Telling Wrong From Rights

Clarence Pendleton is hardly the first chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission to cause controversy, but he is the first to do so by attacking the civil rights programs. In 1984 Pendleton ridiculed comparable worth--the effort to equate pay scales in different jobs--as "the looniest idea since Looney Tunes," and he has denounced U.S. black leaders for marching toward a "political Jonestown" of Government welfare dependence. Pendleton's fighting style has grown more visceral by the issue, so that even some who agree with him think he has lost effectiveness. Commission Member John Bunzel, who usually votes in tandem with the...