2007-12-31 Liberals Against Diversity

• date: 2007-12-31
• source: Wall Street Journal
• author: James Taranto
• topics: William Kristol demonization of liberals New York Times
• link: http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110011066
• title: Liberals Against Diversity
• summary: “The New York Times op-ed page is trying to go from bad to diverse. The page has hired William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, as a weekly columnist, starting next Monday. The Politico reports that word of the hiring "caused a frenzy in the liberal blogosphere Friday night, with threats of canceling subscriptions and claims that the Gray Lady had been hijacked by neo-cons"”

Excerpt

The New York Times op-ed page is trying to go from bad to diverse. The page has hired William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, as a weekly columnist, starting next Monday. The Politico reports that word of the hiring "caused a frenzy in the liberal blogosphere Friday night, with threats of canceling subscriptions and claims that the Gray Lady had been hijacked by neo-cons...

Don't get us wrong. We don't mean to suggest that conservatives qua conservatives have civil rights. If the Times had a policy of refusing to hire conservative columnists, we might criticize or mock the paper for it, but we would never argue that the law should compel it to treat right-leaning job applicants equally.

...

Yet Pollitt's complaint runs directly counter to the standard liberal argument for affirmative action. In his influential split-the-difference opinion in University of California v. Bakke (1978), Justice Lewis Powell opined that racial preferences in college admissions could be justified in the interest of "the attainment of a diverse student body." In Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), a 5-4 Supreme Court majority endorsed Powell's view.