David Bernstein notes a Ninth Circuit opinion that kicks the remaining logical props out from under an already overstretched interpretation of an 1866 civil rights statute (a decision apparently forwarded to him by yet another of my law school classmates). His conclusion:
I think it’s too clever by half for courts to hold that minorities are protected from discrimination by a law that grants them the same rights as “white citizens”, if “white citizens” (among others) do not have these rights to begin with. Put another way, it’s hard to read the language of the 1866 Act as doing anything other than creating legal parity between whites and others. Any interpretation of the Act that disrupts that parity with regard to any right that is perceived to come within the protections of the Act lapses into incoherence.
Read the whole thing. Bonus fun fact from the opinion: did you know that “[a]t the time of the arrival of the first nonindigenous people in Hawaii in 1778, the Native Hawaiian people lived in a highly organized, self-sufficient subsistence social system based on a communal land tenure system with a sophisticated language, culture, and religion”? I have no specific quarrel with this statement, but did you know that it was the law of the land? See 20 U.S.C. 7512(2).