Jay Ambrose
People for the Gutter Way and New Haven firefighters
By: Jay Ambrose
Examiner Columnist
July 15, 2009
There’s a left-wing outfit in the country that calls itself People for the American Way, a name that amounts to a lie. Or at least let’s hope it’s a lie. Let’s hope it is not now the American way to attack a citizen’s reputation just because he stood up for his rights in a case reflecting poorly on a Supreme Court nominee.
The citizen is Frank Ricci, a New Haven, Conn., fireman. He is ambitious – he wanted a promotion – but he is also dyslexic, meaning that it’s hard for him to learn through reading. That’s why he had to rely on audio tapes to master material that would appear on a test, listening for countless hours everyday for months, focusing, focusing, focusing on getting answers right.
For a while, it must have looked like it all paid off, all that time, the money he forsook by quitting a second job to find the time and other money he spent to buy expensive books and have someone read them aloud into a tape recorder. Hallelujah! He did well on the test. Damnation! He found a problem he had not addressed. His race.
It turned out that those passing the test were whites and two Hispanics. No black had qualified. So, said New Haven, what we have here is discrimination, even though prior pains had been taken to make sure the test was fair. The organization that prepared it was alert to such issues, and top black firefighters had said the test was fine.
There had been no discrimination in devising the test, but there was plenty of discrimination to come. Based on who passed and who didn’t, the city said it would abandon the results. Ricci and others sued, the case made its way to a federal panel, and a judge on that panel, Sonia Sotomayor, joined fellow judges in a perfunctory ruling that said in so many words that Ricci and his buddies could go hang.
Sotomayor is now a Supreme Court nominee, and none of this looks very good for her, especially considering that the high court ruled 5-4 that the decision she and the others made was a violation of the Civil Rights law that says you cannot cut off opportunities for people like Ricci because of the color of their skin.
Enter People for the Etc., Etc. Boy, does this group ever want to flatten Ricci because, hey, racism is OK if you have the favored groups figured out right, by golly, and anyway, here is what reporters should know – Ricci has previously sued for discrimination against dyslexics and complained about safety rules in another job.
Good heavens, press, get going on this man’s “troubled and litigious work history,” the group said in an e-mail to reporters, demonstrating in one foul swoop that it is a mean-spirited, relevancy- challenged, democracy-hating, stupid bunch of sniveling rats. (Yes, by heavens, rats.)
And by the way, on the stupidity question, note that the group said the Sotomayor panel was “bound by precedent and federal law” to do what it did, even though observers said that all nine members of the court disagreed with the panel’s decision that the test results were sufficient in and of themselves to reach the conclusion it reached.
Sotomayor is not to blame for this group’s rabidity, even if she is to blame for much else – an extraordinary philosophy that assumes judicial impartiality impossible, for instance. The “people” group, in the meantime, should hang its head in shame for its message that those who speak out will be done in.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: Speaktojay@aol.com.
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