Ebbie — somehow I can't make the leap from zip codes to racial prejudice.

I don't disagree that laws can change behavior to a degree, but I don't think they really touch our basic belief structures or ethical values. From what I've seen, outlawing prejudice just drives it underground and makes it more incidious until there is a sufficient backlash against the law to let it resurface — usually much more violently than before.

In the 1950s or '60s a group of cultural anthopologists — sorry, it's been too long for my failing memory to quote chapter and verse — studied a wide variety of societies to see if they could find a universal taboo. They looked at sexual mores, property concepts, commerce, etc. — basically all forms of societal interaction.

The only UNIVERSAL taboo they could find was: YOU MAY NOT KILL A MEMBER OF THE IN-GROUP.
But they quickly discovered that in-groups are so fluid that that taboo (which is really a law addressing an issue of morality) became meaningless.

I think a good example of what I'm talking about is what happened in the Middle East and Asia Minor in this century. Many of the Muslim countries passed laws liberalizing their society, giving women more rights, etc. It worked for a while, but the backlash has been horrendous — the Ayatolah and the Taliban, who let whole orphanages of children die rather than allow the women who had been caring for them to work outside the home.

This isn't racial, per se, but it's an example of an attempt to use laws to change fundamental belief patterns. IMO, it just doesn't work.

david