Nothing 'Flawed' About These Court Victories

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The Post was guilty of poor research and faulty logic in charging that the Supreme Court's decision in the Cracker Barrel restaurant case was "deeply flawed" for holding that employees are protected from retaliation for making discrimination claims based on race.

The case stemmed from a Reconstruction-era statute stating that all persons should have the same right "as white persons to make and enforce contracts."

In the 1989 case Patterson v. McLean Credit Union, Brenda Patterson, a black woman, said she was verbally abused on the job because of her race, but a majority of the Supreme Court found that because the Reconstruction statute dealt only with making and enforcing contracts, it could not apply to employment "terms and conditions" such as racially based verbal abuse. Justice William J. Brennan Jr. pointed out in his dissent that, under the majority's interpretation, Mrs. Patterson's rights would have been violated only if she had been told when she was hired that she could have the job on the condition that she be racially abused at work.

Congress acted quickly to remedy the situation. In 1991, it rewrote the law to reverse Patterson. It said the statute covered all benefits, privileges, terms and conditions, and a House report noted that it was designed to restore the previously recognized right to sue for retaliation.

But The Post's editorial did not mention the Patterson decision or its reversal in the 1991 Civil Rights Act. Its entire position rests on the absence of the word "retaliation" from the statute. The editorial does no honor to The Post's former reputation as a newspaper that paid careful attention to the law and was devoted to civil rights.

WILLIAM L. TAYLOR

Chairman