WASHINGTON, Dec. 11 (UPI) -- An ultra-conservative group once linked to incoming Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., has filed a brief in the Supreme Court defending cross burning.
The court heard argument Wednesday on whether Virginia's ban against cross burning violates free speech. The justices should hand down a decision within the next several months.
Among the factors they will consider are friend of the court briefs filed by a number of organizations, including the Council of Conservative Citizens.
Lott was criticized in 1998 and 1999 following reports he had spoke at meetings of the CCC.
According to The Washington Post, the CCC was formed to succeed the segregationist white Citizens' Councils of the 1960s.
The Post said that in 1992, Lott told CCC members in a Mississippi speech: "The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy. Let's take it in the right direction, and our children will be the beneficiaries."
It is not unusual for a group to support unpopular activity in the name of civil liberty, but the language used by the CCC in its friend of the court brief, filed in September, is highly unusual in the Supreme Court.
The group said in its brief that it was interested in the Virginia case because its emphasis "is the protection of the expressive rights of the millions of Americans of British and European descent who hold to conservative views on matters of racial and ethnic relations."
One of the factors the Supreme Court is weighing in the Virginia case is whether cross burning is always a form of intimidation.
Surprisingly, the CCC agrees that it can be considered intimidating.
"The lighting of a cross in an area where it is plainly visible to large numbers of minority group members is surely in one sense 'intimidating,'" the group said in its brief.
Those burning a cross are showing "in the most unequivocal means possible their unyielding opposition to what they believe is a minority liberal program of affirmative action in education and employment, 'set asides' in the granting of government contracts, less restrictive immigration laws and other forms of government-sponsored empowerment of non-white ethnic and racial groups," the CCC said.
"A large number of non-whites -- in all probability a decided majority of them -- who view such a demonstration would for that reason be likely to feel a sense of fear and anger upon observing it, and consequently they would undoubtedly describe themselves as having been 'intimidated' because the cross burning transpired within their range of perception."
Besides his earlier connection to the CCC, Lott was in hot water last week for saying that the country would have been better off had then-segregationist Strom Thurmond been elected president on the Dixiecrat ticket in 1948.
Lott's comments came during the 100th birthday celebration for Thurmond, who has since changed his views, and as a Republican from South Carolina is the longest-serving person in the Senate.
