Supreme Court justices made all of the right decisions last week, impressively sifting the facts and setting aside prejudices in three emotionally charged cases to rule on the constitutionality of the laws in question.

The paperwork filed in the cases, which allowed affirmative action in the college admissions process on a limited basis and overturned the prohibition of sodomy in Texas and 12 other states, demonstrated the complexity of the issues involved.

The crux of the justices’ argument in upholding the University of Michigan Law School’s admissions process is that it ostensibly considers each applicant individually, instead of lumping racial minority applicants together and granting their applications an automatic boost based on skin color.

The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equal protection for everyone under state law. Because the Michigan law school considers each applicant individually, and no one is denied that consideration, that equal protection clause is satisfied. As Justice O’Connor said, presenting the Court’s opinion, “truly individualized consideration demands that race be used in a flexible, nonmechanical way.”

It is a problem that student bodies at colleges across the nation do not represent the racial makeup of the population, but there’s a fine line between considering race while trying to achieve a diverse student body and simply handing out letters of admission. Affirmative action as allowed by the Supreme Court is both constitutional and appropriate.

At Iowa State, successful programs that greatly increase opportunities for minorities like the Carver Academy and the Multicultural Vision Program are upheld by the ruling, and that’s great news for us.

The Court’s other major ruling last week took an obviously unconstitutional law off the books. Americans’ right to privacy in their homes is such a basic right that one wonders how anyone could think it was appropriate for the state to monitor sexual activity between adults in a private dwelling. The two men arrested in Houston for engaging in anal sex made a mutual decision to commit that act in private and infringed upon no one else’s rights in doing so.

Make no mistake, though — the only thing the ruling upheld was the equal treatment granted by the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice O’Connor’s concurring opinion best summarizes the equal protection issue, musing whether “moral disapproval is a legitimate state interest to justify by itself a statute that banned homosexual sodomy, but not heterosexual sodomy.” She concluded it was not.

The Supreme Court closed their session on a strong note with solid, Constitutionally-based decisions — just as they are supposed to do.

Editorial Board: Nicole Paseka, Amy Schierbrock, Alicia Ebaugh, Ayrel Clark, Lucas Grundmeier