Introduction
By Harlan A. Loeb
We would like to thank Human Rights editorial board members Jacqueline E. Coleman and Robyn S. Shapiro for their work as special editors on this issue. We also thank Harlan A. Loeb, Human Rights editorial board chair, and Stephen J. Wermiel, Human Rights editorial board member, for their assistance.
Night travelers on the high seas relate that despite dramatic advances in radar technology, the most reliable compass for charting a course is fixing on a star in the sky. Whenever the vessel seems to be straying, one need only look to the sky to become reoriented. It is with this kernel of wisdom from sailors' lore that Human Rights decided to pause and evaluate how the immediate future of our shared course in promoting meaningful civil rights will be charted.
There are a variety of variables that make this a defining moment in time for both civil and human rights. In a number of recent Supreme Court decisions, the Court has suggested in fairly resonant terms that it is increasingly uncomfortable allowing the federal government to be an arbiter of civil rights matters. At the same time, state ballot initiatives have unwired state educational policies and economic empowerment programs designed to promote measurable and sustained equal opportunity in education and employment without companion proposals to address the underlying issue of race-based disenfranchisement.
Paradoxically, the federal government and many local governments have decided that they will use their authority to lend the imprimatur and the public wallet to private religious educational and social welfare institutions. Although the First Amendment friction of these initiatives is manifest, ultimately, the underlying miscalculation may be the symbolic message being sent that the government is willing to compromise core constitutional values in a gesture of defeat on two critical policy frontiers.
This dual abdication of government leadership has a number of hidden costs motivated by short-term thinking. The values-driven civil rights agenda of the 1960s used as its compass basic, albeit ethereal, concepts of equality that articulated a clear and linear ultimate goal. In contrast, we now confront parochial policymaking and legal analysis that do not account for the ultimate objectives of our civil rights struggle and basic constitutional protections.
Although many policies may satisfy immediate and compelling interests, including economic aid for struggling religious schools and church-based chemical dependency counseling, there is no cost/benefit analysis that includes the broader objective of equal participation and opportunity as an essential premise. Similarly, many of the legal decisions in which the federal role in protecting civil rights has been unraveled rely on legal reasoning that is forcefully persuasive, yet their holdings jeopardize vital rights and values.
The danger may very well be that when we can articulate, by example, the extent to which we have strayed from the course, the star in the sky that guides our progress may be too dim to identify. We need to ask, therefore, what we can expect on this essential landscape so that we can remind ourselves that with all of our critical thinking abilities and democratic progress, it is still necessary to look to the sky as our guide.
Harlan A. Loeb
Chair, Human Rights Editorial Board
