Reply #27: details on Roberts: discrimin & segreg in EDUC & HOUSING: [View All]

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http://www.savethecourt.org/site/c.mwK0JbNTJrF/b.999999/k.F245/Civil_Rights_Equal_Opportunity_and_Freedom_from_Discrimination.htm#housing

Discrimination and segregation in education and housing

While serving in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, Roberts repeatedly took positions that would have had the effect of limiting the ability of people to turn to the federal courts to challenge state and local laws and policies that resulted in unequal access to educational opportunities.

Thirty years ago, as part of a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment and activity, the Texas legislature passed a law designed to keep undocumented immigrant children from attending public schools in the state. In 1982, in its ruling in Plyler v. Doe, the Supreme Court struck down the Texas law as unconstitutional. The Court majority said it was “difficult to conceive of a rational justification for penalizing these children” for being in the U.S. based on the actions of their parents. “By denying these children a basic education, we deny them the ability to live within the structure of our civic institutions, and foreclose any realistic possibility that they will contribute in even the smallest way to the progress of our nation.”<61> The decision was a major victory for the constitutional principle of equal protection under the law, and made a huge difference in the lives of thousands – if not millions – of children and their families. The notion that the government would choose to marginalize a generation of young people was viewed by Justice William Brennan as an “affront to one of the goals of the equal protection clause: the abolition of government barriers presenting unreasonable obstacles to advancement on the basis of individual merit.”<62>