How Common Sense Succumbed to Rules

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When U.S. Rep. Howard W. "Judge" Smith, Virginia Democrat, chairman of the House Rules Committee, stuck the word "sex" in the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a prohibited form of discrimination, he did not know that 32 years later 6-year-old Johnathan Prevette would be suspended from school in Lexington, N.C., for giving a 6-year-old female classmate a kiss on the cheek. Judge Smith, however, should have known. As a jurist and legislator, he was no doubt familiar with Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo's observation that law unfolds to the limit of its logic or illogic as the case may be.

Judge Smith offered his amendment as a joke to illustrate the kind of heavy-handed intrusions into private life that the Civil Rights Act would bring. He …