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Gayffirmative Action: The Constitutionality Of Sexual Orientation-Based Affirmative Action Policies, Peter Nicolas
Gayffirmative Action: The Constitutionality Of Sexual Orientation-Based Affirmative Action Policies, Peter Nicolas
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Twenty-five years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court established a consistency principle in its race-based equal protection cases. That principle requires courts to apply the same strict scrutiny to racial classifications designed to benefit racial minorities—such as affirmative action policies—as they do to laws invidiously discriminating against them. The new consistency principle, under which discrimination against whites is subject to strict scrutiny, conflicted with the Court's established criteria for declaring a group to be a suspect or quasi-suspect class entitled to heightened scrutiny, which focused on such considerations as the history of discrimination against the group and its political powerlessness.
As …