WASHINGTON DC--Jessica Gavora of the Independent Women's Forum has performed a notable public service in recent issues of Policy Review, where she succeeded in smoking out the hypocrisy of the ACLU on the issue of racial quotas and preferences. Way back in 1964, the ACLU joined other liberal groups in endorsing the Civil Rights Act, and especially Title VII, which banned discrimination based on race, color, or national origin.

But when it came time to choose sides on the California Civil Rights Initiative, which seeks to re-establish the non-discriminatory principle of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the ACLU didn't even blink. It led the opposition in federal court the day after the election. In responding to Gavora's observation of this hypocrisy, ACLU executive director Nadine Strossen confessed to supporting affirmative action as a "temporary" legal remedy for discrimination. Most amazingly, Strossen says she sees "no inconsistency between individual liberties and affirmative action."

That clunk you hear is the last shred of principle being dropped from the liberal mind. The legislative history of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, especially its famous section 703(j), is clear: it was intended to prohibit reverse discrimination and quotas. The Senate floor leader for the Civil Rights Act, Hubert Humphrey, declared that Title VII "would prohibit preferential treatment for any particular group," adding famously that if this proved not the case, he would eat the pages of the statute book where the Act appeared. "Do you want a society that is nothing but an endless power struggle among organized groups?" Humphrey asked. "Do you want a society where there is no place for the individual? I don't."

Neither did most civil rights leaders. Frederick Douglass had opposed quotas back in 1871, writing that "equality of numbers has nothing to do with equality of attainment." Jack Greenberg of the NAACP said in the 1950s that "The chief problem with quotas is that they introduce a potentially retrogressive concept into the cherished notion of individual equality." And of course Martin Luther King held up a regime in which people were judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

This is the standard account of the main current of the civil rights movement. But it was not the only current. In 1961, a National Urban League official testified before a congressional committee that "I am sick and tired of people saying they are color-blind . . . What we need is to be positively color conscious. . ." A year later the Congress on Racial Equality demanded compensatory preferences in hiring. The NAACP's Roy Wilkins wavered and offered a mild echo of this idea. This other current of thought, as we have seen, came to dominate the civil rights movement after the Act passed. As the capitulation of the ACLU shows, the old liberal center did not hold.

The Great Emancipator, Lincoln, once compared the principle of equality in the Declaration of Independence to the Old Testament passage about "an apple of gold." By allowing the principle of group rights into our constitutional thought, we have let the worm into the apple.