Word: racial
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...vote, the court struck down the districts' plans. Three justices joined Chief Justice John Roberts' opinion saying that, in schools not intentionally segregated, the desire for racial balance isn't enough to trump the Constitution's general ban on treating people differently because of their race. Justice Anthony "Swing Vote" Kennedy agreed with the striking-down bit, but he wrote a separate opinion saying schools could consider race as a factor if they did so in ways precisely gauged to achieve diversity. The districts' plans were too crude - Seattle had only two categories: white and non-white - and too ambiguous...
...Justice Stephen Breyer led Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in dissent, arguing that the districts' use of race served their powerful interest in making sure that students reaped the benefits of learning in racially diverse classrooms. And what about Brown v. Board of Education, Breyer asked incredulously? The 1954 school-desegregation landmark promised "true racial equality," he wrote, and today's plurality decision "would break that promise...
...moment, though, hundreds of public school districts may have to consider alternatives for getting a racial mix in classrooms, and their options are limited...
...coveted free agent and Ellen DeGeneres is America's sweetheart. The notion that gays must be segregated out of the military for the sake of our national security must strike Americans younger than, say, 40 as simply weird, just as we of the previous generation find the rules of racial segregation weird. (O.K., run that by me again: they needed separate drinking fountains because...
...going. When opponents of gay rights talk ominously about a "gay agenda," they are not completely wrong. There has been an agenda in the sense of a long-term strategy, not unlike the carefully plotted strategy of Thurgood Marshall and others in the civil rights movement that ended formal racial segregation. It was a brilliant decision to start with the military rather than attempt to outlaw discrimination generally or push right away for gay marriage. Twenty years from now, maybe sooner, gays will have...