Associate InJustice
December 1st, 2005 by JoshWe already know that even South Africa is more progessive than the US in many ways. So its particularly disturbing that our leadership is actively seeking to turn back the clock on the social progress this nation has slowly made over the last half century and return to that idealized America that only exists in the heads of Ned Flanders and friends.
Exhibit A: Associate justice nominee to the Supreme Court, Samuel Alito:
Last week it came out that Alito was a member of Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP) and even bragged about it on his Justice Department application in 1985. I didn’t know anything about CAP but this great post over at Obsidian Wings by a Princeton alumnus gives an outline of the organization and what it stood for.
CAP is generally described as ‘a conservative group’. But this is as misleading as calling the John Birch Society a ‘conservative group’ would be. There are lots of conservatives who are thoughtful and intelligent, and who have real intellectual integrity. Conservatives like this did not tend to join CAP. CAP was dedicated to finding outrages that it took to be caused by the horrible fact that women and minorities were being admitted to Princeton. The need to find outrages generally came first; any encounter with facts came later. For this reason, CAP tended to attract not conservatives per se, but the sort of conservative who is forever getting deeply hysterical about some perceived threat to a supposed previous golden age, who sees such threats everywhere, and who is willing to completely distort the truth in order to feed his (and it generally was ‘his’) obsessions.
Alito now claims he has “no recollection” of being a member of CAP (convenient eh?) despite being quite proud of it 20 years ago. Remarkable powers of recall.
And let’s not forget that his disdain is not limited to co-education and minority representation. He would happily overturn or undermine Roe as well.
