Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas dissented in Lawrence v. Texas (2003). W wants more Justices like them. Lord help us.

[x NYTimes]

June 26, 2003
Supreme Court Strikes Down Texas Law Banning Sodomy
By JOEL BRINKLEY



WASHINGTON, June 26 — The Supreme Court struck down a Texas law today that forbids homosexual sex, and reversed its own ruling in a similar Georgia case 17 years ago, thus invalidating antisodomy laws in the states that still have them.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in the 6-to-3 Texas decision, said that gay people "are entitled to respect for their private lives," adding that "the state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime."

Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer agreed with Justice Kennedy. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor sided with the majority in its decision, but in a separate opinion disagreed with some of Justice Kennedy's reasoning.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the dissent and took the unusual step of reading it aloud from the bench this morning, saying "the court has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda," while adding that he personally has "nothing against homosexuals." Joining Justice Scalia's dissent were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas.

Justice Scalia said he believed the ruling paved the way for homosexual marriages. "This reasoning leaves on shaky, pretty shaky, grounds state laws limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples," he wrote.

The court's actions today would also seem to overturn any law forbidding sodomy, no matter whether it deals with homosexual or heterosexual activity.

The case, Lawrence v. Texas, No. 02-102, was an appeal of a ruling by the Texas Court of Appeals, which had upheld the law barring "deviate sexual intercourse." The plaintiffs, John G. Lawrence and Tyron Garner of Houston, were arrested in 1998 after police officers, responding to a false report of a disturbance, discovered them having sex in Mr. Lawrence's apartment. Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Garner were jailed overnight and fined $200 each after pleading no contest to sodomy charges.

In its ruling today in the Texas case and its revisiting of the 1986 Georgia case, the Supreme Court made a sharp turn.

In 1986, the justices upheld an antisodomy law in Georgia, prompting protests from gay rights advocates and civil liberties groups. But in the 17 years since, the social climate in the United States has changed, broadening public perceptions of gays and softening the legal and social sanctions that once confronted gay people. Until 1961, all 50 states banned sodomy. By 1968, that number had dwindled to 24 states, and by today's ruling, it stood at 13.

Even though the court upheld the Georgia antisodomy statute — which had applied to heterosexual as well as homosexual conduct — a Georgia court later voided it. But the justices' ruling on the legal principle behind the Georgia statute continued to stand, so today the court, voting 5 to 4, issued a new ruling overturning its 1986 decision in the Georgia case.

Of the three current justices who were on the court when it initially ruled in the Georgia case, in 1986, Justices Rehnquist and O'Connor voted to uphold the Georgia law in 1986 and Justice Stevens voted to strike it down.

The Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, which works on behalf of gay rights advocates and related groups, brought the appeal of the Texas ruling to the court, arguing that it violated equal protection and due process laws. It described sexual intimacy in the home as an aspect of the "liberty" protected by the Constitutional guarantee of due process.

Today's ruling "will be a powerful tool for gay people in all 50 states where we continue fighting to be treated equally," the Lambda fund's legal director, Ruth Harlow, said. "For decades, these laws have been a major roadblock to equality. They've labeled the entire gay community as criminals and second-class citizens. Today, the Supreme Court ended that once and for all."

Some lawyers for the plaintiffs wept in the courtroom as the court made public its decision today. Several legal and medical groups had joined gay rights and human rights groups in their challenge to the Texas law.

But traditional-values conservatives reacted angrily to the court's actions, particularly regarding the prospect that they could open the legal door to gay marriages.

"If there's no rational basis for prohibiting same-sex sodomy by consenting adults, then state laws prohibiting prostitution, adultery, bigamy, and incest are at risk," Jan LaRue, chief counsel for Concerned Women for America, a conservative group, said. "No doubt, homosexual activists will try to bootstrap this decision into a mandate for same-sex marriage. Any attempt to equate sexual perversion with the institution that is the very foundation of society is as baseless as this ruling."

Nonetheless, today's ruling was not surprising, given the tone of the justices' questions during oral arguments before the court on March 26, when it appeared that a majority of the court was even then ready to overturn the Texas law.

Most of the remaining states with antisodomy laws forbid anal or oral sex among consenting adults no matter their sex or relationship. Texas is one of only four states whose law distinguished between heterosexual and homosexual consensual sex.

In the March arguments, the plaintiffs' lawyer, Paul M. Smith, chose to argue that while the concept of gay rights as such did not have deep historical roots, a libertarian spirit of personal privacy did reach back to the country's beginnings.

"So you really have a tradition of respect for the privacy of couples in their home, going back to the founding," Mr. Smith said. He noted that three-quarters of the states had repealed their criminal sodomy laws for everyone, "based on a recognition that it's not consistent with our basic American values about the relationship between the individual and the state."

Justice Scalia retorted, "Suppose that all the states had laws against flagpole sitting at one time" and subsequently repealed them. "Does that make flagpole sitting a fundamental right?"

The district attorney for Harris County, Tex., Charles A. Rosenthal Jr., argued that "Texas has the right to set moral standards and can set bright-line moral standards for its people." He asked the court "not to disenfranchise 23 million Texans who ought to have the right to participate in questions having to do with moral issues."

But in the ruling today, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote, "A law branding one class of persons as criminal solely based on the state's moral disapproval of that class and the conduct associated with that class runs contrary to the values of the Constitution and the Equal Protection Clause, under any standard of review."

Bob Dole asked in 1996, Where's the outrage? Youneverknow. $19 has the Republicans bitching because those poor bastards receiving the $19-refund didn't pay any income tax and therefore, deserved nothing. And State Representative (ahem, U.S. Representative) Tom DeLay (R-Sugar Land) is going to seek redistricting in Texas after every election. Why wait until the next Census? And we can't find the WMD! Where's the outrage? I hope the Democrats in the Legislature walk and keep DeLay and Governor Good Hair and Speaker Crackpot fuming for the entire 30-day Special Session! Walk, boys (and girls)!

[x NYTimes]
June 26, 2003
Very Richest's Share of Income Grew Even Bigger, Data Show
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON


he 400 wealthiest taxpayers accounted for more than 1 percent of all the income in the United States in the year 2000, more than double their share just eight years earlier, according to new data from the Internal Revenue Service. But their tax burden plummeted over the period.

The data, in a report that the I.R.S. released last night, shows that the average income of the 400 wealthiest taxpayers was almost $174 million in 2000. That was nearly quadruple the $46.8 million average in 1992. The minimum income to qualify for the list was $86.8 million in 2000, more than triple the minimum income of $24.4 million of the 400 wealthiest taxpayers in 1992.

While the sharp growth in incomes over that period coincided with the stock market bubble, other factors appear to account for much of the increase. A cut in capital gains tax rates in 1997 to 20 percent from 28 percent encouraged long-term holders of assets, like privately owned businesses, to sell them, and big increases in executive compensation thrust corporate chiefs into the ranks of the nation's aristocracy.

This year's tax cut reduced the capital gains rate further, to 15 percent.

The data from 2000 is the latest available from the I.R.S., but various government reports indicate that salaries, dividends and other forms of income have continued to rise since then, even as the stock market has fallen.

The top 400 reported 1.1 percent of all income earned in 2000, up from 0.5 percent in 1992. Their taxes grew at a much slower rate, from 1 percent of all taxes in 1992 to 1.6 percent in 2000, when their tax bills averaged $38.6 million each.

Those numbers can be read to show that the wealthiest, as a group, carried a disproportionate share of the overall tax burden — 1.6 percent of all taxes, versus just 1.1 percent of all income — evidence that all sides in the tax debate will be able to find ammunition in the data.

In 2000, the top 400 on average paid 22.3 percent of their income in federal income tax, down from 26.4 percent in 1992 and a peak of 29.9 percent in 1995. Two factors explain most of this decline, according to the I.R.S.: reduced tax rates on long-term capital gains and bigger gifts to charity.

Had President Bush's latest tax cuts been in effect in 2000, the average tax bill for the top 400 would have been about $30.4 million — a savings of $8.3 million, or more than a fifth, according to an analysis of the I.R.S. data by The New York Times. That would have resulted in an average tax rate of 17.5 percent.

The rate actually paid by the top 400 in 2000 was about the same as that paid by a single person making $123,000 or a married couple with two children earning $226,000, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, a labor-backed group whose calculations are respected by a broad spectrum of tax experts.

The group favors higher taxes on the wealthy, and its director, Robert S. McIntyre, said yesterday that the I.R.S. data bolsters that viewpoint. "Regardless of which party these 400 are in, these are the guys Bush wants to help, even though they have so much money they don't know what to do with it," he said. "How Bush feels about the half of the population that doesn't have much money is he got them a tax cut worth an average of $19 each."

William W. Beach, a tax expert at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative organization that favors lowering taxes for all Americans, said that the top 400 taxpayers made "the significant contribution" to government revenue — about one in every $64 of individual income tax paid. Cutting taxes, he said, will prompt the wealthy to invest more in the economy's growth.

Detailed information about high-income Americans has become increasingly important in setting tax policy, because the government relies on the top 1.3 million households for 37.4 percent of individual federal income tax revenue. The half of Americans who earned less than $27,682 in 2000, paid less than 4 percent of income taxes.

All of the I.R.S. data is based on adjusted gross income, the figure reported on the last line on the front page of individual income tax returns. Interest earned on municipal bonds, which are exempt from tax, is not included.

Over the nine years of tax returns that were examined for the new report, only a handful of taxpayers showed up in the top 400 every year, according to I.R.S. officials. In all, about 2,200 taxpayers made the cut even once. There were a few incomes of more than $1 billion a year in the group, but none as high as $10 billion.

The names of the wealthiest taxpayers are not disclosed in the report, which was prepared at the urging of Joel Slemrod, a University of Michigan business school professor who serves on an I.R.S. advisory panel and is a leading authority on taxation of high-income Americans.

The figures do not include the incomes of the many wealthy Americans who use shelters to reduce their reported incomes below the level of the top 400.

In 1999 and 2000, for example, William T. Esrey — then the chief executive of Sprint, the telecommunications company — earned more than $150 million in stock option profits, lofting him onto many lists of the best-paid corporate managers.

That income might have put Mr. Esrey in the I.R.S.'s top 400 taxpayers. But, as later came to light, Mr. Esrey bought a tax shelter from Ernst & Young, the accounting firm, designed to let him delay reporting the profits for tax purposes until the year 2030. Sprint's board forced Mr. Esrey to resign in March after he acknowledged that the shelter was the subject of an I.R.S. audit.

Over the nine years reviewed in the new report, the incomes of the top 400 taxpayers increased at 15 times the rate of the bottom 90 percent of Americans; their average income rose 17 percent, to $27,000, from 1992 to 2000.

Long-term capital gains accounted for 64 percent of the income of the top 400 in 2000, nearly double the level in 1992. Wages contributed 16.7 percent to the incomes of the top 400 in 2000, down from 26.2 percent in 1992, and dividends made up 2.8 percent.

A second report that the I.R.S. will make public today shows that the number of Americans with high incomes who pay no taxes anywhere in the world has reached a record. In 2000, there were 2,022 Americans with incomes of more than $200,000 who paid no income tax anywhere in the world, up from just 37 in 1977, when the report was first issued.

Last week the American Association of University Professors announced the removal of censure from four institutions and did not place a single institution on censure at its 2003 annual meeting; it was the first time that no censure had been invoked in 37 years. That got me thinking (?). I teach at a public 2-year-college that has been on the AAUP Censure List for 35 years.

[x AAUP]
Censured Administrations
1930-2002

The following record is a companion piece to the feature article "The AAUP's Censure List" about the history of the AAUP's censure list. The citations below refer to the Association's journal. From its first appearance in 1915 until 1978, it was published under the title Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors. Since February 1979, it has been titled Academe: Bulletin of the AAUP. For the period 1930-81, the page numbers in the journal are consecutive from one issue to the next for each calendar year, and the citations therefore refer to a year, a volume number, and page numbers. Starting in 1982, the consecutive page numbers are limited to each issue of the journal, so the citations refer to a year, volume number, issue number, and page numbers.

Investigating Institution Committee Report Censure Imposed Censure Removed

[snip snip]
Amarillo College (TX) 1967, v.53, 292–302 1968, v.54, 172–73 BLANK
[snip snip]

You are known by the company you keep. Amarillo College is among some of the sleaziest outfits in educationdom, or, academia as my educationist colleagues are wont to say. We are on probation because the prexy in the 1960s was a wacko akin to Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny. He didn't roll ball bearings in his hand, they rolled in his head. He fired another wacko without due process and proceeded to stiff the AAUP investigating committee. The committee had no choice.

Find all of the stuff at Academic Freedom and Tenure.