[ OUR OPINION ]
Lott should give up
GOP leadershipSen. Trent Lott has apologized for what he now admits were "terrible" words in which he looked back fondly at the era of racial segregation, but the Senate Republican leader's remarks were no inadvertent slip of the tongue. Previous statements by Lott indicate that his expressed view at the 100th birthday party of Sen. Strom Thurmond was not, as he claims, "a mistake of the head -- and not the heart." He should abandon his aim to lead the GOP-controlled Senate in the next Congress.
THE ISSUE Senate GOP leader Trent Lott praised Sen. Strom Thurmond's 1948 presidential bid, a campaign he waged as a segregationist.
At the party for the retiring Thurmond, R-S.C., Lott said he was "proud" that his state of Mississippi voted for Thurmond in his 1948 candidacy for president: "And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either." Thurmond ran for president as a "Dixiecrat" on a platform that opposed "social intermingling of the races."
Lott made a nearly identical statement at a 1980 campaign rally in Mississippi. In 1981, he filed a friend-of-the-court brief to help Bob Jones University, a conservative Christian college in South Carolina, keep its tax-exempt status despite its ban on interracial dating. "Racial discrimination does not always violate public policy," he wrote, alluding to affirmative-action programs aimed at promoting racial diversity. Lott also has expressed sympathy for pro-Confederate causes and has appeared before the racist Council of Conservative Citizens.
Lott said his words about Thurmond were "poorly chosen and insensitive," adding, "I regret the way it was interpreted." Considering the single-issue nature of Thurmond's 1948 candidacy and Lott's other statements and actions, his words can be interpreted only one way: The civil-rights movement -- i.e., "all these problems over all these years" -- should have been stopped at its inception.
President Bush has denounced Lott's remarks as failing to "reflect the spirit of the country. Any suggestion that the segregated past was acceptable or positive is offensive and it is wrong," Bush said. "He has apologized, and rightly so." The president did not say whether he regards the apology as adequate. It is not.
The controversy threatens to cripple the Republican Party as it prepares to take over both houses of Congress and tend to the president's agenda. That work will be hampered if the Senate's leader is known too long for the bad old days of racial segregation.
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Court should uphold
freedom of expressionOFFENSIVE as Senator Lott's words alluding to racial segregation were, his right to state them is protected by the First Amendment. The freedom to express opinions, despicable as they might be, extends to all forms of expression, even burning flags or crosses. The U.S. Supreme Court should reject attempts to depart from that important principle.
THE ISSUE The U.S. Supreme Court is considering a Virginia state ban on burning crosses with the intent to intimidate.
The high court repeatedly has ruled that burning the American flag is constitutionally protected, and in 1992 similarly struck down a St. Paul, Minn., ordinance penalizing the display of a swastika or burning cross. Any diversion from that tenet, as sought by the state of Virginia, would seriously undermine the First Amendment and lead to other attempts to whittle away at Americans' freedom of expression.
Virginia law bans cross-burning in public view or on another person's property. Justice Clarence Thomas, who voted with the majority a decade ago, argued this time that such a ban should be allowed because the burning cross is "intended to cause fear and to terrorize a population." Other justices quickly agreed in deference to Thomas, the court's only African American, rather than defend the legal principle at issue.
The Virginia statute prohibits burning a cross "with the intent of intimidating any person or group of persons." Not included in the prohibition is the burning of other religious symbols, such as the Star of David, the Buddhist wheel, the Hindu Om or the Islamic moon and star. Under the law, a health-care demonstrator could be prosecuted for burning the Red Cross, but not the Blue Shield. Such are the contents of the Pandora's box that the justices are asked to open.
Rodney A. Smolla, the attorney for three men convicted under the Virginia law, explained that it would conform with the Constitution if it simply made it a crime to threaten or intimidate another person, with no mention of symbols. The Virginia legislature this year passed a law prohibiting the burning of any object with the intent to intimidate -- a clumsy attempt to circumvent the issue.
When Justice Anthony M. Kennedy told Smolla that "100 years of history" created a difference between a burning cross and, say, a burning torch, the lawyer's response was to the point: "Thank you, Justice Kennedy, and that 100 years of history is on the side of freedom of speech."
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