"The purpose that brought the fourteenth amendment into being was equality before the law, and equality, not separation, was written into the law"
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Bork’s line is a lawyerly shove against the idea that the Fourteenth Amendment can be made to bless separation so long as the signage is evenly printed. The sentence is built like a closing argument: identify a single founding purpose, name the operative principle, then slam the door on rival readings. “Brought ... into being” isn’t poetic; it’s constitutional midwifery. He’s invoking Reconstruction as a moment of deliberate design, not an evolving moral mood.
The subtext is a fight over who gets to claim “original meaning.” Bork, famously allergic to expansive judicial invention, wants equality anchored to law’s public face: the state must not allocate rights, protections, or burdens by caste. The word “written” does heavy lifting. It’s meant to downgrade sociological arguments and elevate the text as the referee. If equality is “in the law,” then the court’s job is to enforce a uniform legal status, not to manage society through parallel tracks.
Context matters because Bork is also shadowboxing with the long American habit of laundering hierarchy through procedure. “Equality, not separation” reads as both a rejection of “separate but equal” and a warning to contemporary policymakers tempted by race-conscious compartmentalization. It’s a conservative claim with a radical edge: if the Amendment’s point is equal citizenship, then any state action that sorts people into distinct legal lanes is suspect, even when sold as benevolent.
The line works because it compresses a century of constitutional warfare into a simple antithesis: equality versus separation. It dares you to pick a side, then insists the text already did.
The subtext is a fight over who gets to claim “original meaning.” Bork, famously allergic to expansive judicial invention, wants equality anchored to law’s public face: the state must not allocate rights, protections, or burdens by caste. The word “written” does heavy lifting. It’s meant to downgrade sociological arguments and elevate the text as the referee. If equality is “in the law,” then the court’s job is to enforce a uniform legal status, not to manage society through parallel tracks.
Context matters because Bork is also shadowboxing with the long American habit of laundering hierarchy through procedure. “Equality, not separation” reads as both a rejection of “separate but equal” and a warning to contemporary policymakers tempted by race-conscious compartmentalization. It’s a conservative claim with a radical edge: if the Amendment’s point is equal citizenship, then any state action that sorts people into distinct legal lanes is suspect, even when sold as benevolent.
The line works because it compresses a century of constitutional warfare into a simple antithesis: equality versus separation. It dares you to pick a side, then insists the text already did.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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