Equality Update: Plessy and Ferguson Could Not Be Reached for Comment
Posted on | February 16, 2013 | 17 Comments
In Aurora, Colorado, an elementary school set up an after-school tutoring program from which white students were deliberately excluded. When the mother of a 10-year-old white girl complained, she got a phone call from Mission Viejo Elementary principal Andre Pearson explaining that the program is “focused for and designed for children of color.”
This revival of public-school segregation — unexpectedly! — caused Pete Da Tech Guy to notice that Aurora school policy sounded oddly familiar:
We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.
Of course, that’s from the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which upheld the “separate but equal” rationale of segregation
We might pause to wonder what sort of curriculum could be “focused for and designed for children of color,” but that would be a distraction from the larger theme, namely the liberal obsession with Equality. During the recent National Review Institute Summit, Charles Krauthammer felt it necessary to point out, “There is a reason that in the New York Harbor there’s a Statue Of Liberty — it’s not a Statue of Equality.”
This is a distinction liberals don’t want us to spend too much time thinking about, because it takes only a few minutes of reflection for anyone familiar with history to understand what atrocities have been committed in the name of Equality — a term I capitalize, along with words like Progress and Science, when referring to such concepts as objects of idolatrous reverence for ideological fanatics.
Liberals have a religious devotion to these intellectual abstractions, and they are profoundly indifferent to the actual consequences of these ideas when pursued as matters of public policy. If the pursuit of Equality requires that we send women into combat — indeed, Rep. Charles Rangel suggests America’s daughters should be subject to the military draft — anyone who objects is automatically condemned as a hateful bigot.
That kind of radical certainty is incompatible with thoughtfulness, and must be drilled into people’s heads by rigorous indoctrination, carried out in environments where dissenting opinions are suppressed and contradictory facts are excluded from consideration. Who needs gulags and re-education camps when we have places like Fordham University?
Live long enough, and you become accustomed to seeing liberals engaged in weirdly ironic contradictions of their supposed principles. In the 1970s, many peaceniks who had demanded U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam managed to find arguments to minimize, justify or excuse Pol Pot’s murderous reign of terror in Cambodia. This was the point at which the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the 1960s New Left became apparent, a fate that had previously been experienced by the Old Left during the Stalinist era. As always, where leftists lead, liberals follow:
Liberalism has no fixed goal. We will never reach a point at which the liberal will say, “enough.” Grant all his demands today, and tomorrow the liberal will return to demand more.
What one usually hears — when attempting to get liberals to describe their principles or to explain how we are expected to pay for their endless demands for more, more, more — is either:
- A lamentation of present conditions requiring that we “do something” to ameliorate the specified wrong;
- A claim that our policy should be more like that of some European social democracy where p0licies favored by liberals are said to have been proven workable; or
- A rant blaming Republicans for the problems.
These arguments always involve errors of fact or errors of logic, and never suffice to demonstrate that liberal policies are superior to all other possible policies, but liberals always make up for their shortage of facts and logic by their surplus of anger and self-righteousness.
So when you point out one of these glaring contradictions — segregation of “children of color,” instituted as a means of achieving equality — don’t expect liberals to recognize (and certainly, they will not admit) that this might be evidence of the failure of liberalism in general.
If they could be persuaded by evidence, they wouldn’t be liberals.
Comments
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http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere
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http://twitter.com/JohnPSquibob John P. Squibob
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http://twitter.com/wjjhoge WJJ Hoge
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Cube
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Steve Skubinna
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http://wizbangblog.com/ Adjoran
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http://wizbangblog.com/ Adjoran
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Adobe_Walls
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http://boogieforward.us/ K-Bob
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jsn2
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jsn2
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Wombat_socho
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http://opinion.ak4mc.us/ McGehee
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http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere
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http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere
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http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere
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http://boogieforward.us/ K-Bob