In my years working for the Friedman Foundation, I've seen some low blows aimed at our founder Milton Friedman. I've had to learn to take it in stride when people throw the most vicious smears at this great man. But nothing makes my blood boil more than the attempt to link him to segregation.

Unfortunately, in Utah this long-discredited canard has been trotted out of the barn once again. The state Democratic party is issuing a series of statements attacking Friedman and arguing that his idea enables segregation. That's how desperate they are to put their teacher-union clients ahead of the needs of students, and how bankrupt they are of legitimate arguments.

Let me be clear: I have no partisan ax to grind. I don't belong to either political party. I'm proud to work with the growing number of Democratic politicians who support school choice because children need it. And I'm just as disgusted when Republicans put special interests ahead of students as I am when Democrats do it.

But if the Utah Democratic Party is going to smear Milton Friedman, as the executive director of the foundation he started, I have to respond.

Milton Friedman wasn't just a "great man." He was a good man. He gave more of himself to help others than almost anyone else I know of.

The Utah Democrats have tried to portray him as selfish and greedy because he opposed the misuse of rhetoric about "public service" to support policies that undermine individual liberty. But that doesn't mean he opposed public service. He devoted his whole life to teaching, educating the public, promoting better public policy and serving as a volunteer on public commissions.

I'd like to know which of the people who wrote these scandalous attacks on Friedman has done half as much public service -- or even a 10th as much -- as Friedman did.

And then there's the segregation charge. One of the most striking things about Friedman was how completely free he was from any prejudice about people. When he talked with you, it was transparently obvious that he was engaged with your ideas, not your skin color or anything else about you besides your thinking.

Wayne Holland, the chair of the Utah Democratic party, admits that Friedman-style vouchers would not be "overtly" racist. That's his way of saying they're covertly racist. It's sickening.

The charge is twice as galling when you consider that Friedman grew up as a Jew in New Jersey in the early 20th century. Doors weren't exactly flying open for Jewish people at the time -- particularly in his line of work, academia. The top colleges had quotas for the number of Jewish professors they had -- and these weren't affirmative action quotas.

It is true that, back when public schools practiced segregation, some people briefly seized on vouchers as part of a scheme to avoid desegregation. But their trickery went nowhere, and it hasn't been heard from since.

School vouchers have an honorable, 200-year history. They were first proposed by Thomas Paine in 1792 and were later championed by John Stuart Mill -- two of the most important intellectual champions of progressive policy in history. Vermont has a school voucher program that dates back to 1869; Maine has one that dates to 1873.

And, of course, the modern school choice movement was started by Milton Friedman, who was the furthest thing in the world from a racist -- and whose ideas did more in one week to help the poor and the victims of discrimination than politicians who put teachers' unions first do in their whole lives.

In fact, the claim that vouchers cause segregation has been shown to be false. There's a sizeable number of empirical studies on school voucher programs. They unanimously show that private schools participating in vouchers are less segregated than public schools. And all voucher programs prohibit discrimination.

Vouchers don't segregate, they integrate. Public schools are heavily segregated because they assign students to schools based on their neighborhoods. School vouchers break down those barriers and bring students together across geographic boundaries, because they allow students to go to the best school for them, wherever it may happen to be located.

Nobody said Franklin Roosevelt was racist for proposing the G.I. Bill, which offers school vouchers for college students. Milton Friedman's idea was just to extend Roosevelt's vouchers from college to K-12 education. Oh, and Holland may not know this, but Franklin Roosevelt was a Democrat.

Robert Enlow is the executive director of the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation.