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

You Cant Say That The ontogenesis terror to well-behaved Liberties from Antidiscirmination Laws You Cant Say That is a truly distinguished book, for it reminds us that no social revolution, even the near morally justified, is wooless. 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. everywhere the nearly half-century since its passage much has changed in America, and for African-Americans that change has been both 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 eloquent and accessible book, remarkably free from the lawyers inclin ation to stultify the laymen with a blizzard of case law, it is clear that the principal cost has been to First Amendment values, sacrificed too cavalierly when they conflict with antidscrimination principles. One need that look to the publisher of Bernsteins book, the Cato Institute, to see that the ideological landscape has been radically alte blood-red since the 1960s, when New Deal liberals still dominated the left, and the First Amendment comprised the centerfield and soul of their United States Constitution. Even earlier, before World War II, when Communists held disceptation on the left, the First Amendment was sacrosanct to Communists it was their second favorite constitutional amendment, by and by 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. trapping and Urban Development officials used the Fair Housing Act amendments to constrain neighborhood mu ltitudes that sought to exercise their free speech rights to campaign against group homes for the disabled, while those charging discrimination have sometimes been allowed by courts to enter into recount a defendants past political speech. These examples are the star of Bernsteins iceberg. Even good causes can run amuck if key 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