Last week's Supreme Court decisions, allowing states to use racial preferences to promote blacks and striking down the Texas anti-sodomy law, testify to three decades of failure of Republican presidents to restore that court to constitutionalism.

Anyone who still thinks this court is conservative deludes himself and deceives those people who have voted, again and again, to stop these renegade justices from imposing their ideology upon our society.

Consider. Of the nine sitting justices today, seven were nominated by Republicans. Two of the seven, John Paul Stevens, named by Ford, and David Souter, a Bush I nominee, voted not only to strike down the sodomy laws of every state, but to permit 20 points to be added to the score of black high school students applying to the University of Michigan.

But it was Sandra Day O'Connor, the first Reagan nominee, whose performance would have broken the heart of the president who thought he was naming a conservative champion of the Constitution.

In the 5-4 ruling upholding affirmative action, O'Connor held that race discrimination against whites at Michigan Law School is permissible, if the goal is the "compelling state interest" of "diversity." "We expect," said O'Connor, "that 25 years from now the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary."

Yet another generation of white kids can thus be kept out of state schools to which they should have been admitted based on achievement and ability alone. This is what now passes for equal justice under law.

The decision striking down the Texas anti-sodomy law was 6-3, with Clinton nominees Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined by Stevens, Souter, O'Connor and Reagan nominee Anthony Kennedy.

In the Texas decision, the Court overturned a 17-year-old precedent and tossed out the laws of almost a dozen states to create a constitutional right to engage in homosexual acts. What James Madison never saw in the U.S. Constitution he wrote, and 12 generations of jurists never found, this pair, Kennedy and O'Connor, discovered.

The Court has now virtually stripped states of the power to legislate in the realm of sexual morality. By creating a right of consenting adults to engage in homosexual acts, the Court has also put in jeopardy all state laws against incest, gay marriage, prostitution and pedophilia, assuming the youngster consents.

At Gay Pride festivals this past week, there was anticipated rejoicing, underscoring Justice Antonin Scalia's barbed comment that the court has thrown off all judicial restraint and joined the culture war.

Of greater import, however, was the reaction among the politicians. When the decisions came down, Democrats hailed both, though neither the gay rights agenda nor affirmative action is popular with a majority of Americans. Continued...