The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race...

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court issued opinions in a few cases. One of the cases was Parents Involved vs. Seattle School District (05-908). Here's the decision (careful, it's 185 pages long).

Simply put (very simply), the court said that race should not be an issue when assigning children to one school or another. That seems logical, doesn't it. In fact, if I remember my grade school American history correctly, a case titled Brown vs. Board of Education said pretty much the same thing. But the weird thing is that the Parents suit was filed (if I understand the situation correctly) because race was NOT being used as a criteria in assigning students to schools.

Whatever. The court did the right thing. Chief Justice Roberts wrote part of the majority opinion. Roberts is an intellectual giant, like Scalia. If you saw any of his confirmation proceedings, you know this. His opening statement to the Senate Judiciary committee was a thing of beauty. In the Parents decision, he brandishes his intellect deftly.

Behold his summary paragraph:

Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin. The school districts in these cases have not carried the heavy burden of demonstrating that we should allow this once again—even for very different reasons. For schools that never segregated on the basis of race, such as Seattle, or that have removed the vestiges of past segregation, such as Jefferson County, the way "to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial bases," ... is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. [emphasis mine]

What genius there is in common sense.

UPDATE - Excellent commentary, as usual, is available from the brainiacs at the Power Line.