The Onion headline was a joke: "The Death of Rosa Parks: 'Now We Can Finally Put Civil Rights Behind Us.'" Perfectly straitfaced, the Onion reports:
It is often difficult for young people to understand the segregated United States of the mid-20th century, when black citizens often lived in poverty, had substandard housing, were given poor-quality public educations, and were disenfranchised as voters. With the passing of Parks and the fight for racial equality that she symbolized, such subjects are now relics of a bygone era.The only problem is, for the Bush administration there's nothing ironic about that paragraph. The best evidence is the dozens of veteran lawyers, over 20 percent of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division staff, who have left in the last year. At the same time, the division has stopped energectically prosecuting the racial and gender discrimination crimes it usually handles. For example, the first case the division took up under the Voting Rights Act this year was a reverse-discrimination lawsuit, accusing a majority-black county in Mississippi of discriminating against white voters. You know how those black people have been getting rich off of whites in Mississippi.
In this context, Bush nominates to the Supreme Court a man who said he was "particularly proud" of his work to end racial and ethnic quotas, a man who has consistently denied the reality of racism and gender discrimination and shown no respect for the life-long work of Rosa Parks.
How soon before civil rights are only something you read about in history books, right next to the picture of Rosa Parks?