Posted on 01/25/2003 4:49:29 AM PST by Davis
Ann Coulter is a favorite of ours. We've cited her for her wit and lucidity quite a few times, and we've published an appreciation of her. She has outdone herself in her column this week shredding the legal arguments underlying what the PC dissemblers dubbed "affirmative action" and have for thirty years tried to convince us was socially desirable and legally permissible because it was...well...affirmative, hence not negative.
Miss Coulter correctly asks what the big deal is about the University of Michigan cases now before Supreme Court. Isn't it plain that favoring some races--blacks, Latinos chiefly--is not equal treatment? Doesn't it offend the 14th Amendment equal protection provision?
...No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
I don't want to duplicate Miss Coulter's authoritative examination of the 14th Amendment and its legislative follow-up, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That law expressly prohibits institutions that receive Federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin. The University of Michigan receives plenty of Federal funds.
Not hard to understand, this idea of equal protection. It doesn't mean that a jury judgment of guilty must be applied equally to the defendant, the judge, jury, bailiffs, and spectators. It means one law applying to all. A speeding law that reduces the speed limits for blacks and Chinese, wouldn't be equal application of the law, equal protection. A desire for "diversity" in traffic offenders wouldn't serve to mask its obvious unfairness.
I've chosen a trivial example, speeding limits, but the principle is clear. We are concerned here with building and maintaining a decent society. Our starting point is that a decent society doesn't change the rules so that two pairs beats three-of-a-kind if Charlie holds them.
It was this kind of behavior that the 14th Amendment and the Civil rights Act were passed to prevent, favoritism by race being primary. It's clearly unjust whichever be the favored race. It's absurd and contradictory to declare "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others," as the pigs do in Orwell's Animal Farm. But isn't this precisely what affirmative action requires?
The argument that affirmative action is action to equalize, to iron flat inequalities of life is specious and rests on separating "equal" from "protection." It implies that equality of condition is our societal goal. But equality of condition cannot be the goal of a decent society because it requires robbing individual human beings of their individuality. It requires that individual differences be treated as if they don't exist. But, they do exist.
The great pretense of affirmative action is that all the hands dealt out by Mother Nature are the same for individuals and for the great groups of individuals we call "races." To maintain that pretense throughout the football season is impossible privately and it's publicly laughable. It is dishonest, too. Time we gave it up, don't you think?
I guess those folks pushing for quotas never read the Civil Rights Act.
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