Ethnic studies ban doesn’t belong in federal court

In 2010, the Arizona Legislature enacted a bill intended to shut down a Mexican-American Studies program in the Tucson Unified School District. Critics alleged that the program was indoctrinating students with a Marxist class warfare perspective about the United States, including the need to combat a white oppressor class.

Now, schools in Arizona are funded through a holistic state finance formula. The Legislature has a right to dictate curriculum, and does so in a large number of uncontroversial ways.

Still, this seems an overreach, something best left to the local politics of the Tucson Unified School District to resolve.

So, the temptation is to shrug the shoulders at a federal judge striking down the legislation as a violation of the federal Constitution’s Fourteenth and First amendments. But the rationales behind that decision, written by Judge A. Wallace Tashima, are troubling.

According to Tashima, the legislation, although facially neutral regarding race, violates the Fourteenth Amendment because it was enacted out of racial animus toward Latinos.

The most persuasive evidence of racial animus, according to Tashima, was anonymous blog comments by John Huppenthal. Huppenthal was chairman of the Senate Education Committee when the legislation was passed and state school superintendent when it was enforced against TUSD.

Those blog comments were pretty raw. Huppenthal railed against Spanish-language media. He said he didn’t mind Mexican food as long as the menus were mostly in English.

According to Tashima, Huppenthal’s anonymous blog posts about things other than the legislation were a more accurate indication of his motivation than the more measured comments he made about the legislation itself. Knowing Huppenthal, I think the judge is incorrect.

I don’t have an explanation as to why Huppenthal felt the need to have a secret life as a red-meat conservative blogger. But, in his public life, he was a numbers-crunching policy wonk and geek. The latter wasn’t an act.

But Huppenthal wasn’t the only one out to get Latinos, according to Tashima. So was Tom Horne, who pushed for the legislation when he was superintendent. Tashima’s beef with Horne seems to be principally over the most accurate English translation of the Spanish phrase, La Raza.

Tashima finds that Horne and Huppenthal sought to take political advantage of the legislation in their respective campaigns for state office. Imagine a politician doing that. Moreover,