You Can’t Say That: The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties from Antidisc

You Cant formulate That The Growing Threat to well-behaved Liberties from Antidiscirmination Laws You Cant Say That is a truly important book, for it reminds us that no favorable revolution, even the most morally justified, is costless. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did indeed precipitate a social revolution, one that at long last began to deliver on the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation. Over the nearly half-century since its passage much has changed in America, and for African-Americans that change has been twain grievously overdue and remarkable in its sweep, although still very much a work in progress. However, this is not a book that catalogues the successes of the antidiscrimination movement that burgeoned in the wake of the 1964 Act, but rather an elegy to what must count on the other side of the ledger, to what has been compromised in the noble quest for racial equality. In this silvery and accessible book, remarkably free from the lawyers propensity to stultify the laymen with a blizzard of case law, it is clear that the principal cost has been to First Amendment values, sacrificed excessively cavalierly when they conflict with antidscrimination principles. One need only look to the publisher of Bernsteins book, the Cato Institute, to see that the ideological landscape has been radically altered since the 1960s, when New betray liberals still dominated the left, and the First Amendment comprised the he stratagem and soul of their United States Constitution. Even earlier, before World War II, when Communists held sway on the left, the First Amendment was sacrosanct to Communists it was their min favorite constitutional amendment, after the Fifth, prized as a stratagem to protect their freedom to subvert. For... ...orks most prestigious museums did not display enough art produced by women. Housing and Urban Development officials used the Fair Housing Act amendments to intimidate neighborhood groups that sought to exe rcise their free speech rights to promote against group homes for the disabled, while those charging discrimination have sometimes been allowed by courts to enter into evidence a defendants past political speech. These examples are the topple of Bernsteins iceberg. Even good causes can run amuck if fundamental constitutional principles are set aside noble ends can be compromised by hasty or tainted means. This book is a red flag, which we ignore at our peril. Works CitedYou Cant Say That The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties from Antidiscirmination Laws by David E. Bernstein. Washington, DC CATO Institute, 2003, 197 pages, $20.00