Why Pickering Is in a Pickle
Mr. Pickering, the evidence shows, at one point in the 1970s while a state legislator contacted the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an unsavory arm of the Mississippi state government, an anti-civil rights police agency that tracked "subversives" with an excess of zeal. I'd guarantee that if he'd been a politician in the 1950s he would have indicated opposition to desegregation, not exactly a bold stand in those times. Then in 1990 he lied about it. He wouldn't have been found out if the records of the commission hadn't been opened in 1998.
Pickering really should have said he was sorry. He could have added that his visit to the commission was just a matter of constituent service. That might well be true. If not, who could prove otherwise? Or he could have seen the light. George Wallace did it. Strom Thurmond did it. Brooks Hays of Arkansas made spent much of his life apologizing for signing the Southern Manifesto along with just about every other Southern Congressman who wanted to keep his job in the fallout of Brown v. Topeka.
Politicians make mistakes. The bulk of their job is pandering to public opinion. It used to be fashionable in the South for politicians to "play the race card." Scratch a Southern politician in the last century and you'd almost always find a public racist. It was good politics. But the fashion's changed. Those days are long past. But changing fashion has not brought liberalism to all of the South.
Pickering's real sin is that in 1976 he was about the first to write anti-abortion planks into the Republican platform. And he wants a Constitutional amendment to ban abortion. And he is not very accepting of alternative lifestyles. He is not all that far removed from the Southern moderate style of the 1950s. He may not be a bigot when it comes to race, regardless of his somewhat tenuous tie to the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, but he is clearly not a flaming liberal, and he has less than full devotion to Roe v Wade. That's the history that should be jumping up and biting Judge Pickering.
But it's hard. He's aroused the pro-choice crowd. The National Abortion Federation, the National Organization for Women, and other backers of Roe v Wade are afraid. But progressives have long scorned conservatives who made abortion right their litmus test. Now they're stuck doing the same thing. So they have to broaden the attack, find that race card. It's okay; it's diversionary; it's politics. And in politics guilt by association is as good as any other form of guilt. Pickering is not everybody's hero. But don't try to make the charges credible by distorting history. If the political charges are weak, bad history won't make them any stronger.