Support For Affirmative Action
Guste pleased liberals by being a strong defender of affirmative action. He submitted an amicus curiae brief in the 1986-1987 case Johnson v. Transportation Agency of Santa Clara County, California on behalf of a female county employee who was promoted over an equally qualified male employee. The plan provided that, in making promotions to positions within a traditionally segregated job classification in which women have been significantly underrepresented, the transportation agency was authorized to consider as one factor the sex of a qualified applicant. The agency said that women were represented in numbers far less than their proportion of the county labor force. Therefore, the county plan was intended to achieve a statistically measurable yearly improvement in the hiring, training, and promotion of minorities and women. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed with the county government that the voluntary affirmative-action plan did not violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In his dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia, who sided with the Reagan administration, said that the Santa Clara County plan was "not established to remedy prior sex discrimination by the agency, but imposed racial and sexual tailoring that would, in defiance of normal expectations and laws of probability, give each protected racial and sexual group a governmentally determined 'proper' proportion of each job category," or, in other words, racial or sexual quotas.
Read more about this topic: William J. Guste
Famous quotes containing the words affirmative action, support, affirmative and/or action:
“Affirmative action was never meant to be permanent, and now is truly the time to move on to some other approach.”
—Susan Estrich (b. 1952)
“They [women] can use their abilities to support each other, even as they develop more effective and appropriate ways of dealing with power.... Women do not need to diminish other women ... [they] need the power to advance their own development, but they do not “need” the power to limit the development of others.”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)
“The affirmative class monopolize the homage of mankind. They originate and execute all the great feats. What a force was coiled up in the skull of Napoleon!”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and complete and of a certain magnitude.... A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)