CBS 46 Atlanta - Officials brace for first election under controversial ID law

CBS 46 Atlanta - Officials brace for first election under controversial ID lawOfficials brace for first election under controversial ID law
Aug 28, 2005, 5:45 PM

LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. (AP) -- The last-minute approval of Georgia's voter identification law means last-ditch efforts to prepare for the new requirements in Gwinnett County, the site of the state's first election since the contentious measure was approved.

The new law, which requires voters to show government-issued ID cards at the polls, will be enforced Tuesday, when voters are set to fill the unexpired term of state Representative Phyllis Miller.

Previously, voters cold show one of 17 forms, including bank statements or utility bills, to receive a ballot. County election officials were caught off guard by the regulations, which were approved by the Department of Justice late Friday.

Elections manager Lynn Ledford said her office had NOT anticipated the change taking effect until sometime in September. Yesterday, Gwinnett officials hurried to comply with the law, sending out press releases to inform voters of the new requirements and changes to absentee balloting.

China CRIENGLISH

China CRIENGLISHA ten-year old boy formally registered as a student in an engineering college in the city of Tianjin on Saturday.

The Beijing Youth Daily reports that Zhang Xinyang, who is from the northeastern Liaoning province, is the youngest participant in this year's college entrance examination in the country.

Since Zhang Xinyang is much younger than average students, the college is allowing his father to accompany him while he is studying and has opened a special dorm for the father and son.

An official from the college admitted it would be a challenge to give appropriate education to Zhang Xinyang , especially regarding how to cater for his outstanding ability while providing a reasonably normal environment for a ten year old boy.

This summer, China saw a record high of 8.7 million participants taking the college entrance examination. The average admittance rate is normally less than 60%.
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Your future competition in the job market. You thought I was kidding in class!
Professor Armwood

Morning-After Pill: Politics and the F.D.A. - New York Times

Morning-After Pill: Politics and the F.D.A. - New York TimesAugust 28, 2005
Morning-After Pill: Politics and the F.D.A.
By GARDINER HARRIS

WASHINGTON, Aug. 27 - For more than a year, federal drug officials have insisted that their repeated delays in deciding whether to approve over-the-counter sales of a morning-after contraceptive have nothing to do with abortion politics.

Among veterans of the battles over drug approvals here, it is hard to find anyone who believes them.

On Friday, the food and drug commissioner, Lester M. Crawford, announced that he would indefinitely postpone a ruling on Plan B, the morning-after pill made by Barr Laboratories. He explained that while the science supported over-the-counter access for women 17 and older, the agency had not figured out how to do that without younger teenagers getting the pills.

While the announcement prompted familiar responses on each side of the abortion debate - protest from abortion rights groups, support from abortion opponents - other veterans of the drug wars sounded more exasperated than anything else.

"At some point, the statute requires that the agency make a decision," said Dr. Eve E. Slater, an assistant secretary of health from 2001 to 2003. "You can't just delay forever."

The Plan B decision has become "overly politicized, and it shouldn't be," Dr. Slater added. Under federal regulations, the Food and Drug Administration was required to reach a decision on Plan B by January. Nothing happened. Indeed, Barr executives said they had no discussions with the agency after January. Usually when the agency is actively considering an application, there is a constant back-and-forth with the company.

As the months passed, two Democratic senators who support abortion rights, Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Patty Murray of Washington, vowed to block any vote on President Bush's nomination of Dr. Crawford to become agency commissioner unless the F.D.A. made a decision on the pill, for or against. Mr. Bush has long been aligned with abortion opponents.

The senators relented in July after the secretary of health and human services, Michael O. Leavitt, promised that a decision would be made by Sept. 1. On Friday, both senators attributed Dr. Crawford's latest announcement to political interference.

Dr. Robert Fenichel, a former deputy division director for cardiovascular and renal drugs who left the F.D.A. in 2000, agreed, saying the agency's decisions on Plan B were being driven by abortion politics.

"I've never seen anything like this before," Dr. Fenichel said.

That the Plan B fight is politically charged is nothing new, of course. During Dr. Crawford's confirmation hearings, Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah and a supporter of Dr. Crawford, called it not "a pharmaceutical issue as much as it's a social issue."

Nor is it new that politics would play an important role in the decisions of the F.D.A. or any other politically appointed regulatory agency. Elliott Millenson, former president and chief executive of Direct Access Diagnostics, a company that sought to sell an at-home test for H.I.V. infection in the 1980's and 90's, recalled that when gay rights groups opposed the test, the agency initially refused even to accept the company's application. "The commissioner's office explicitly told us in 1992 that if we wanted approval we would need to get political support for our product," Mr. Millenson said.

He sued the agency and won. The agency eventually approved the test, although for business reasons the company never sold any.

"On sensitive issues, politics are business as usual at the F.D.A.," Mr. Millenson said.

The agency approved Plan B as a prescription contraceptive in July 1999. The pill provides a concentrated dose of the medicines available in most daily birth control pills; it can prevent pregnancy if taken as long as 72 hours after intercourse. Many abortion opponents view it as tantamount to abortion.

The F.D.A.'s announcement on Friday led to open bickering between abortion rights advocates and Barr executives. Publicly, the two sides have been supportive of each other for nearly two years, but privately, they have long disagreed on strategy.

In May 2004, the food and drug agency rejected Barr's application to sell its drug over the counter, saying the company had failed to provide enough information about how well girls younger than 16 understood the drug's label and whether they might engage in riskier sex if the drug was easily available.

At that point, Barr had two choices. It could have undertaken another "label-comprehension" study with scores of young teenagers and then resubmitted an almost identical application. Or it could have used the data that it had on hand and reapplied to sell the drug as an over-the-counter pill only to women 16 years of age and older. Younger girls would have to get a prescription. On Friday, the agency changed the age to 17.

Kirsten Moore, president of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, an abortion rights advocacy group here, said she and fellow advocates suggested that Barr do another label study. Barr decided to reapply with existing data. No one knows whether the advocates' strategy would have worked, but Barr's has not, at least so far.

Ms. Moore said label-comprehension studies were relatively easy, cheap and quick to perform. Most are done in malls, where researchers set up a table and ask passers-by to read a drug label and answer a few questions.

Bruce Downey, Barr's chairman and chief executive, said he did not regret the company's actions. And Dr. Carol Ben-Maimon, chief of Barr's proprietary research, said F.D.A. officials never told the company exactly what questions a new study should answer.

In addition to label comprehension, the agency voiced concerns about Plan B's effects on sexual promiscuity and sexually transmitted diseases, Dr. Ben-Maimon said. To answer those questions, a quick study at a mall would not suffice, she said.

Dr. Crawford said Friday that the F.D.A. would seek public comments over the next 60 days on whether it had the authority to approve Barr's application and whether it could enforce any regulation that would stop girls younger than 17 from buying the pill freely.

Ms. Moore said she and other abortion-rights advocates wanted Barr to withdraw its present application, perform a label-comprehension study and then apply to sell the drug over-the-counter to women of all ages. Rejecting the application again if it contained clear data showing that young teenagers understood how to use the drug would be more difficult for the agency to justify with scientific or regulatory rationales, she said.

"It's time to call F.D.A.'s bluff," Ms. Moore added.

Mr. Downey, of Barr, said the company was considering a new label-comprehension trial and added that it would provide comments to the F.D.A. during the next 60 days.

Whether the agency will listen to those comments is unclear.

"We volunteered repeatedly to put proposals forth to the F.D.A.," Dr. Ben-Maimon said. "They didn't really seek out our opinions or thoughts on how we could implement them."

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Communications Law Students this is an example of how an administrative agency, the FDA in this case, works-- Professor Armwood

Justice Weighs Desire v. Duty (Duty Prevails) - New York Times

Justice Weighs Desire v. Duty (Duty Prevails) - New York TimesAugust 25, 2005
Justice Weighs Desire v. Duty (Duty Prevails)
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 - It is not every day that a Supreme Court justice calls his own decisions unwise. But with unusual candor, Justice John Paul Stevens did that last week in a speech in which he explored the gap that sometimes lies between a judge's desire and duty.

Addressing a bar association meeting in Las Vegas, Justice Stevens dissected several of the recent term's decisions, including his own majority opinions in two of the term's most prominent cases. The outcomes were "unwise," he said, but "in each I was convinced that the law compelled a result that I would have opposed if I were a legislator."

In one, the eminent domain case that became the term's most controversial decision, he said that his majority opinion that upheld the government's "taking" of private homes for a commercial development in New London, Conn., brought about a result "entirely divorced from my judgment concerning the wisdom of the program" that was under constitutional attack.

His own view, Justice Stevens told the Clark County Bar Association, was that "the free play of market forces is more likely to produce acceptable results in the long run than the best-intentioned plans of public officials." But he said that the planned development fit the definition of "public use" that, in his view, the Constitution permitted for the exercise of eminent domain.

Justice Stevens said he also regretted having to rule in favor of the federal government's ability to enforce its narcotics laws and thus trump California's medical marijuana initiative. "I have no hesitation in telling you that I agree with the policy choice made by the millions of California voters," he said. But given the broader stakes for the power of Congress to regulate commerce, he added, "our duty to uphold the application of the federal statute was pellucidly clear."

The court's press office made the text of his speech available here.

While the substance of his remarks was interesting, so was the timing. The 85-year-old Justice Stevens, who will observe his 30th anniversary on the court this fall, is a savvy observer of the political landscape. It certainly did not escape his notice that Supreme Court confirmation hearings were looming and that a microscopic examination of the views of the nominee, Judge John G. Roberts Jr., was under way.

Perhaps Justice Stevens intended a gentle reminder that no matter what views Judge Roberts held as a young lawyer in the Reagan White House, the real question was one that only the nominee could answer: not what views he holds today, but the impact he would permit those views to have on his work as a Supreme Court justice.

While Justice Stevens is the only member of the court to have addressed the issue in a speech, others have used their written opinions to acknowledge the conflict between a judge's policy preferences and decisions the judge may feel forced to render because of legal precedent or judicial philosophy.

In March, for example, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, whom Judge Roberts would succeed, dissented from the court's opinion that declared unconstitutional the execution of those who commit capital murder before the age of 18.

"Were my office that of a legislator, rather than a judge, then I, too, would be inclined to support legislation setting a minimum age of 18," Justice O'Connor wrote in her dissenting opinion in Roper v. Simmons in the course of explaining why, in her view, the Constitution did not support that outcome.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, in providing a fifth vote for the court's 1989 decision that burning an American flag as a political protest is protected by the First Amendment, noted that the decision "exacts its personal toll." In his concurring opinion in the case, Texas v. Johnson, Justice Kennedy wrote: "The hard fact is that sometimes we must make decisions we do not like. We make them because they are right, right in the sense that the law and the Constitution, as we see them, compel the result. And so great is our commitment to the process that, except in the rare case, we do not pause to express distaste for the result, perhaps for fear of undermining a valued principle that dictates the decision."

For a justice on the speaking circuit, Justice Stevens gives unusually good value. Rather than retreating to the safety of historical anecdotes or constitutional platitudes, as some others do, he often talks about what is actually on his mind. This month, he went to the American Bar Association's annual meeting in his home city, Chicago, and offered some pointed criticism of the death penalty.

Sometimes, of course, justices and other judges express themselves at their peril, as Justice Antonin Scalia learned after criticizing an appeals court decision that barred the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public school classrooms. He was obliged to recuse himself a few months later when the case reached the Supreme Court.

On the other hand, Justice Scalia's more abstract discussion of his jurisprudence, in a book titled "A Matter of Interpretation," has proved a steady seller since its publication in 1997.

Next month, his colleague and occasional debating partner, Justice Stephen G. Breyer, will offer his own very different views of constitutional interpretation in a new book titled "Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution."

Justice Breyer's book is based on the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, which he delivered last year at Harvard. Justice Scalia's book was based on his lectures in the same series, which he delivered at Princeton in 1995.

CBS 46 Atlanta - Georgia's DUI Fatalities Soar

CBS 46 Atlanta - Georgia's DUI Fatalities SoarGeorgia's DUI Fatalities Soar
Aug 22, 2005, 11:07 PM

ATLANTA (AP) -- Alcohol-related traffic deaths increased by ten percent in Georgia during 2004, compared to a two percent decline nationally.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in Washington released the figures today for fatal crashes involving at least a driver or a motorcycle rider with an illegal blood-alcohol level of point-zero-eight percent or higher.

Nationwide, the government said 12-thousand, 874 people died in alcohol-related crashes in 2004, compared with 13-thousand and 96 in 2003.

The agency said that in Georgia, there were 392 such deaths in 2004 and 355 in 2003, an increase of 37.

Several other Southern states -- Alabama, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee -- also posted higher fatality numbers. Texas saw a ten percent reduction in its alcohol-related fatalities, accounting for 141 fewer deaths than in 2003.

Bob Dallas, the director of the Governor's Office of Highway Safety, says the rise in the number of DUI deaths in Georgia followed three years of decline in the percentage of alcohol-related fatalities among overall traffic deaths.

About.com

About.com:

Friday, August 5, 2005; Posted: 12:07 p.m. EDT (16:07 GMT)

ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) -- In the popular video game "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas," players assume the lead character of Carl Johnson, a down-on-his-luck criminal who roams city streets, stealing cars and helping gang members knock off rivals in drive-by shootings.

"CJ," as he's known by his pals, is black -- and to some in the video game industry, that's a problem.

A growing number of people in the booming industry believe there should be more black and Hispanic heroes and heroines instead of hoods and hoodlums.

"Not everybody goes outside with bling-bling and listens to rap music all day," says Amil Tomlin, a black 15-year-old from Baltimore who plays hours of video games each day.

Among those trying to paint a different racial picture is Mario Armstrong, who hosts a weekly National Public Radio program on technology. He and two fellow black colleagues have started the Urban Video Game Academy, a virtual programming boot camp for minorities.

"It's been said that a bunch of nerdy white guys are creating these games," Armstrong said. "The problem with a bunch of white guys creating the games is that the story isn't being created with balance."

Roughly 80 percent of video game programmers are white, according to preliminary results of an International Game Developers Association survey. About four percent of designers are Hispanic, and less than three percent are black.

The academy is holding summer workshops in Atlanta, Baltimore and Washington to give minority students like Tomlin an opportunity to learn the basics of making video games. Organizers hope this early exposure will inspire a new generation to make minority video game characters that go beyond typecast racial roles.

"I'd love to hear what other stories exist in the world besides the stereotypical ones. There are good people in the ghetto. There are role models," said academy co-founder John Saulter, who runs Entertainment Arts Research, one of the industry's few black-owned video gaming companies.

So far, interest in the workshops has been high, which doesn't surprise organizers.

A March study by the Kaiser Family Foundation revealed that black youths between 8 and 18 years old played video and computer games roughly 90 minutes a day -- almost 30 minutes more than white youths. And Hispanics play about 10 minutes more per day than whites.

"If you've got kids who can sit in front of a game for eight hours, then they have the cognitive thought process to learn how to build the game," Saulter said.

Some in the industry believe race in games is a serious issue that has been ignored for too long.

"For a long time, we've talked in the game industry about gender diversity as the one problem on the radar, but the racial split is worse," said Ian Bogost, a Georgia Tech game design professor who recently published a book on video game criticism.

Jason Della Rocca, IGDA's executive director, said the industry must confront a cycle that threatens its creativity: Educated, young white males create games for other educated, young white males.

"Games are an expressive medium. They are an art form, just like movies, theater and literature," Della Rocca said. "We're seeing, to a large extent, that the games that are being designed unconsciously include the biases, opinions and reflections of their creators."

In a way, he said, stubbornness to diversify runs counter to the industry's tolerant roots.

"We like to think that game design is a higher calling and that no one really cares what your skin color is or your sexual orientation," Della Rocca said. "But that doesn't seem to manifest itself in terms of a more diversified workplace."

CBS 46 Atlanta - Students Get Free On-Line Preps for SATs

CBS 46 Atlanta - Students Get Free On-Line Preps for SATsStudents Get Free On-Line Preps for SATs
Aug 11, 2005, 7:16 PM

(CBS46 News) --- The state of Georgia offers more help to students trying to get into college. Students no longer have to pay for expensive SAT prep courses. They can now take on for free online.

Today the governor went back to school.. Highschool. The occassion.. A pepralley at sprayberry hgih in marietta... But this time the sporting event was acadmeic... The sport of taking the sat's the madatory college entracne exam...

For years, students who have the money have been able to pay for pricy SAT prep clases at private venues. But now, the state is offering similar on-line prep courses free to every student in Georgia.

Georgia appropriated a million dollars last year to buy every student unlimited use of the web site to study and take drill tests. When the student is ready, he can take actual practice tests that will be scored just like the real thing

The state hopes the online sat prep course is one more way to close the gap between rich and poor when it comes to access to public university system and highlight Georgia academics when it comes to test scores nationwide.

-- Kim Fettig, CBS46 News

John Johnson, Publisher of Ebony and Jet, Dies at 87 - New York Times

John Johnson, Publisher of Ebony and Jet, Dies at 87 - New York TimesJohn Johnson, Publisher of Ebony and Jet, Dies at 87
By REUTERS

Filed at 6:24 p.m. ET

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Magazine publisher John Johnson, who jolted the mostly black readers of Ebony and Jet with violent images that lent visibility and momentum to the civil rights movement, died on Monday, his office said.

A publicist at Johnson's Chicago-based publishing company would not immediately give a cause of death. He was 87.

A multimillionaire who in 1982 became the first black American to make Forbes' list of the richest Americans, Johnson said his magazine philosophy was to reflect the ``happier side'' of black American life, and that ``deep down, at the end of the day, we're trying to give people hope.''

But from the early days of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, readers of Ebony and Jet saw vivid images of the tumult over school desegregation, police beating blacks and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

But readers also read about black celebrities and absorbed hints on accumulating wealth, which led to charges Johnson neglected the pressing problems facing many of his readers.

Copies of Jet's historic photograph of the mutilated body of teenager Emmett Till in his casket helped galvanize the civil rights movement. An all-white jury later acquitted two white Mississippians of the 1955 murder of the 14-year-old Chicagoan killed for whistling at a white woman.

Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, who once worked on Johnson's loading dock, said Till's photograph inspired Rosa Parks to spark the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott.

Johnson's magazines became must-reading for many blacks -- Ebony's circulation grew to nearly two million, Jet to nearly one million -- leading to the oft-heard adage in the black community: ``If it wasn't in Jet, it didn't happen.''

'A VOICE AND FACE'

``He gave African Americans a voice and a face, in his words, 'a new sense of somebody-ness,' of who they were and what they could do, at a time when they were virtually invisible in mainstream American culture,'' President Bill Clinton said when awarding Johnson the Medal of Freedom in 1996.

Born in Arkansas City, Arkansas, Johnson was 6 when his father was killed in a mill accident.

After the family moved to Chicago, Johnson was attending college and working at an insurance company when he borrowed $500 using his mother's furniture as collateral. He sent offers for $2 subscriptions to the firm's clients, using $6,000 in proceeds to create ``Negro Digest,'' modeled on Reader's Digest.

Borrowing the look of Life Magazine, Johnson began Ebony in 1942. Jet was launched in 1951.

Unable to line up advertisers for a magazine created by and for blacks, Johnson started his own mail-order beauty products firm and ran its ads. He created his own line of cosmetics suitable for the black models appearing on his pages. He later bought and sold radio stations.

Recounting his story in a 1989 autobiography, ``Succeeding Against the Odds,'' Johnson would write, ``One of the sweetest emotions in the world is watching scorn turn into awe.''

Johnson defended his magazines against charges of being lightweight by saying: ``Whenever I got sick, my mother gave me castor oil. And I'd run and hide and squeal and holler. Finally she got smart. She gave it to me in orange juice. And it was more acceptable then.

``I tell people all the time, we run a lot of entertainment, but it's orange juice. If you look inside, there's always castor oil.''

About.com:

VOTING RIGHTS ACT 40th ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION

Date
August 4, 2005 - February 28, 2006

In recognition of the upcoming 40th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Atlanta’s Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site opens an original exhibit chronicling the journey of African Americans toward guaranteed enfranchisement.

“Of Ballots Uncast: The African-American Struggle for the Right to Vote,” on display August 4, 2005 through March 7, 2006, calls attention to the obstacles African Americans faced while fighting to secure voting rights assurances as U.S. citizens. These legal and extralegal hindrances; such as poll taxes, gerrymandering, lynching and blatant intimidation; created hostile environments that prevented African Americans from exercising the constitutional right to vote afforded them through the 15th Amendment ratified in 1870. The nearly 100-year-long campaign would yield a succession of momentous events significant to American history, culminating with President Lyndon B. Johnson’s signing of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965.

“Of Ballots Uncast” is sponsored by the African American Experience Fund/National Park Foundation and the National Archives and Records Administration.

The exhibition features:

-An interactive recreation of the “Jelly Bean Test,” which, according to legend, required that hopeful African-American voters correctly guess the number of jelly beans in a jar;

-A replica of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, site of the infamous “Blood Sunday” attack ordered by Alabama Governor George C. Wallace against peaceful marchers attempting the infamous trek from Selma to Montgomery in March 1965; -A transcript of John Lewis’ federal court testimony regarding the brutal “Bloody Sunday” attack against marchers, including Lewis who would years later be elected as a U.S. Congressman;

-President Johnson’s reading copy with handwritten changes of his speech “Special Message to the Congress: The American Promise,” appealing for support for the Voting Rights Act; and

-An ink pen used by President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign the historic Voting Rights Act into law.

Admission is free to the exhibition located at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site, Visitor Center, 450 Auburn Avenue, Atlanta. Exhibit hours are 9a-6p daily through August 4-15; and 9a-5p daily August 15, 2005—March 7, 2006 except Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Days. For more information, call (404) 331-5190 or visit www.nps.gov/malu.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site, operated by the National Park Service, preserves and interprets the places in Atlanta where civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was born, lived, worked, worshiped and is buried.

Court Nominee Advised Group on Gay Rights - New York Times

Court Nominee Advised Group on Gay Rights - New York TimesAugust 5, 2005
Court Nominee Advised Group on Gay Rights
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

WASHINGTON, Aug. 4 - Judge John G. Roberts Jr., the Supreme Court nominee, gave advice to advocates for gay rights a decade ago, helping them win a landmark 1996 ruling protecting gay men and lesbians from state-sanctioned discrimination.

Judge Roberts, at the time an appellate lawyer for the Washington firm of Hogan & Hartson, did not write legal briefs or argue the case, lawyers involved said. But they said he did provide invaluable strategic guidance working pro bono to formulate legal theories and coach them in moot court sessions.

Judge Roberts did not disclose his role in the case to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which asked about pro bono work in a questionnaire. News of his participation was first reported Thursday in The Los Angeles Times, and it set off an immediate scramble on both the left and the right, upending perceptions of the nominee in both camps.

The White House immediately sought to reassure Judge Roberts's conservative backers, telephoning prominent leaders, including Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, but it appeared that not all of them had been convinced.

The 1996 case, Romer v. Evans, is considered a touchstone in the culture wars, and it produced what the gay rights movement considers its most significant legal victory. By a 6-to-3 vote, the Supreme Court struck down a provision of the Colorado Constitution that nullified existing civil rights protections for gay men and lesbians and also barred the passage of new antidiscrimination laws.

"It's one more piece of the puzzle as we keep trying to find out who John Roberts is," said Kevin Cathcart, executive director of Lambda Legal, the advocacy group that helped bring the Romer case. "Where does this fit in on his judicial philosophy and his view of the Constitution?"

Indeed, Judge Roberts's participation seems to stand in contrast to the picture that has emerged from his days as a young lawyer with the Reagan administration, when he advocated a more conservative approach to civil rights and voting rights. Lawyers in the Romer case said Thursday that Judge Roberts had not discussed its substance with them, but seemed to approach it more as an intellectual challenge.

Even so, reports of his involvement echoed on conservative talk shows Thursday, generating outrage and disbelief. "There's no question this is going to upset people on the right," Rush Limbaugh told his radio listeners. "There's no question the people on the right are going to say: 'Wait a minute. Wait a minute! The guy is doing pro bono work and helping gay activists?' "

A White House spokeswoman, Erin Healy, said Judge Roberts's involvement was minimal. "As in any other case," Ms. Healy said, "it is wrong to equate legal work product with personal opinions."

The lead plaintiffs' lawyer in the Romer case, Jean Dubofsky, said Thursday that she sought out Judge Roberts at the recommendation of Walter Dellinger, then a senior official in the Justice Department under President Bill Clinton. Ms. Dubofsky, a former justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, said she was specifically seeking a conservative who could provide her an insider's road map, of sorts, helping her to anticipate objections from some of the court's more conservative members, like Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist.

Judge Roberts, who once clerked for Justice Rehnquist and now serves on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, spent about six hours on the case, Ms. Dubofsky said. "He told me, 'You have to know how to count and to get five votes, you're going to have to pick up the middle.' "

And then, she said, Judge Roberts provided explicit instructions on how to do just that, telling her that she would have to prove to the court it did not have to overturn a previous case, Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld a ban on homosexual sodomy. He peppered her with questions in a moot court session.

"So when I was asked by Justice Scalia if they would have to overturn Bowers v. Hardwick to rule my way, I said no," Ms. Dubofsky said, adding, "In this particular case if you wanted to get the U.S. Supreme Court turned around on gay rights issues, you didn't have to win every gay rights case floating around out there."

Ultimately, in a forceful opinion by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the court said the Colorado provision had put the state's gay men and lesbians in a "solitary class," singling them out in violation of the Constitution's equal protection guarantee in a manner that was so sweeping as to be inexplicable on any basis other than animus. Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the justices to whom Judge Roberts is most often compared, issued a blistering dissent.

The Romer case proved to be the first step in the Supreme Court's ultimate disavowal of the Bowers decision in its 2003 ruling in the case of Lawrence v. Texas. That ruling, which overturned a Texas sodomy law, has drawn the ire of conservatives at a time when the Supreme Court is expecting still more cases involving gay rights. In November, the court is scheduled to hear a case that grows out of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy toward gay service members. The question is whether Congress can withhold federal money from universities that restrict military recruiters' access to their students, in an effort to support gay rights. Judge Roberts would join in hearing that case, should he be confirmed by the first Monday in October, as Republicans hope.

Judge Roberts did not mention the Romer case in the response he filed to a questionnaire from the Senate Judiciary Committee, which asked about pro bono work. Committee Democrats said they were not troubled by the omission, because it did not appear that Judge Roberts had spent a significant amount of time on the case. He did list two other cases, including one in which he represented welfare recipients in the District of Columbia who were challenging cuts in their benefits.

Walter A. Smith, who was in charge of pro bono work at Hogan & Hartson from 1993 to 1997, and who worked extensively on the Romer case, said about a dozen lawyers at the firm assisted. He said he had little trouble recruiting Judge Roberts.

"It looked like a challenging, interesting, provocative, important case," said Mr. Smith, who is now the executive director of the D. C. Appleseed Center, a nonpartisan public interest legal group. "Everybody knew that, and I think he believed it was worth his time."

Mr. Smith said part of his job was to match lawyers with cases that would intrigue them, and that his initial instinct was that Judge Roberts would be willing, despite his conservative bent. In the past, Judge Roberts has made it a point to note that lawyers do not always agree with their clients.

"Every good lawyer knows that if there is something in his client's cause that so personally offends you, morally, religiously, if it so offends you that you think it would undermine your ability to do your duty as a lawyer, then you shouldn't take it on, and John wouldn't have," he said. "So at a minimum he had no concerns that would rise to that level."

Liberal critics of Judge Roberts, however, continued to assail him on Thursday as a foe of civil rights. "John Roberts was a key member of a right-wing policy team that waged a comprehensive assault on fundamental constitutional rights," said Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group, "and that is most relevant to his qualification to be on the Supreme Court."

While some conservatives, including Dr. Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, said they were unconcerned about Judge Roberts's involvement in the Romer case, others signaled that the report had at least raised questions in their eyes.

James C. Dobson, chairman of the evangelical group Focus on the Family, said Judge Roberts's work in the case was "not welcome news to those of us who advocate for traditional values," though he said it did not necessarily mean that Judge Roberts shared the plaintiffs' views.

Colleen Parro, executive director of the Republican National Coalition for Life and one of the few conservatives to raise questions about Judge Roberts, said his work on the case was "cause for more caution and less optimism" about his nomination.

Linda Greenhouse contributed reporting from Washington for this article.