MALDEF attorney breaks down in tears at Hazleton trial

Last year Hazleton, Pennsylvania under the leadership of Mayor Lou Barletta passed an ordinance that seeks to remove illegal aliens from the town by punishing landlords who rent to them and businesses that hire them (as previously discusssed at VFR here, here, and here). The constitutionality of the statute was attacked by the ACLU, MALDEF and others, and the issue is now being tried in federal court in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The blog Diggers Realm has daily coverage of the trial. Yesterday the town’s police chief and Steve Camerota of the Center for Immigration Studies testified.

Here is an e-mail that has been forwarded to me about the trial:

Just spoke with Steve, who testified yesterday up in Hazelton. His testimony went fabulously, but what was most remarkable was that under cross examination – performed by an attorney from MALDEF (don’t know her name) – Steve’s responses were so devastating that plaintiff’s counsel left the hearing and went to the back of the courtroom and started sobbing. Uncontrollably. An ACLU attorney went back to console her and attempted to get her to return to the proceedings, to no avail. Kris Kobach told Steve that he’d never seen such a devastating turn of events. Steve said that he enjoyed a remarkable dialogue with the judge, who regularly queried Steve despite the objections of plaintiffs’ attorneys. Winning in Hazelton remains a longshot, but this morning Steve believes there’s doubt about that outcome that didn’t exist a week ago.

And here is newspaper story from the Hazleton, PA Standard Speaker on yesterday’s testimony by Steve Camarota that made the MALDEF attorney break down and leave the courtroom.

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Paul K. writes:

I was amused by the report that the female attorney began crying at the Hazleton trial. It appears that those who hold politically correct positions are so unaccustomed to being challenged that they may suffer an emotional collapse as a result.

A few years ago Thomas Sowell addressed a group of black college students about his opposition to affirmative action; he was startled that the reaction of many was to burst into tears. He was saying things they thought they would never have to hear, but at some level must have known were true.

There was a similar reaction when David Horowitz ran his ad against reparations for slavery. According to a John Leo column, “Deeply offended by the airing of a political position they did not agree with, angry leftists stormed the offices of the student paper, thrashed about for a while, screaming and weeping and trying to intimidate staff… . Most of the campus uproar was conducted in the language of feelings, as if the emotional response of some students adds up to a powerful case for suppressing an argument against reparations. “It hurt so much,” said one protester. “Indescribably hurtful,” said another… . Many said they no longer felt welcome on campus.”

A recent example is MIT professor Nancy Hopkins of MIT, who left Harvard president Larry Summers’ speech when he raised the subject of male-female differences because if she didn’t, as she told the Boston Globe, she would have “either blacked out or thrown up.”

To think that, for decades, these delicate buds have been determining the direction of our culture!

Andrew E. writes:

This story is remarkable and it is eerily familiar to the events of a 1963 federal court case that took place in Georgia, Stell vs. the Savannah Board of Education, as chronicled by Carleton Putnam in his 1967 publication Race and Reality (his sequel to his 1961 publication, Race and Reason). The case came about when parents of certain white children were preparing to challenge a court action requiring the desegregation of their schools. The plaintiffs in the case were certain blacks who were demanding desegregation, the NAACP provided representation. This was to be the case where Putnam and his allies were going to expose the false scientific data (Boas egalitarianism) that underlined the famous Brown decision which purportedly showed the manifest equality of whites and blacks.

At the beginning of the case, after a flurry of furious objections by the plaintiffs’ counsel, the judge made it clear that the scientific evidence would be heard. Over the course of two days, as Putnam tells it, the defense put up all their witnesses who methodically went through all the cold, hard scientific findings conclusively demonstrating the intrinsic psychological and physiological differences between whites and blacks. The counsel for the plaintiffs had no choice at this point but to sit back and take it. Their cross examination was minimal to non-existent.

Putnam noted that on the second day of testimony from the scientific experts, as the evidence began to take on a devastating cumulative effect, he noticed that right there, in the courtroom Constance Motley—co-council for the plaintiffs—was weeping audibly.

Of course, the subject of this particular case is very different from the one in Hazelton but they do have something very important in common. It’s amazing what power liberalism has over the mind and body. Humans are supposed to react positively to truth and yet liberalism had warped this poor woman to the extent that she could not control herself in a court of law. It is incredible really.

Hopefully the similarities end there. The defendants in Stell won the case but the decision was swiftly reversed by the appellate court, without even having glanced at the evidence.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 21, 2007 11:07 AM | Send