Racial gerrymandering having thus become a moral imperative, North Carolina's Legislature created a "majority-minority" (a voting-age population 56 percent black) state legislative district after the 1990 census. But the 2000 census revealed that demographic changes had made that district just 35 percent black. So the Legislature tinkered with the district's shape to make it 39 percent minority. But it did so by again dividing two counties, which North Carolina's Constitution forbids.

This time Pender County sued. A state court said the VRA's Section 2 required splitting Pender, but North Carolina's Supreme Court held that Section 2 only protects against vote dilution in drawing district lines when a minority group is a majority. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed -- even though Section 2 says nothing whatever about a bright numerical line like this "50 percent rule."

In an opinion joined only by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sam Alito, Justice Anthony Kennedy lamented that "racially polarized voting" is "not ancient history." Well, yes. It is federal policy: By codifying the assumption that people of a particular race will and should think and vote alike, the VRA now encourages such voting by treating it as normal, and hence sort of admirable.

Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Antonin Scalia, endorsed only Kennedy's conclusion. Thomas rejected Kennedy's argument, noting the glaring fact that Section 2's text provides no basis -- none -- for "any vote dilution claim, regardless of the size of the minority population in a given district." The VRA, properly read, concerns only "access to the ballot."

But it has been improperly read by result-oriented lawyers skillful at creative construing, and by judges legislating their own notions of racial rectitude. The VRA was written to protect each individual's right to vote. Having been twisted to serve group rights -- certain groups' entitlements to win quotas of offices -- the VRA has become emblematic of both the noble flourishing and the ignoble decline of the civil rights movement.