Auchtoon!

Best wishes to all for taking a summertime break from the algorithms!

I am super excited about the World Cup, and I’ll be cheering on the U.S. team no matter whatever odd Eastern Time Zone hour they will be playing. As four-time winners and defending champs, it’s easy to be a fan of the U.S. Women. But this year will be a significantly more difficult challenge. So many other countries have vastly improved their play. So I’m enthusiastic, but certainly not over-confident.

I hesitate to draw a parallel here, because bringing people up on felony charges should never be considered a sport. However, in both athletic competition and governance the goals are similar: to work within a system with rules that provide for a fair competition.

This week, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced felony changes against 16 people who allegedly posed as electoral college members after the 2020 election. The charges are clearly targeted to actual evidence of breaking of election laws. Of course it’s political. (Everything is.) But that should never stop prosecution of broken laws. I’m looking forward to the healthy competition.

An incident at a recent Michigan Republican Party meeting in Claire featured a fight between two ardent party supporters in which one kicked the other in the groin. It was remarkable mostly in that it wasn’t so remarkable — it fully fit a pattern within the Michigan GOP of late.

Now history has clearly demonstrated that it’s better for everyone in general for a political party to have some level of dysfunction than to be a well-oiled machine. So I’m fine with dysfunction. Being preached to about family values and acting in decidedly un-family values ways… not so much.

By their very nature, editorial cartoons do not age well. They are almost always a snapshot of an exact time with a particular set of circumstances.

So it was certainly unusual when something I drew decades ago bubbled up in my head and made me think, “I would draw the same thing today.” In fact, I don’t think that has ever happened — until this week.

In 2003, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled on Grutter v. Bollinger, a case involving student admissions in higher education and the legality of affirmative action. The court held that “a student admissions process that favors ‘underrepresented minority groups’ did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause so long as it took into account other factors evaluated on an individual basis for every applicant.” So basically, race could be considered but specific racial quotas were unconstitutional.

As with the recent Supreme Court ruling, which went a step further in eliminating race as even a consideration, there was intense dissent about the ruling (and opinions about race in general). For example:

In her majority opinion, [Justice Sandra Day] O’Connor wrote that “race-conscious admissions policies must be limited in time,” adding that the “Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer concurred in the judgment, but did not subscribe to the belief that the affirmative measures in question would be unnecessary in 25 years. In a dissent joined by three other justices, Chief Justice William Rehnquist argued that the university’s admissions system was, in fact, a thinly veiled and unconstitutional quota system.

And so 20 years later, the question remains the same: Which comes first — racial equality or the end of racism?