry, no possibility of procreation.

MR. COOPER: Your Honor is referring, I'm sure, to the Turner case, and -­

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Yes.

MR. COOPER: — I think that, with due respect, Justice Ginsburg, way over-reads — way over-reads Turner against Safley. That was a case in which the prison at issue — and it was decided in the specific context of a particular prison where there were both female and male inmates, many of them minimum security inmates. It was dealing with a regulation, Your Honor, that had previously permitted marriage in the case of pregnancy and childbirth.

The Court — the Court here emphasized that, among the incidents of marriage that are not destroyed by that — at least that prison context, was the expectation of eventual consummation of the marriage and legitimation of — of the children. So that -

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Thank you, Mr. Cooper.­

It's been 44 years since the riots of Stonewall pushed the gay rights agenda into the public consciousness in a big way. Since then, Mick Jagger went from dangerous sex symbol to the guy dancing in a Maroon 5 video, hip-hop was invented, and the fashionable jean silhouette has changed roughly 187 times. We've given the homophobes plenty of time to think this over. It's time to move on without them.

Labels: Christofascist Zombie Brigade, civil rights, gay marriage, homophobia, Supreme Court

I couldn't say 45 years ago, I couldn't stand here and say what I'm saying -- what I will say to you tonight. Like I told, God helped me to see that its not just about black people, it's about poor people. And I've come a long way. I knew that I couldn't live with hate, you know. As my mother has said to so many, if we had tried to live with hate in our hearts, we'd probably be dead now.

But I've come to realize that we have to work together and -- you know, it's sad that we don't have a room full of white and blacks here tonight 'cause we have to overcome the divisions that we have. We have to get to the point as Tony Morrison said race exists but it doesn't matter. We have to work just as hard -- I know it's -- you know, that division is still here, but our communities are not going to thrive -- you know, our children won't have the communities that they need to be able to stay in and live in and have a good life if we can't figure this out, you all. White people, black people, Hispanic people, we all have to do our part to make our communities a safe place, a healthy place, a good environment.

Labels: a real mensch, civil rights, real heroes

Dr. King would have been 80 years old now. He came to national prominence not trying to elect an African-American president, but just trying to get us past the depraved practice of blacks being forced to endure the humiliation of standing up and giving their seat on a bus to a white person, some man or woman or child.

Get up, girl. Get up, boy.

Dr. King was just 26 at the time, a national treasure in a stylish, broad-brimmed hat. He was only 39 when he was killed, eight years younger than Mr. Obama is now.

There are so many, like Dr. King, who I wish could have stayed around to see this day. Some were famous. Most were not.

I remember talking several years ago with James Farmer, one of the big four civil rights leaders of the mid-20th century. (The others were Dr. King, Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young.) Farmer enraged authorities in Plaquemine, La., in 1963 by organizing demonstrations demanding that blacks be allowed to vote. Tired of this affront, a mob of state troopers began hunting Farmer door to door.

The southern night trembled once again with the cries of abused blacks. As Farmer described it: “I was meant to die that night. They were kicking open doors, beating up blacks in the streets, interrogating them with electric cattle prods.”

A funeral director saved Farmer by having him “play dead” in the back of a hearse, which carried him along back roads and out of town.

Farmer died in 1999. Imagine if he could somehow be seated in a place of honor at the inauguration alongside Dr. King and Mr. Wilkins and Mr. Young. Imagine the stories and the mutual teasing and the laughter, and the deep emotion that would accompany their attempts to rise above their collective disbelief at the astonishing changes they did so much to bring about.

And then imagine a tall white man being ushered into their presence, and the warm smiles of recognition from the big four — and probably tears — for someone who has been shamefully neglected by his nation and his party, Lyndon Johnson.

Johnson’s contributions to the betterment of American life were nothing short of monumental. For blacks, he opened the door to the American mainstream with a herculean effort that resulted in the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He followed up that bit of mastery with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“Once the black man’s voice could be translated into ballots,” Johnson would say, “many other breakthroughs would follow.”

Without Lyndon Johnson, Barack Obama and so many others would have traveled a much more circumscribed path.

I wish Johnson could be there, his commitment to civil rights so publicly vindicated, his eyes no doubt misting as the oath of office is administered.

It’s so easy, now that the moronic face of racism is so seldom openly displayed, to forget how far we’ve really come. When Dr. King delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech” at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, it was illegal, just a stone’s throw away in Virginia, for whites and blacks to marry. Illegal! Just as it is illegal now for gays to marry.

Less than a month after the speech, members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed a black church in Birmingham, Ala., where children had gathered for a prayer service. Four girls were killed. Three were 14 years old, and one was 11.

My sister, Sandy, and I, growing up in Montclair, N.J., a suburb of New York City, were protected from the harshest rays of racism by a family that would let nothing, least of all some crazy notion of genetic superiority, soil our view of the world or ourselves.

My grandparents, who struggled through the Depression and World War II, and my parents, who worked tirelessly to give Sandy and me a wonderful upbringing in the postwar decades, seemed always to have believed that all good things were possible.

Even if the doors of opportunity were closed, they didn’t believe they were locked. Hard work, in their eyes, was always the key.

Still, the idea of a black president of the United States never came up. Perhaps even for them that was too much to imagine. I wish they could have stayed around long enough to see it.

Labels: civil rights, inauguration, President Barack Obama

Just because Barack Obama has been elected president and George W. Bush is retiring to Texas in two months, don't think that Keith Olbermann is getting out of the "Special Comment" business.

Olbermann, who signed a four-year deal with MSNBC that will keep him at "Countdown" and NBC's "Sunday Night Football" until at least 2012, said Monday that he isn't ruling out doing the commentary that has helped vault his 5-year-old show to its best-ever ratings last month.

It may not be the same type -- directed at President Bush, Sen. John McCain and others who have drawn Olbermann's ire -- but there's plenty to comment on.

"There could be just as many of them this year and next year, but they might be just directed at topics. They may be more commentary and less 'free this land' kind of stuff, but you never know," Olbermann said. "I have no idea what Obama is going to do in office. I have no earthly clue. I mean I have a guess, but I can't predict it."

But the contract extension for Olbermann -- which gives him about $7.5 million a year for the next four years, up from $4 million a year -- means that MSNBC thinks there's plenty to talk about. Monday night's special comment was to be directed against the Californians who successfully voted for Prop. 8, the controversial measure banning gay marriage in the state. There's also a favorite Olbermann target, Bill O'Reilly.

"Bill just signed for four more years, thus guaranteeing me at least that much material," Olbermann said.

Labels: civil rights, Keith Olbermann

Today, I’m going to write about a slur. It’s a distortion that’s been around for a while, but has spread like a weed over the past few months. It was concocted for partisan reasons: to flatter the prejudices of one side, to demonize the other and to simplify a complicated reality into a political nursery tale.

[snip]

The distortion concerns a speech Ronald Reagan gave during the 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., which is where three civil rights workers had been murdered 16 years earlier. An increasing number of left-wing commentators assert that Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia to send a signal to white racists that he was on their side. The speech is taken as proof that the Republican majority was built on racism.

The truth is more complicated.

[snip]

In reality, Reagan strategists decided to spend the week following the 1980 Republican convention courting African-American votes. Reagan delivered a major address at the Urban League, visited Vernon Jordan in the hospital where he was recovering from gunshot wounds, toured the South Bronx and traveled to Chicago to meet with the editorial boards of Ebony and Jet magazines.

Lou Cannon of The Washington Post reported at the time that this schedule reflected a shift in Republican strategy. Some inside the campaign wanted to move away from the Southern strategy used by Nixon, believing there were more votes available in the northern suburbs and among working-class urban voters.

But there was another event going on that week, the Neshoba County Fair, seven miles southwest of Philadelphia. The Neshoba County Fair was a major political rallying spot in Mississippi (Michael Dukakis would campaign there in 1988). Mississippi was a state that Republican strategists hoped to pick up. They’d recently done well in the upper South, but they still lagged in the Deep South, where racial tensions had been strongest. Jimmy Carter had carried Mississippi in 1976 by 14,000 votes.

So the decision was made to go to Neshoba. Exactly who made the decision is unclear. The campaign was famously disorganized, and Cannon reported: “The Reagan campaign’s hand had been forced to some degree by local announcement that he would go to the fair.” Reagan’s pollster Richard Wirthlin urged him not to go, but Reagan angrily countered that once the commitment had been made, he couldn’t back out.

[snip]

...spoke mostly about inflation and the economy, but in the middle of a section on schools, he said this: “Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them. I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.”

The use of the phrase “states’ rights” didn’t spark any reaction in the crowd, but it led the coverage in The Times and The Post the next day.

The murders were among the most notorious in American history. They constituted Neshoba County’s primary claim to fame when Reagan won the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1980. The case was still a festering sore at that time. Some of the conspirators were still being protected by the local community. And white supremacy was still the order of the day.

That was the atmosphere and that was the place that Reagan chose as the first stop in his general election campaign. The campaign debuted at the Neshoba County Fair in front of a white and, at times, raucous crowd of perhaps 10,000, chanting: “We want Reagan! We want Reagan!”

Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever to appear at the fair, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told that crowd, “I believe in states’ rights.”

Reagan apologists have every right to be ashamed of that appearance by their hero, but they have no right to change the meaning of it, which was unmistakable. Commentators have been trying of late to put this appearance by Reagan into a racially benign context.

That won’t wash. Reagan may have been blessed with a Hollywood smile and an avuncular delivery, but he was elbow deep in the same old race-baiting Southern strategy of Goldwater and Nixon.

Everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was signaling at the fair. Whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans — they all knew. The news media knew. The race haters and the people appalled by racial hatred knew. And Reagan knew.

He was tapping out the code. It was understood that when politicians started chirping about “states’ rights” to white people in places like Neshoba County they were saying that when it comes down to you and the blacks, we’re with you.

And Reagan meant it. He was opposed to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was the same year that Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were slaughtered. As president, he actually tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He opposed a national holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He tried to get rid of the federal ban on tax exemptions for private schools that practiced racial discrimination. And in 1988, he vetoed a bill to expand the reach of federal civil rights legislation.

Congress overrode the veto.

Reagan also vetoed the imposition of sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa. Congress overrode that veto, too.

Throughout his career, Reagan was wrong, insensitive and mean-spirited on civil rights and other issues important to black people. There is no way for the scribes of today to clean up that dismal record.

Labels: Bob Herbert, civil rights, David Brooks