Alito on civil rights

This WaPo story may be what Old Zeke is talking about when he portrays Alito as anti-civil rights in his picture in the previous post:

In civil rights cases, Alito has agreed with the court's majority most of the time, The Post's review found. When he disagrees, he is not prone to inflammatory language or frontal challenges to Supreme Court precedent. Still, when he has taken a dissenting stance, Alito repeatedly has set a higher bar than his fellow judges for plaintiffs to prove that they were discriminated
against -- and sometimes even to get a trial.

Alito has written six major dissents, including Bray [v. Marriott] , on cases involving employment discrimination, siding squarely with the employee one of those times. Given the large volume of cases, the review focused largely on instances in which Alito differed with the other dozen members of the Philadelphia-based 3rd Circuit, generally regarded as a comparatively moderate appeals court, rather than his entire body of writings on rights.

The actual text of the Bray dissent is here. It's long, but very well-reasoned and worth a read if you have the time. In short, Alito isn't making any reactionary anti-civil rights ruling. He just argues that the plaintiff didn't meet the burden of proof. There were job candidates who appeared equally qualified by objective measures for a managerial promotion. Bray claimed that her rival was chosen because Bray was a minority. Alito agreed with the lower court that heard the case that her evidence to support this claim was insufficient. How radical!

In other Alito news, this Seattle P-I story shows that Alito was not only pro-privacy but also actively pro-sodomy in college, an issue I'm sure Old Zeke cares about deeply:

In college, Samuel Alito led a student conference that urged legalization of sodomy and curbs on domestic intelligence, a sweeping defense of privacy rights he said were under threat by the government and the dawning computer age.

President Bush's choice for the Supreme Court, in a report written years before ubiquitous personal computers made electronic privacy the everyday concern it is now, warned of the potential for abuses by officials and companies collecting data on individuals.

Three decades before the Supreme Court decriminalized gay sex, Alito declared on behalf of his group of fellow Princeton students that "no private sexual act between consenting adults should be forbidden." Alito also called for an end to discrimination against homosexuals in hiring.