From time to time, I am ashamed to be an American. My shame has many sources — sometimes it’s our pride, sometimes it’s our astounding levels of greed and consumption, and other times, it is our seemingly boundless ability to justify the absurd, the invidious and the hateful. Nowhere is our capacity for rationalizing the irrational more frustrating than when you find it in the words of our own U.S. Supreme Court justices.
I could, if I wished, bring forth examples numerous enough to fill up all the gigs on my hard drive. However, I think I can make my point a bit more succinctly with the following gems:

Scott v. Sandford, 1857
“Free negroes and mulattoes are not such citizens as were contemplated by the federal or state constitution.” “Courts have nothing to do with the justice, wisdom, policy, or expediency of a law.”

Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896
“Laws permitting, and even requiring, (racial) separation, in places where they are liable to be brought into contact, do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures … “
“We consider the underlying fallacy of the … argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”

Buck v. Bell, 1927
“It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Hirabayashi v. United States, 1943
“Whatever views we may entertain regarding the loyalty to this country of the citizens of Japanese ancestry, we cannot reject as unfounded the judgment of the military authorities and of Congress that there were disloyal members of that population, whose number and strength could not be precisely and quickly ascertained. We cannot say that the war-making branches of the Government did not have ground for believing that in a critical hour such persons could not readily be isolated and separately dealt with, and constituted a menace to the national defense and safety, which demanded that prompt and adequate measures be taken to guard against it.”
“We cannot close our eyes to the fact, demonstrated by experience, that in time of war residents having ethnic affiliations with an invading enemy may be a greater source of danger than those of a different ancestry.”

Bowers v. Hardwick, 1986
” … to claim that a right to engage in (consensual homosexual sex in the privacy of one’s home) is ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’ or ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty’ is, at best, facetious.”
” … if respondent’s submission is limited to the voluntary sexual conduct between consenting adults, it would be difficult, except by fiat, to limit the claimed right to homosexual conduct while leaving exposed to prosecution adultery, incest, and other sexual crimes even though they are committed in the home.”
Slavery, segregation, sterilization, concentration, homosexuality — these are just a few areas where the Court’s majority opinions have left us a legacy to be ashamed of.
Or perhaps not.
When we look back upon these statements — uttered so earnestly at the time — it’s easy to see how fundamentally flawed the beliefs behind them are. They represent the worst of our culture: bigotry, ignorance and hypocrisy.
The easiest option is to cringe and then condemn the authors who wrote such nonsense and made it the law of the land. There is, however, a better solution. Look at how far we’ve come.
We still have unresolved racial tension; the new war on terror has created some serious questions about our treatment of those suspected of terrorist activities, and homosexuals are far from having all the rights and protections of their heterosexual neighbors. But it could, and has, been worse.
For today — and maybe tomorrow — I think I’ll cheer myself with the notion of how far we’ve come and quit fretting over how far we’ve left to go.