Rehnquist's Legacy, Parts I & II
Allen Dershowitz wrote about the legal career of the late Chief-Justice William Rehnquist ("Telling the Truth About Chief Justice Rehnquist"). After recounting some telling incidents from Rehnquist's time (the late '40s and early '50s) at Stanford law school, which still discriminated against Jews and other minorities, he told of the memo Rehnquist wrote at the time of Brown v. Board of Education in which he maintained that the principle of "separate but equal" (from the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision) was sound and should be affirmed. These remarks were surrounded by other startling facts about Rehnquist, making me wonder how in the world Rehnquist could come to seem almost moderate in the current political milieu.
Dershowitz summarized Rehnquist's law career, which "set back liberty, equality, and human rights perhaps more than any American judge of this generation" this way:
Rehnquist’s judicial philosophy was result-oriented, activist, and authoritarian. He sometimes moderated his views for prudential or pragmatic reasons, but his vote could almost always be predicted based on who the parties were, not what the legal issues happened to be. He generally opposed the rights of gays, women, blacks, aliens, and religious minorities. He was a friend of corporations, polluters, right wing Republicans, religious fundamentalists, homophobes, and other bigots.
Rehnquist served on the Supreme Court for thirty-three years and as chief justice for nineteen. Yet no opinion comes to mind which will be remembered as brilliant, innovative, or memorable. He will be remembered not for the quality of his opinions but rather for the outcomes decided by his votes, especially Bush v. Gore, in which he accepted an Equal Protection claim that was totally inconsistent with his prior views on that clause. He will also be remembered as a Chief Justice who fought for the independence and authority of the judiciary. This is his only positive contribution to an otherwise regressive career.
None of this is really shocking. Informative, perhaps surprising, possibly alarming, but not shocking.
Then Dershowitz told the story of being interviewed soon after Rehnquist's death on Fox News by Colmes (nominally) and Hannity (in fact), and how rudely he was treated by Hannity when Dershowitz' remarks were not to Hannity's taste, and how the interview was ended prematurely by a petulant Hannity. None of this was even very surprising.
What shocked me was Dershowitz' saying he'd been receiving a lot of e-mail hate messages, many of which are anti-Semitic. For instance:
One writer called me “a jew prick that takes it in the a** from ruth ginzburg [sic].”
Now, that shocks me. You might think, given that I'm a big ol' homo myself and quite accustomed to hearing "fag" or "homo" or "queer" or any number of similar epithets casually used as combining forms to fill out the iambic feet in relatively uncreative insults, and given that I am no stranger to the idea of taking it in the a** either, I'm still shocked. Not, I think, because the writer called Dershowitz a "prick", but because the writer called him a "jew prick".
I just don't get it. I really don't. Maybe this was what Dershowitz meant when he wrote that
His [Rehnquist's] rise to power speaks volumes about the current state of American values.