The government\u2019s top legal advocate on Monday urged Supreme Court justices to preserve affirmative action in service academies and civilian institutions alike.<\/p>\n
Toward the end of the oral argument in what has been a controversial Supreme Court case about the legality of affirmative action, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar echoed a key argument of defenders of the inclusive policy: that a diverse officer corps is necessary for national security.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur armed forces know from hard experience that when we do not have a diverse officer corps that is broadly reflective of the diverse fighting force, our strength and cohesion and military readiness suffer,\u201d Prelogar said.<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
In August, she and other government officials, including the Pentagon\u2019s general counsel, filed a friend-of-the-court brief defending affirmative action.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have had experiences in the past where the officer corps and its racial composition did not reflect the diversity of enlisted service members,\u201d Prelogar said Monday, in an apparent reference to internal conflict during the Vietnam War, \u201cand it caused tremendous racial tension and strife.\u201d<\/p>\n
Responding to a question from Justice Elena Kagan, Prelogar said that the service academies had considered race-neutral alternatives to affirmative action. According to Prelogar, the academies found that, for now, no such alternatives would lead to an officer corps with adequate diversity.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019ve looked into other alternatives, like socioeconomic preferences, but West Point discovered that that would actually increase the number of white men at the academy,\u201d Prelogar said.<\/p>\n
Chief Justice John Roberts asked whether Prelogar wanted the court to view her argument about the military separately from arguments about civilian colleges and universities.<\/p>\n
\u201cAre you linking yourself to Harvard and UNC \u2014 in other words, you rise and fall with their case?\u201d Roberts asked, later adding, \u201cIt might make sense for us not to answer the service academy issue in this case?\u201d<\/p>\n
Prelogar didn\u2019t answer Roberts directly. Instead, she allowed that the military had \u201cdistinctive interests\u201d in diversity, but stressed that the end of affirmative action in civilian colleges and universities with ROTC programs would also affect the military.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s also critically important \u2014 because actually more officers come from ROTC programs \u2014 to try to protect and preserve space for universities to also achieve the educational benefits of diversity and provide the paths to leadership that inhere in those programs as well,\u201d Prelogar said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I don’t think I ever cared what color skin an officer over me had, which set of genitalia they possessed, or which gender they liked to fuck. I cared that they were competent officers that weren’t going to get us killed. Screw the racist stuff and just hire\/appoint the best people for the job.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Supreme Court is set to rule on affirmative action at colleges. The way it’s been … Government tells SCOTUS colleges have to stay racist to bolster national security<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":664,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[213,295],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-your-tax-dollars-at-work","category-scotus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/664"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=132998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132998\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=132998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=132998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=132998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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