The evangelical Christian ministry Focus on the Family is convinced that too many public schools are intent on preventing bullying of gay, lesbian and transgender students at the expense of the free expression rights of Christian students.

A Focus on the Family spokeswoman told The Denver Post, as noted at TPM, that, "We feel more and more that activists are being deceptive in using anti-bullying rhetoric to introduce their viewpoints, while the viewpoint of Christian students and parents are increasingly belittled."

But GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, maintains that students' free speech rights, which are limited in public schools primarily because public schools are not wide- open public forums and the federal courts have consistently held that educators have great discretion in controlling the curriculum and ensuring safety of students, are not the issue here. Instead GLSEN says too many gay students are the victims of bullying and supports local and federal efforts to curb the incidents. A 2005 GLSEN and Harris Interactive report showed nearly 65 percent of middle and high school students had been subjected to bullying and a 2007 GLSEN report revealed that a little more than 86 percent of LGBT students were victims of bullying at school.

The group is urging Congress to pass a bill introduced earlier this month by Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey called the Safe Schools Improvement Act (SSIA), which would include protections against bullying of gay, lesbian and transgender students.

"Our nation has failed to address the pervasive problem of bullying and harassment in schools for far too long. Countless youth are denied access to education every day because they do not feel safe in school. Passing the Safe Schools Act would go a long way toward laying the necessary foundation of support lacking in many American schools," GLSEN Executive Director Eliza Byard said in a press statement.

Byard told The Denver Post that GLSEN's efforts to stop bullying of LGBT students do not subvert the religious speech of other students. She noted that, "The word ‘faggot' is not part of any religious creed," and that her group has worked with other organizations, such as the Christian Educators Association International and the First Amendment Center, on sexual orientation issues in the public schools.

[image via Flickr]

The Supreme Court opinion in Citizens United, which gives corporations unfettered ability to pump millions into electioneering, is emblematic of a narrow high court majority that is actively advancing corporate interests, Sen. Sherrod Brown told a gathering of law students at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law.

In his speech, hosted by the law school's ACS law student chapter and the ACS Columbus Lawyer Chapter, Sen. Brown focused on progressive periods in the nation and how they produced lasting advancements for civil rights and economic justice. For instance, he lauded three years in the 1960s as "probably the best three years Congress has every had - 1964, 5 and 6, when Congress and a new president, President Johnson, passed Medicaid, Medicare, the Wilderness Act, and the Economic Opportunity Act, including Head Start; passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts." But Brown said that progressive era resulted in pushback from voters who apparently thought Congress moved too quickly, yet enjoyed the benefits of those laws for many years to come.

He said the current progressive era is receiving enormous pushback from corporate interests. The financial reform package that was recently passed did so over intense corporate interest lobbying - a million per day - Brown maintained. And in Citizens United v. FEC, a slim, but radical, majority of the Supreme Court issued a ruling that will further embolden corporate interests, the senator said.

Brown noted, "For years, all we've heard over and over again from conservatives is that the courts have taken an activist role; that thirty-year drumbeat ... from conservatives is that we shouldn't make laws from the bench, that liberal courts are making law from the bench, this activism from the judiciary is bad for the country." He said that refrain from conservatives has been heard often, "ad nauseam."

"But," Brown continued, "there was really no better example of an activist judiciary legislating from the bench than the Citizens United case. It was a narrow Supreme Court ruling from a radical majority; a majority that always, always, always puts corporate interests in front of everything else."

The Citizens United decision, "will clearly allow corporations to have an even larger influence in our political system," the senator said. Video of Brown's comments is available here or by clicking the picture (right). Video of the entire event, including a question-and-answer session with Brown, is here.

 

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A conversation between Dennis Parker, ACLU Racial Justice Program Director, and Marjorie Esman, ACLU of Louisiana Executive Director, about Hurricane Katrina and the racial injustices that it exposed to the rest of the country.

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Dennis Parker: Let me begin the conversation by asking you, Marjorie, as a New Orleans resident and rights and liberties advocate, what you think was the most important lesson learned from the disaster?

Marjorie Esman: Katrina showed the world what we here always knew: New Orleans is a city divided by race and class. Those divisions played a major role in everything that followed in aftermath of the flood. Still, we and the rest of the country were shocked by the images of thousands of poor black people trapped in terrible conditions and the never-ending stories of abuse. The ACLU did a report bringing to light the police abuse, racial profiling, housing discrimination and the dangerous lack of planning at the Orleans Parish Prison that disproportionately impacted the black population.

DP: Sadly, we didn't learn the lesson that systematic discrimination and inequality exist not only in New Orleans but in the United States as a whole. Katrina wasn't the first time that inequality was revealed, and sadly, it won't be the last. Remember how surprised everyone was 20 years ago when statistical evidence confirmed what communities of color had long known, that black and brown people are subjected unfairly to racial profiling? But I'm not sure we learned any lasting lessons. Look at the extreme "show me your papers" law in Arizona that basically requires police to racially profile Latinos. Where are we five years later in New Orleans?

ME: The anniversary of Katrina offers us an opportunity to reevaluate the discriminatory systems in place and to assess whether those systems have improved. The report card is mixed. Our police force is now being monitored by the U.S. Justice Department because of longstanding police misconduct, some of which was uncovered after Katrina. It's too soon to know whether this and other recent changes will have lasting effects. On the other hand, because of the connection between race and poverty, race has played a major factor in determining who can return to the affected areas.

DP: To illustrate your point, just a few days ago a federal court in Washington, D.C., blocked the state of Louisiana from continuing to use a discriminatory formula as part of the federally-funded Road Home program meant to help homeowners rebuild after the devastating damage resulting from Hurricanes Rita and Katrina.

The program gave relief funds based on home appraisals. The problem is that homes in poor neighborhoods, many of which are predominately black, aren't valued as highly as similar homes in white neighborhoods. People who lived in the poorer neighborhoods didn't receive equal relief even though materials and labor for reconstruction don't cost any less in one neighborhood than they do in another. The program was designed by the Louisiana Recovery Authority and approved by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, but both Louisiana and the federal government failed to take the reality of racial and economic inequality into account.

ME: Tragically, the ruling only impacts the families who qualify for future Road Home funding. Thousands of others who lost their homes to Katrina or Rita will not be receiving any additional money to rebuild even though the court recognized that they did not receive equitable funding because of where they lived. This means that poorer areas, many of which are black neighborhoods, will remain full of destroyed and empty houses.

DP: It's an unfortunate example of what happens when we refuse to acknowledge or forget our sad legacy of racial and economic inequality despite all of the evidence that it still persists. I believe that New Orleans and the United States will be able to more successfully address the persistent effects of racial discrimination if we stop pretending that it doesn't exist.

ME: Yes, it's time that as a country we honestly look at race and what it means. New Orleans remains a city divided by race, despite our shared experience in surviving this disaster. Five years later, despite significant improvements, we still fight the legacy of racial discrimination. Katrina made the world see the problem, and we need to remember that the problem hasn't gone away.

[Photo courtesy of Infrogmation]

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By Sonja Ralston, a judicial law clerk to the Hon. Guido Calabresi of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Ralston taught bilingual first grade prior to law school, and has published several scholarly papers on education law.

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On Tuesday, the federal Department of Education announced the winners of the final round of its Race to the Top program. Nine states and the District of Columbia join Delaware and Tennessee, which won the first round in April. All told, forty-six states and the District of Columbia competed for a share of the $4 billion in prize money to implement comprehensive education reform plans, making it the largest state-based "competitive, discretionary grant" - in short, prize - in national history.

Though prizes are not an entirely new means of governing (in 1714, Parliament established the Longitude Prize to develop accurate measures of longitude on the open water and awarded £100,000 over fifty years), the Obama administration has newly emphasized competitive grants. But even among the administration's prize programs, Race to the Top is special: unlike the Longitude Prize or the Department of Energy's prizes for energy-efficient light bulbs and better batteries, the goal is to spur policy rather than technological innovation. Therefore, it invites states rather than individuals, companies, universities, or cities to compete.

Race to the Top represents a new approach to federalism: one that strikes a better state/federal balance in substantive policymaking than traditional spending programs while simultaneously doing more to leverage the impact of federal dollars.

In terms of the balance of policymaking, Race to the Top puts more power in the hands of states than other federal education programs. Overall, the federal government provides around 10 percent of K-12 public education spending each year, but that funding is overwhelmingly concentrated in two areas: aid to high-poverty school districts under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and aid to school districts for the education of students with disabilities under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). In each of these block grant programs, Congress, not the states, decides how the money will be spent. For example, IDEA sets very specific standards for what counts as a disability, how students with disabilities must be accommodated in schools, and what procedures schools must follow.

In contrast, Race to the Top gives states greater discretion over how to spend the funds. Fifty percent of any Race to the Top award can be distributed as the state sees fit, within guidelines that are so loose that a state could comply by spending the money on essentially any education program. Additionally, the 500-point rubric for awarding Race to the Top grants has dozens of subcategories, allowing states to pick what reform issues to focus on. As a result, each state's application proposes a different approach to improving education. Race to the Top thus gives real meaning to the cliché, "laboratories of democracy."

Under Race to the Top, states, not the federal government, set policy even when uniformity is important, as it is for learning standards. Under the Race to the Top rubric, a state received up to 40 points for joining "a consortium of States that . . . develop[s] and adopt[s] a common set of K-12 standards." The federal Department of Education did not write the standards; it didn't even establish the group that wrote the standards. The National Governors' Association took the lead, starting last summer, and published the Common Core Standards this June, which forty-eight states (and the District of Columbia) helped develop and thirty-five (and the District) have already adopted.

Prizes also have the potential to leverage federal dollars. Consider the now-familiar Ansari X Prize. It awarded $10 million to the company that first produced a private manned spacecraft, whereas competitors spent over $100 million. The $4 billion the federal government is spending on Race to the Top is only around 25 percent of what it spends every year on Title I. Yet unlike other small programs, which are pilot projects only implemented in a small percentage of schools or districts, the process of merely applying for Race to the Top led to changes in the laws of nearly every state, from lifting caps on the number of charter schools to eliminating data firewalls.

Race to the Top gives the federal government more bang for its buck than most education spending. Unlike, for example, Title I (a block grant program the Department of Education administers according to a congressional formula), Race to the Top is a discretionary - and therefore flexible - funding program. Funds are awarded by the agency, not by Congress, so there's no push for pork, the program need not spend a proportionate amount in every state, and it is not the kind of block-grant pre-requisite that might lead to contentious congressional votes - like when attempts to add national standards to annual ESEA funding were repeatedly defeated.

Finally, Race to the Top is special because its competitors are states - and only states. This focus on states in the first two rounds has policy benefits: making the states the competitors is the most direct way to prod states to change course on alternative school structures like charters or autonomous schools, teacher tenure, and standards. But it also embraces a larger virtue: federalism. By giving the states real choices about how to accomplish federal policy priorities rather than just making them administrative go-betweens that cut checks and write reports, Race to the Top reaffirms states' status as sovereigns with authority over - and responsibility for - their citizens' welfare.

At a moment when the public is increasingly concerned about reasserting state authority (including by calling for the repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment), less radical ways to give states greater autonomy deserve attention. The so-far success of Race to the Top shows that prizes can spur policy innovation, especially in fields in which it is easier to agree on ideal outcomes (like having all children learn) than on how to reach those goals.

 

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By Nsombi Lambright, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi.

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I can't believe that five years have passed since Hurricane Katrina devastated Gulf Coast communities in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. And although groups and advocates who were experienced in disaster recovery told us that it would take at least ten years to rebuild, I never imagined that five years later, we'd still face the same challenges. The fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina; are we celebrating growth and recovery, commemorating a tragedy, or both?

As I viewed the film "Trouble the Water" this week, I was mixed up inside. The ACLU of Mississippi partnered with an organization started by Katrina Survivors who relocated from New Orleans to Jackson, called Rise Above Katrina, to show the film at Tougaloo College, a historically black college in Mississippi. I met the New Orleans natives from Rise Above Katrina and hundreds of others from the Mississippi Gulf Coast immediately after Hurricane Katrina as the ACLU began to monitor the Government's overall response to the disaster as well as the disparities between services provided to white communities and people of color communities. In 2006, the ACLU participated in a U.S. delegation to Geneva to discuss the impact of these disparities to the United Nations Human Rights Committee. The ACLU also provided technical and legal assistance to Rise Above Katrina when they were threatened by law enforcement when protesting in front of the American Red Cross offices in Jackson. The group protested the American Red Cross' distribution of disaster relief funds.

As I interacted with Wilma Taylor and LaShawn Traylor and some of the other survivors, I thought about how far they'd come. Wilma is a Gulf Coast Fellow who is starting her own organization to advocate for individuals with disabilities. LaShawn is finishing her education and continuing her ministry. They've moved into new homes, celebrated births.

Life has moved on. They have risen above Katrina. However, there's still a glimpse of sadness remaining in their eyes. It's a sadness that allows you to travel into their bodies and view the pain in their souls. You hear it when they talk about loved ones who didn't make it through the storm. You hear it when they talk about their disappointment in the governments that let them down. The city of New Orleans, which did not provide transportation for people to leave; the state of Louisiana, which brought military and law enforcement in to shoot and arrest survivors; the state of Mississippi, which withheld federal dollars from everyone except homeowners; the city of Jackson, which moved everyone out of the temporary shelter of the coliseum because a Disney show was coming to town; Harrison County, the place that has not rebuilt shelters for the homeless and arrests people for not having a place to rest their heads at night.

The list of disappointments is endless. And still they rise. They rose above the storm to accomplish great things. They rose above the storm with new friends and family who were survivors too. They rose above the storm with a new sense of awareness about the importance of fighting for those who cannot fight for themselves. And even though they are still rising, they don't forget; they won't forget; they can't forget. I'll be there with them, rising too; until there is true freedom and justice for all!

 [Photo courtesy of Infrogmation]

Whether it's the extremist Florida pastor promoting a burn-the-Quran day or conservative pundit Newt Gingrich peddling his shrill campaign against the planned Islamic community center in New York City, rising anti-Islam action within in the country is not only "ugly," but raises serious "questions about the future of religious liberty," writes a leading First Amendment scholar.

In an Aug. 27 article for the First Amendment Center, Charles C. Haynes notes a recent Economist poll that reveals 34 percent of those surveyed "say there are some places in the U.S. where it is not appropriate to build mosques, though it would be appropriate for other religions to build houses of worship."

Haynes, director of the Religious Freedom Education Project, continues:

Propaganda works. The drumbeat of anti-Islam messages this summer - often conflating Islam and terrorism - on talk radio, the Internet and at political meetings around the country has apparently convinced a good slice of the public that American Muslims do not have the same rights as people of other faiths.

Haynes notes an e-mail from a soldier serving in Afghanistan, who is Muslim. The soldier asks, "Do we not deserve the right to worship freely and mourn for the people who died on 9/11? They were our countrymen too."

Haynes concludes:

If we are unwilling to protect the right of every American to religious liberty, then we have no business sending this soldier to risk his life in the name of freedom and democracy.

[image via Wikimedia Commons]

 

A Florida pastor has found a way to garner attention - lots of it - for his otherwise unremarkable, but financially troubled evangelical church. The pastor of the fittingly named Dove World Outreach Center has planned a burning of Qurans to mark the forthcoming 9/11 anniversary. Pastor Terry Jones has dubbed the event "International Burn a Koran Day," and conceded to The New York Times that he doesn't know much about the religious text, and that the planned event is drawing donations at a time when his bank has demanded payment on the church's mortgage and its property insurance has been cancelled.

Although, Jones says he has "no experience with it [the Quran]," and only knows "the Bible," he is nonetheless convinced that Islam is "full of lies," and a religion "of the devil." The pastor's actions have drawn attention worldwide. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) calls the planned burning an outrage. Watch video of some of CAIR's response here. Dr. Saeed Khan, a professor at the University of Florida, told The Times that Jones is "hijacking Christianity," much like "Al Qaeda hijacked Islam."

As noted here, First Amendment scholar Charles C. Haynes has maintained that the rise of anti-Islam rhetoric is not only a danger to religious liberty in the country but also plays into the hands of extremists. "Such ill-informed statements must be music to al-Qaida's ears. After all, al-Qaida has worked hard to convince the Muslim world that its political and violent ideology is the true face of Islam - and America's ‘war on terrorism' is actually a ‘war on Islam,' Haynes wrote.

[image via Wikimedia Commons]

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By Emily J. Martin, Vice President and General Counsel, National Women's Law Center

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Much like the Nineteenth Amendment itself these days, Women's Equality Day-the anniversary of the amendment's ratification-keeps a fairly low profile, sneaking in at the end of August, when much of the country is enjoying the last few days of summer vacation. But this August 26, the ninetieth anniversary of the constitutional guarantee of women's right to vote, it is worth stopping to reflect on the many years of labor that culminated in ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment and that work's relevance to women's progress going forward. One important way of honoring that history and continuing that progress would be ratification of the Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) , a landmark international agreement that affirms principles of fundamental equality for women and girls.

In one of the few law review articles addressing the Nineteenth Amendment, Yale Law professor Reva Siegel describes it as "a constitutional amendment so rarely cited that reference to it prompts many, if not most, constitutional law scholars to ask: ‘Which one is that?'" In retrospect, its passage seems inevitable and the ground it broke has been largely forgotten. But ratification came in 1920 only after fifty years of fierce campaigning for a constitutional guarantee of full citizenship for women.

As Siegel explains, opponents of women's right to vote saw suffragists' demands as deeply threatening. "The demand is for the abolition of all distinctions between men and women, proceeding upon the hypothesis that men and women are the same," one opponent asserted. "[This] attacks the integrity of the family; . . . it denies and repudiates the obligations of motherhood." Anti-suffragists asserted that a federal guarantee of women's right to vote represented a power grab for the federal government, which would "draw a line of political demarcation through a man's household, through his fireside, and to open to the intrusion of politics and politicians that sacred circle of the family." Given this history, it is ironic that last week a Washington Times op-ed invoked the anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment to urge opposition to CEDAW, the women's rights treaty, in terms remarkably similar to those once used to oppose women's suffrage.

The CEDAW treaty has been adopted by every country in the world but seven; the United States is one of the holdouts, in the unlikely company of Iran, Sudan, Somalia, and three small Pacific Islands. Ratifying countries affirm that women's rights are human rights and commit themselves to ending discrimination against women and girls. CEDAW provides a practical blueprint for these efforts; guided by CEDAW, policymakers and advocates in other countries have taken important steps toward stopping sex trafficking and domestic violence, expanding girls' educational opportunities, providing access to maternal health care, and yes, ensuring women's right to vote. By ratifying CEDAW, the United States would strengthen its role as a global leader in standing up for the rights of women and girls and continue a long, bipartisan tradition of promoting and protecting human rights.

CEDAW's opponents, however, assert that CEDAW's promise of nondiscrimination "denies the nature of women, the need for families, and the proper role of government." These scare tactics and false claims grossly misrepresent CEDAW and its mechanisms, given that a central purpose of CEDAW is to ensure that women are not disparaged or devalued based on their status as mothers. CEDAW instead seeks to provide parents the support they need to provide for and care for their children. Moreover, through its opposition to practices like polygamy, forced marriage, and domestic violence, CEDAW promotes women's safety and health within families. A committee of women's rights experts makes nonbinding recommendations to ratifying countries regarding best practices for ending discrimination, but it is always up to policymakers and advocates within each country to determine how best to meet CEDAW's goals in that country. In short, CEDAW no more threatens the integrity of the family than did the Nineteenth Amendment before it.

Yet the similarities between the language used to oppose the Nineteenth Amendment a century ago and CEDAW today are striking. Both the Nineteenth Amendment and CEDAW have been described as an attack on motherhood. While anti-suffragists warned of the Nineteenth Amendment's "abolition of all distinctions between men and women," CEDAW opponents assert that CEDAW "forbids recognizing the wonderful differences between men and women." While anti-suffragists warned of the federal government's invasion of the "sacred circle of the family," CEDAW opponents claim that CEDAW would somehow turn family decisions over to the U.N. The echoes are revealing, demonstrating the remarkable persistence of the fear that recognizing women's equality will somehow mean the end of families, even in the face of decades of evidence to the contrary.

In the case of the Nineteenth Amendment, overcoming this fear required:

56 referendum campaigns directed at male voters, plus "480 campaigns to get Legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters, 47 campaigns to get constitutional conventions to write woman suffrage into state constitutions; 277 campaigns to get State party conventions to include woman suffrage planks, 30 campaigns to get presidential party campaigns to include woman suffrage planks in party platforms and 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses."

The Senate should celebrate the 90th anniversary of the great and hard-fought achievement that was the Nineteenth Amendment by ratifying CEDAW. By doing so, the United States would again reject the argument that ending discrimination against women somehow harms families. By affirming women's fundamental human rights, the ratification of CEDAW would instead promote women's health, safety, economic security, and dignity, helping not only women themselves, but their families and communities. The Senate should ratify CEDAW now.

[image via the U.N.'s Division for the Advancement of Women]

 

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By Donna Lieberman, Executive Director, New York Civil Liberties Union, and Louise Melling, Deputy Legal Director, ACLU.

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Cross-posted at ACLU's Blog of Rights

"Of course you have the right to build a mosque, but it is insensitive to build it there."

This is the newest version of the call from critics of the proposed Islamic center in downtown New York City. The sentiment may at first blush seem sensitive: it recognizes the trauma of 9/11, the sacred nature of Ground Zero and the constitutional right to religious freedom. But the sentiment that the Islamic center can be built - just elsewhere - inevitably reflects a prejudice and intolerance that is in fact inconsistent with religious freedom.

To conclude that building the Islamic center near Ground Zero is insensitive, one must, consciously or not, believe that the Muslims of downtown New York City who will come to the center to pray are - by virtue of their faith - all tainted by the terrorists who committed an atrocious act in the name of Islam. How else to explain the alleged "insensitivity"?

Political leaders like Mayor Bloomberg in New York should be praised for standing up for religious freedom in the face of political pressure. But the voices of prejudice still fill the airwaves, and outright hostility toward mosques continues to flare up around the country in locations having no relation to any acts of terrorism.

Throughout our history, Jews, Protestants, Catholics and Muslims have all been victims of fear and discrimination. In the end, tolerance and fairness generally prevail. So should it here. But that means speaking up for fairness, opposing religious discrimination rooted in cultural stereotyping, and resisting those who seek to trade away our most precious values for political advantage. It means letting our political leaders know that discrimination is a losing proposition, and that adherence to the Constitution is not optional.

For our part, the ACLU will continue to defend the right of all religious denominations - from majority faiths to unpopular religions - to establish places of worship, and for Americans to pray, or not, as they choose. We will also continue to defend the right for those who object to speak their mind. At the same time, we will continue to remind people that, even as we are still healing from an indescribable wound, we cannot abandon our core values or we will have lost everything.

For the second time a federal appeals court panel rejected jury awards in favor of African-American plaintiffs who alleged discrimination against the poultry company Tyson. In a 2-1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit found that a Tyson manager's use of the word "boy" to address a black man, John Hithon, did not amount to evidence of racial discrimination.

Hithon denied a promotion at the Gadsden, Ala., poultry plant, argued that manager Tom Hatley had discriminated against him, citing, among other things, Hatley's derogatory usage of "boy." In 2002, Hithon and other employees of the plant lodged a lawsuit alleging racial discrimination and a jury found in their favor awarding hundreds of thousands in compensatory damages and $1.5 million in punitive damages. A federal magistrate judge invalidated the jury's verdict maintaining that racial discrimination was not proved, and in 2005 a panel of the Eleventh Circuit upheld that ruling. But the U.S. Supreme Court heard an appeal of the case and found that the use of the word boy could prove racial bias. "The speaker's meaning may depend on various factors including context, inflection, tone of voice, local custom and historical usage," the high court ruled in remanding the case to the Eleventh Circuit. The remand also produced another jury trial, which again found in favor of Hithon and the other black employee, Anthony Ash.

But the Eleventh Circuit, in its recent ruling (pdf) in Ash v. Tyson Foods, Inc., refused to budge from its earlier decision, concluding that there was not new evidence to show the use of the word was discriminatory, Law.Com reported. But U.S. District Senior Judge David D. Dowd Jr., appointed to the bench by President Reagan, in a dissent said the jury verdicts should have been upheld.

In a column for Daily Report, Stephen B. Bright, president and senior counsel of the Southern Center for Human Rights, wrote that the latest decision is a troubling reminder of the need for diversity on the Eleventh Circuit.

Bright wrote:

These two white judges [referring to Eleventh Circuit Judges Edward E. Carnes and William H. Pryor, Jr., of the majority in Ash], residing in their judicial palaces as far away from the lives of ordinary people as one can get, purport to know more about what it means when a white overseer calls an African-American man ‘boy' than 24 Alabamians selected for two federal juries.

...

This march back to Jim Crow would surely be more difficult if there were more people of color on the federal bench. About a quarter of the population of three states that make up the 11th Circuit is made up of African Americans and Hispanics. Yet there have been only two black judges on the 12-member 11th Circuit in its history, and they have served one at a time. There is only one active African-American federal judge in all of Georgia today, Judge W. Louis Sands in the Middle District. The Northern District of Georgia, which includes Atlanta and has three African Americans representing it in Congress, has no African American judges in active status at this time.