"Racial Ridicule" And Connecticut Civil Rights Law

06/12/2010

Eugene Volokh has a post about a Connecticut law that provides

Any person who, by his advertisement, ridicules or holds up to contempt any person or class of persons, on account of the creed, religion, color, denomination, nationality or race of such person or class of persons, shall be fined not more than fifty dollars or imprisoned not more than thirty days or both.

This strikes Volokh as "pretty clearly unconstitutional," but apparently there have been "79 prosecutions since 1996, 29 of which led to convictions."

I commented that

According to this chronology of Connecticut Civil Rights law, the law was first passed in 1917.

In fact, Connecticut has had civil rights laws for a long time. The same Connecticut government chronology also features:

1866 Connecticut was first state to ratify 14th Amendment to U.S. Constitution. (Guaranteeing equal protection under the law)

1868 Public schools required to serve all children regardless of race or color.
1876 The State Constitution amended to eliminate the requirement that voters be white. (23rd Amendment)
1884 Deprivation of state or federal constitutional or legal rights because of alienage, color or race was made punishable by fine or imprisonment or both. (Sec 46a-58)[Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities | Connecticut Civil Rights Law Chronology]

All of which means, for any of you who were absent that day in school, that Connecticut was on the Northern side in the Civil War. This is from a Peter Brimelow speech a while back:

You know, I have had until recently two small children in the public schools in New England, in Connecticut — an area that is a hundred percent white. And they raised a regiment of Connecticut farm boys, the 2^nd Connecticut heavy artillery, which was shot to pieces at Cold Harbor. They were all ardent abolitionists. Notwithstanding this, my little boy has, from kindergarten, has been exposed to stuff about Martin Luther King and the evils of segregation.
Now, there never was segregation in Connecticut. They were opposed to slavery. And this is an area where–well, America is more stable than people think if they live in New York. There are a lot of blue-collar workers in my area who are colonial stock, whose families bought the land from the Indians. The woman who cuts my hair, the fellow who delivers my mail, has ancestors who died or were injured with the 2^nd Connecticut Heavy artillery at Cold Harbor. But I've never heard a public school teacher who knows anything at all about this. But it would support the message — that’s the interesting, the fascinating thing about this — it would support the message that slavery is evil and all this kind of thing, to tell the children that their ancestors fought in this war to abolish it. But you never see it.

All of which makes it more and more ridiculous that New Haven, Connecticut is trying to illegally discriminate against white firemen in the name of making up for past discrimination against blacks.

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