About-Face

Another civil rights setback

In his pronouncements, President Reagan is firmly "dedicated and devoted to the principle of civil rights." In legal practice, however, his Administration has turned away from many of those goals. The past few months have seen a backing off by the Government on school busing, affirmative action and housing discrimination. Last week the Administration switched direction on still one more longstanding federal civil rights policy. It moved to end the practice of denying tax-exempt status to private schools that discriminate against minorities.

Since 1971 the Internal Revenue Service has sought to withhold the benefits of tax exemption from the private white academies that were founded in the South and elsewhere to evade integration. Other schools that discriminated for religious reasons also got socked by the IRS. Two of them, the fundamentalist Bob Jones University in South Carolina and North Carolina's Goldsboro Christian Schools, challenged the action as an infringement of their First Amendment right to freedom of religion. When they went to the Supreme Court, they were opposed at first by the Reagan Justice Department. Then came word, just before the close of business last week for the Supreme Court, that the Government had changed direction. The tax exemptions were no longer being opposed by the IRS. Administration lawyers therefore urged the court to end consideration of the case.

The policy shift was announced by the Treasury Department, but it was clear that it had been okayed by top officials at both the Justice Department and the White House. Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Fein explained that after re-examining the issue, the Administration could find nothing in the "plain language" of the IRS code or the history of the legislation that justified the denial of the tax exemptions. Veteran Civil Rights Attorney Joseph Rauh thought otherwise. "This was a sop to the right-wingers," he said. "The law is very clear that you can't give a direct subsidy to a discriminatory institution. I don't see any difference between giving someone a tax exemption and giving them a direct subsidy."

For the schools involved, the benefits may be short-lived. Private civil rights groups now plan to go into court to press the position abandoned by the Justice Department. They will start this week. Those cases will take months, or more likely, years to mature, but if the courts finally order an end to such tax exemptions, the schools will probably feel as minorities do today: in practice, the Government's pronouncements often do not yield real benefits.

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