Supreme Court rules against ‘equal justice under law’

The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled against the principle of “Equal justice under law” (a phrase that also appears on the high court’s building) and allowed colleges and universities that receive tax dollars to continue factoring race into decisions to admit and reject individual applicants. By a 4-3 vote, the court in Fisher v. University of Texas last month held that UT’s race-based admissions practice did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Christina Swarns, litigation director for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, was apparently happy about the news. “This was obviously a big surprise,” she told PBS NewsHour. “It demonstrates a remarkable evolution in the way [Justice Anthony M. Kennedy] thinks about these issues.”

The message of affirmative action is that certain racial groups aren’t competitive with others, so schools must lower standards for lower-performing groups to achieve “equality.” I’ve railed against this practice and its implications for years. I’ve called on black Americans to oppose racial preferences as unfair and demeaning. I reminded them that a government with the power to discriminate in their favor can wield that power to discriminate against them.

What does Fisher mean for K-12 schools? As racial preferences opponent Richard D. Kahlenberg noted in the NewsHour report, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007) is still in effect for them. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that government-funded K-12 schools in Jefferson County, Ky., and Seattle could not use race as a tiebreaker when assigning students.

No matter what a court decides, liberals won’t stop bowing before the altar of diversity. Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education Association, reacted to the Fisher decision by saying that “the mission of public elementary, secondary, and higher education is to instill in all students the values on which our society rests and to provide them all, regardless of race, with the skills and knowledge necessary to realize their full potential. That mission cannot be fulfilled without racially diverse classrooms.”

Thomas J. Gentzel, the executive director of the National School Boards Association, said his organization is “pleased” with the decision, because “it takes dedicated efforts to achieve racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity.”

Translation: We can’t instill values and provide children with skills and knowledge unless we discriminate against them based on race, and our “dedicated efforts” must include discriminating against children based on race.

We take comfort in knowing that even if the government treats us differently based on race, God doesn’t. He created the diverse people of the world and redeems individuals without regard to those differences. He will judge the unrepentant by their sins. Though children in the public schools might be taught to obsess over diversity, let’s teach them eternal truth. If they repent and accept Christ, they will be counted among the “great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. …”