I disagree with the prevailing point of view of some black leaders that special treatment for blacks is acceptable.
When I went into the seminary, I was one of those victims of New Math and had not had Algebra I and had no idea what we were doing in New Math in the ninth grade. But when I went into the seminary, they had gone the traditional route and taught first-year algebra.
I tend to really be partial to Ayn Rand, and to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
My grandfather could barely read. My grandmother had a sixth-grade education. They were people who were industrious. They were frugal.
I still have a 15ยข sticker on the frame of my law degree. It's tainted, so I just leave it in the basement.
People get bent out of shape about the fact that when I was a kid, you could not drink out of certain water fountains. Well, the water was the same.
I'd grown up fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult I was starting to wonder if I'd been afraid of the wrong white people all along - where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes, but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony.
But I know that the vote of 9 out of 10 black Americans for the Democratic Party or for leftist kinds of policies just is not reflective of their opinions.
The thing that bothered me when I was in college was that I saw myself rejecting the way of life that got me to where I was.
It really bugs me that someone will tell me, after I spent 20 years being educated, how I'm supposed to think.
We've talked more about civil rights after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than we talked about it before 1964.
And I don't think that government has a role in telling people how to live their lives. Maybe a minister does, maybe your belief in God does, maybe there's another set of moral codes, but I don't think government has a role.
My job is to write opinions. I decide cases and write opinions. It is not to respond to idiocy and critics who make statements that are unfounded. That doesn't mean that people shouldn't have constructive criticisms, but it should be constructive.
I don't know one of my friends who is considered a conservative who has not had to go back and thoroughly think through everything. You do a lot of soul-searching - 'cause we are not going to win any popularity contests.
I was never a liberal. I was radical. I was cynical. I was negative. But, I was never a liberal. I always saw that as too lukewarm for me.
I think Juan stopped short - he got halfway to the destination and got off the train. He is certainly an excellent writer and a good person, but I'm not a nationalist.
I have to admit that I'm one of those people that thinks the dishwasher is a miracle.
You have a number of choices. You could continue to always fight against people who are really distractions. They're people in the cheap seats of life. Or you can do what you went there to do.
But what I believe is that if a person's individual rights or right to be a part of our economic system is violated under statute, we aggressively go after it. But we don't issue mandates to businesses that you've got to do this and you've got to do that.
Unfortunately, the reality was that, for political reasons or whatever, there was a need to enforce antidiscrimination laws, or at least there was a perceived need to do that.
