Have I ever mentioned that the Supreme Court sometimes relies upon nuances of reasoning that are inaccessible to the average bonehead? I think so.
A South Dakota lawmaker on Monday said businesses should be able to turn away customers based on race.
In a Facebook comment, state Rep. Michael Clark, a Hartford Republican, said business owners should have the final say in who they serve.
“He should have the opportunity to run his business the way he wants,” Clark wrote. “If he wants to turn away people of color, then that(‘s) his choice.”
The remarks came in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s narrow decision Monday siding with a Colorado baker that refused to make a cake for a same-sex couple’s wedding.
Clark apologized for the remark shortly after the news story was published, but people who don’t mean things like that would never say it in the first place.
I was reared in Detroit, Michigan, and the great northern migration of southerners, especially blacks, to work in the factories caused a lot of cultural upheaval. Little remarked now is that the UAW’s Walter Reuther was a genuine hero of the civil rights movement, and the UAW contributed mightily to smoothing the way for blacks to enter the workforce and, eventually, the middle class. There was plenty of racism around, but it was never so structural, implicit, and invidious as it is here in the south — and I’m talking about today, not when I was a kid. If it were not for the public accommodation laws passed in the ’60s during the Johnson Administration, blacks would still be denied the opportunity to sit at the lunch counter.
And thanks to the foolishness of the Supremes, we can now look forward to a long succession of new test cases that were fought decades ago.