The Left's Descent Into Irrationality

One of Trump's nominees to the Federal bench is a fellow named Giampietro.  He's an ex-Fed attorney with time in private practice, and currently with NML.  Several years ago, he expressed an opinion on the Hobby Lobby case.

Naturally, this opinion caused some hair-fires on the Left.  But if you sit back and read all of what Giampietro said, it's clear that his opponents are irrational.  That's not a surprise; nihilism, gnosticism, and pelagianism (what the Left is really all about) are irrational.

Anyhow, here's a bit of the defense.  We'll start again with Hobby Lobby:

...How did the federal government come to have the authority to reach to the provision of medical care in private businesses and make the support for abortion compulsory even for employers who bore religious objections?

The breakthrough for the federal government came with the New Deal and the expansive claim to reach the working conditions of any enterprise that had even the most tenuous connection to “interstate commerce.” But a barrier even more serious was crossed with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The federal government passed over a constitutional divide when it claimed the authority to bar discriminations on the basis of race in private inns and restaurants.

The law ran well beyond what used to be called “public accommodations,” and soon it would cover virtually any business beyond a hotdog stand. And so, as I pointed out, we’ve reached the point where decisions on hiring and firing in small businesses, and even small private colleges, may be contested in federal courts....

Got that so far? Good. There's more.

..along with many others I moved to the side of supporting that Civil Rights Act. For the discrimination suffered by black people in the South was still too glaring and demeaning, and it was going to require the intervention of a more distant, central government to break those local tyrannies.

This was precisely the point that drew in Gordon Giampietro and his commentary, and if anything he made an even deeper case for the conditions that justified the intervention of the federal government. He would “go even farther back,” he said, “to the original sin of slavery. Absent slavery, there might have been a vibrant federalism that allowed for differences of opinion to exist side by side until the truth will out.”

In other words, his point was that it was the wrong of slavery, and the corruption of culture wrought in the South, that made it necessary to enlarge powers of a federal government and penetrate these local tyrannies....



I suspect that my children will look at all this (and the linked essay) as something of a revelation; they have not lived in a regime other than that of the CRA 1964.  And I'm not as certain as Arkes that there are "better angels" which would have obviated the need for CRA.  But to argue that Giampietro's commentary is racist? 


Irrational.