I don't want to be cruel to someone with deep emotional scars, but at the same time I don't want someone who has deep emotional scars to deal with them by engaging in a monomaniacal crusade to limit the life choices of large numbers of people.

If you read Bob Herbert's column today, in which black anti-affirmative-action zealot Ward Connerly is quoted as saying, "Supporting segregation need not be racist. One can believe in segregation and believe in equality of the races," here's a follow-up that might make your jaw drop: a 1997 profile of Connerly in which we learn the source of his anger (it's clearly at blacks, not at preferences, and it's clearly personal), and we also learn that many people who knew him as a child and now hear him talk about his youth -- including family members -- say he's a liar:

Arthur Soniea, Mr. Connerly's codgerly and irascible 75-year-old uncle, said: ''That's malarkey about him stuffing paper in his shoes. Another damned lie is that sweet potatoes three times a day. He don't come around here, but if he did,'' Mr. Soniea said, he would haul his nephew into the woodshed.

And there's quite a bit more where that came from.

You come away from this feeling sorry for the man -- or you would if you didn't know that reversing many of the gains of the civil rights movement is his life's work.

(Readers impatient to get to the bizarre stuff are urged to jump directly to page 2. But read the whole thing -- the end shows a Connerly barely able to defend his own ideas. Not that it stops him from trying to impose them on the whole country.)