Guess that's one way of lookin' at it.

Via StoutDem, who was very busy between six and ten Wednesday morning, comes this Houston Chronicle article with the truly astonishing lead-in:

Charges against a man accused of driving his van through the front entrance of a Houston abortion clinic in March were dismissed by a federal judge who ruled a part of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act unconstitutional.

Read it again; it starts to get really funny after a while. I suppose they were discriminating by not providing sufficient access to pop-eyed wackjobs in vans? "Nope, see, them front doors shoulda been bigger. He di'nt have no choice." The ruling turns on a semi-arcane question over interpretation of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution relative to a 2000 review and ruling on the Violence Against Women Act, but it's probably worth mentioning that the judge is Kenneth Hoyt, a Reagan appointee who has proven before that, well, that he's an idiot, mostly.

Hoyt, who is black, said at one point that race is not a factor in some diseases -- including sickle cell anemia -- and has refused to admit evidence about the rate of lupus contraction among blacks "because white people wrote it."

The recusal motion also quotes a remark Hoyt made that physical differences among races were the product of their environments. "Why do you think Chinese people are short? Because there is so much damn wind over there they need to be short. Why are they so tall in Africa? Because they need to be tall. It's environmental," he said. "I mean, you don't jump up and get a banana off a tree if you're only 4 feet. If you're 7 feet tall and you're standing in China, then you're going to get blown away by that Siberian wind, aren't you?"

That's right. He's a federal judge.