Thursday, August 3, 2006

Leaving the Fly Club Behind

Today’s story about Deval Patrick’s membership in Harvard’s all-male Fly Club misses the point. The news isn’t that Patrick may be more of an elitist than he admits. The headline is that the candidate had the good sense to listen to his wife.

Diane Patrick says she told her husband it was inappropriate for him to belong to the Fly Club, and he took her advice, dropping out in 1983.

Is his 30-year-old Fly Club membership proof that he doesn't respect women's rights?

Nah. As President Clinton's assistant attorney general for civil rights, he made a career of rebuffing both Congress and entrenched traditions.

In 1995, Patrick opposed a bill to end affirmative action and sponsored by Senator Robert Dole, saying that by "completely prohibiting otherwise lawful and flexible affirmative action and categorically rejecting several decades of Supreme Court precedent imposing limits on affirmative action, this bill attacks remedies that have evolved as a modest, but helpful response to the deep intransigence of institutions which persist in viewing African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and women as less deserving of jobs, business opportunities and places in universities."

In 1997, as he was stepping down from this job, he said: "There's work still to be done. For example, VMI and The Citadel are now open to women, but there are still issues to be worked through in terms of the full integration of women into those programs."

"How can I put it? I think it was Thomas Jefferson who said, 'Constant vigilance is the price of liberty.' I take that to mean that the work of civil rights, which is of course the measure of liberty and the vitality of American democracy, is never finished."

Posted by at 03:53 PM

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