CIVIL RIGHTS WORTH A FIGHT, NOT COMPROMISE

This summer finds official Washington focusing on a new civil rights bill. In a sincere effort to broker a compromise between the White House and congressional Democrats, Missouri's senior United States Senator is at center-stage. Credit Sen. Jack Danforth with tenacity and the best of intentions in pursuing goals he fervently believes to be of overriding importance to the nation. We respectfully suggest, however, that Sen. Danforth is attempting to forge compromise across an unbridgable chasm, when a firm stand on principle would be much the better course.

The evolution of the debate on this topic is sad, even depressing. For more than a generation, the phrase civil rights was seared into the nation's consciousness, a stirring battle cry that moved America to reexamine its soul. In Martin Luther King's words, the challenge of civil rights was for Americans "to live out the true meaning of our creed." This was an epic struggle fueled by sacrifices beyond number, and watered by the blood of martyrs.

Mention the phrase civil rights, and from the 1950s and '60s, indelible images are called forth. The fight to abolish poll taxes, literacy tests, and other artificial barriers to voting by blacks. Rosa Parks of Montgomery, Alabama, with surpassing dignity her unmistakable signature, refusing to sit in the back of the bus. A courageous Medgar Evers, marching and dying for the voting rights and simple human decency of the poor blacks of Mississippi. The police dogs and firehoses of Birmingham Sheriff Bull Connors turned on marchers both black and white who sought nothing more than to ask America to listen to its own conscience.

This appeal to conscience was in the finest American tradition. In its universality it proved unanswerable; it carried the day. The triumph of civil rights, in changing the face of America, is complete and irreversible.

Contrast that noble struggle with the wrestling match currently under way in Washington. Today, this critical discussion about fulfilling America's destiny has been reduced to a lawyer's quarrel. As such, today's whole discussion of civil rights suffers from a sterility that threatens despair among people of good will on all sides of the debate.

Where the original civil rights struggle was about whether the Constitution meant what it said about equal rights for all, today's fight is about vague notions and legal abstractions few can grasp. The right of minority Americans to sit at any lunch counter has been won; today, we're locked in a struggle over arcane concepts such as "disparate impact", burdens of proof, the extent of damages, and the alleged distinction between "affirmative action" and quotas.

Let us say it forthrightly: We are deeply suspicious of the cast of characters who call themselves today's "civil rights community." A movement that once called on all Americans to judge each other "not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character" (Dr. King's words, again) has done a stunning turnabout. It is a betrayal.

The civil rights movement of the '60s was about the integration and assimilation of minorities into the mainstream. Today's uncompromising demand from the "civil rights community" is that we classify Americans by race, ethnicity and gender, assigning them rights and quotas according to groups. It is passing strange that just as South Africa moves away from race-based classifications, we are being urged back into this sinister form of organizing society.

We note that among those who have joined Sen. Danforth to broker the compromise is Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania's GOP Senator. Specter is one who, during the 1987 confirmation debate over Robert Bork's Supreme Court nomination, stuck a wet finger into the air and pronounced Sen. Danforth's former law professor to be "outside the judicial mainstream." We simply cannot forget that Sen. Specter's decision to oppose Judge Bork was a decisive turning point in what history will remember as a dark and shameful Senate attack on that distinguished public servant.

That disgraceful and fundamentally dishonest attack was quarterbacked by Sen. Edward Kennedy, Mr. Ralph Neas and others in the "civil rights community" with whom Sen. Danforth now says we all must compromise.

The group rights and quota approach currently pushed by the "civil rights community" should be called by its proper name: it is a racial- and gender-based spoils system. As such, it is nothing less than a perversion of the true meaning of those civil rights that so many fought and bled and died for back in the '60s.

Acquiescence in the vision of America offered by "the civil rights community" will hurt it is hurting blacks, whites, hispanics and all other Americans of good will. It is no accident that racial tensions, separatism and animosity seem inexorably on the rise. Indeed, these trends are far worse than was the case in the '60s. That these alarming trends toward separatism seem most pronounced on our campuses should give us all pause. This has occurred as advocates of group rights and quotas have tried to intimidate their opponents into silence in the name of "civil rights."

Sometimes the price of consensus is too high. We believe this to be such an occasion. We side with President Bush and his advisers in their refusal to join Senator Danforth's compromise.