I used the editorial in a post to an earlier TNR commenter who didn't quite get it, on another thread as the exact same example.  That NRO editorial falls quite short in the area you mention Issac (it must have been written by John Miller too as it uses his exact wording from his Corner posting).  I'd consider this a double slag as NRO insists on using the same words twice.

Plus, all of this purported love of states' rights seems to evaporate when a state legalizes gay marriage or marijuana use.

It's good to see someone who actually confronts racism as part of the history of conservatism instead of pretending that it's all just some conspiracy by the liberal media.  Voegli is right in that the fact that an idea is advocated by racists does not mean it's a bad idea.  We don't ditch the Declaration of Independence because it was written by a slave-owner.  

But you have to recognize the bad along with the good.  Want to praise the non-bigoted conservative ideals that guys like Buckley and Helms backed?  Fine, but don't pretend that they were really just fine with the idea of black people being equal to whites in American society.  I don't know many liberals who are hesitant to criticize FDR for the internment of  Japanese citizens during World War II, even though we admire many of the things that he stood for.  Nobody says crap like "FDR just had a different vision of freedom with regard to Japanese Americans."

DSimpson - I with ya, but a better example is the beloved Reagan administration's ukase forcing the states to adopt a 21-year old drinking age (particularly galling for me as I was around 19 at the time these laws were being changed).  See South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203 (1987).

It seems obvious that conservatives are pretending to believe in states rights when they do stuff like this.

Many thinking liberals not only recognize that one can be in favor of "states' rights" without necessarily being a racist, but actually argue that robust federalism is often a very good thing -- laboratory of ideas and all that. It's just that we tend to be hostile to the idea that states' rights should trump HUMAN rights.

Divergence between states on matters of education or health care or tax or drug policy furthers pragmatic ends by enabling us to compare policies and outcomes. (The current Massachusetts health care scheme, for example, may be viewed as a large-scale experiment.) The only thing we "learned" from Jim Crow is that it's wicked and barbaric -- and we should never have needed an experiment to figure that out.

Also: Buckley should not be grouped with Helms. Buckley grew up in a casually racist environment, and was initially opposed to the civil rights movement. But he was a thoughtful person, and became more progressive on race later in life. He was never a segregationist and white supremacist in the Helms mold. (If you doubt this, look for Buckley's Firing Line interviews with Leander Perez or George Wallace, who he despised.)

Yeah, it is horseshit to say Liberals are against states rights, in one of the most liberal states of all, California, they push medical marijuana as a states right. And, of course, the gay marriage issue is being decided by state Courts. Why and how it is any Republicans Goddamn interest in what the California Supreme Court does (obviously not Republicans that live in California) especially since they trumpet States rights is ironic to say the least.

Voegeli is right in general, but not as regards the rhetorical and suggestive power of the specific phrase used to oppose desegregation, "states' rights." The phrase originated as the rallying cry of the 19c Slave Power. It was used by 19c slavery apologists to justify rights for slaveholder states but that somehow, miraculously, did not apply with any force when the issue was the rights of free states (cf the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850). That American conservatives chose to resurrect this fetid, fraudulent rhetorical trope in response to the civil rights movement indicates that, despite the power of the American conservative ideology, this ideology and the tactics supporting it did indeed have more than a whiff of racism during the 1960s.