Proverbs

Against Affirmative Action

Four Menaces to Society, by Earl Gosnell

Part 1: Against Affirmative Action, Jan 2, 2003

CONTENTS

• Against affirmative action
• LAMENTATIONS: CHAPTER 5
  1. some problems that are a sign to us
  2. Foreigners own our property.
  3. Our children are being raised by single moms.
  4. We pay, or pay too much, for basic services.
  5. Our jobs are demanding and we have little or no time off.
  6. We are dependent on foreign oil.
  7. We are made to feel guilty because our forefathers mistreated their slaves.
  8. Our very laws of the land promote affirmative action.
  9. We get mugged in the city on our way home from work.
  10. Crop failures.
  11. Date rape.
  12. The innocent terminology of our elders is now politically incorrect.
  13. Flipping burgers for a start.
  14. Modern music is no longer edifying.
  15. liberals are not having much fun.
  16. We can't hold our heads up in the international community.
  17. The news is too depressing to watch on TV.
  18. Environmental disaster looms ahead.
  19. But God is a constant.
  1. If you feel far from God,
  2. guess who moved?
  3. divine judgements
• A Biblical view of slavery
• Booker T. Washington.
• Du Bois
• Martin Luther King
• his I have a Dream speech
• the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these;
• adultery, envyings, emulations, variance, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies
• Black English
• understanding the math involved
• women's issues
• The reasons for unequal pay
• sexual integration
• Who can lay down the rules?—
• stressed out in the workplace.
• dryness of spirit
• THE EMERGENCE OF MALE-FEMALE CONFLICT GROUPS
• women's rights
• progressed in stages
• the cure is worse than the disease
• not all women share the feminist views
• homosexuals
• Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail"
• Lionel Hampton's autobiography
• the school desegregation case in 1954
• SUMMARY
• consider race relations from a Biblical (Pauline) perspective
• MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech
• the Missouri debates.
• understand history.
• President Eisenhower's meddling
• an individual perspective
• a best case scenario
• That's cowboy logic
• "Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people."
• Example of Kosovo
• A Lover's Complaint
• MLK was passionately moved by the plight of the Negro
• nonetheless his message contained the sweetness of forgiveness and reconciliation.
• MLK was rude to the extent of crossing lines
• He "did livery falseness in a pride of truth"
• Martin Luther King was the champion guiding the civil rights movement to success
• MLK appealed to a broad range of people
• mesmerizing them with his potent speeches.
• He was manipulative in his speeches.
• a young inexperienced country fell prey to his deception
• argument against affirmative action as an answer.
• Quotas

Four Menaces to Society, by Earl Gosnell

Part 1: Against Affirmative Action, Jan 2, 2003

Prov. 30:21-23, "For three things the earth is disquieted, and for four which it cannot bear: For a servant when he reigneth; and a fool when he is filled with meat; for an odious woman when she is married; and an handmaid that is heir to her mistress." In modern parlance it would be affirmative action, generous welfare, a bitchy wife, and the reversal of, "Blood is thicker than water." We will start with the first portion of this proverb that causes stress to society: "The earth is disquieted, and ... it cannot bear: for a servant when he reigneth," and use the popular term "affirmative action," although Biblical definitions do not always strictly follow political ones. If we touch upon complex social issues, we are not trying to solve them all, only point out a source of stress.

There's a companion passage in Ecclesiastes (10:5-7) "There is an evil I have seen under the sun, as an error which proceedeth from the ruler: Folly is set in great dignity, and the rich sit in low place. I have seen servants upon horses, and princes walking as servants upon the earth." The ruler comes up with some kind of civil rights act, the underclass rides in their pimpmobiles and WASPs are treated like dirt. It does have a familiar ring to it. Maybe the Bible is more up-to-date than I thought.

The servant who reigns has some bad company in the Bible.

2." Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens."

Foreigners own our property.

3. "We are orphans and fatherless, our mothers are as widows."

Our children are being raised by single moms.

4. "We have drunken our water for money; our wood is sold unto us."

We pay, or pay too much, for basic services.

5. "Our necks are under persecution: we labour, and have no rest."

Our jobs are demanding and we have little or no time off.

6. "We have given the hand to the Egyptians, and to the Assyrians, to be satisfied with bread."

We are dependent on foreign oil.

7. "Our fathers have sinned, and are not; and we have borne their iniquities."

We are made to feel guilty because our forefathers mistreated their slaves.

8. "Servants have ruled over us: there is none that doth deliver us out of their hand."

Our very laws of the land are not against affirmative action, but promote it.

9. "We gat our bread with the peril of our lives because of the sword of the wilderness."

We get mugged in the city on our way home from work.

10. "Our skin was black like an oven because of the terrible famine."

Crop failures.

11. "They ravished the women in Zion, and the maids in the cities of Judah."

Date rape.

12. "Princes are hanged up by their hand: the faces of elders were not honoured."

The innocent terminology of our elders is now politically incorrect.

13. "They took the young men to grind, and the children fell under the wood."

Flipping burgers for a start.

14. "The elders have ceased from the gate, the young men from their musick."

Modern music is no longer edifying.

15. "The joy of our heart is ceased; our dance is turned into mourning."

Rush Limbaugh is quick to point out that the liberals are not having much fun.

16. "The crown is fallen from our head: woe unto us, that we have sinned!"

We can't hold our heads up in the international community.

17. "For this our heart is faint; for these things our eyes are dim."

The news is too depressing to watch on TV.

18. "Because of the mountain of Zion, which is desolate, the foxes walk upon it."

Environmental disaster looms ahead.

19. "Thou, O LORD, remainest for ever; thy throne from generation to generation."

But God is a constant.

20. "Wherefore dost thou forget us for ever, and forsake us so long time?"

If you feel far from God, ...

21. "Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old."

... guess who moved?

22. "But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us."

9/11

A Biblical view of slavery has been much discussed, so we will give only one quote from John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism¹

Paul accepted the institution of slavery as one of the facts of life. He made no effort to call slaves into freedom. He expressed a kind of pastoral compassion for the slaves but contented himself with fine-tuning the institution of slavery itself, so that it might be kinder and gentler. Paul urged the runaway slave Onesimus to return to his master, Philemon, and therefore to bondage, with the hope that Philemon would treat him kindly because of his service to Paul (Philem. 1:10ff). He enjoined the slaves in Colossae to "obey in everything those who are your earthly masters" (Col. 3:22). He balanced that admonition by urging masters to "treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a master in heaven" (Col. 4:1).

Apparently for Paul justice and fairness could be achieved inside the system of slavery by urging kindness. Here ... is an attitude that is difficult for this generation the world over, and on the lips of any politician today it would receive overwhelming rejection, even in a nation as violently race divided as South Africa. Yet for almost nineteen hundred years, slavery lived in the Christian West justified by an appeal to Paul and other biblical texts. There was not in the Christian West a sufficient moral sensitivity to challenge this inhumane institution. The dichotomy is best seen for me in that most overtly religious section of the United States, the evangelical Bible belt of the South, was the place where slavery flourished and segregation, the stepchild of slavery, was clung to with tenacity even into the latter years of the twentieth century.

The nation's foremost black leader from the 1890's until his death in 1915 was Booker T. Washington. ...

Washington attained prominence in 1895 when he set forth his racial views in a famous address in Atlanta. The first task of blacks, he insisted, must be to acquire useful vocational skills. Once blacks proved their economic value to society, he predicted, racism would fade away; meanwhile, they must patiently accept their lot in life. ...

White Americans much admired Washington, who traveled widely, lectured frequently, and once dined at the White House with Theodore Roosevelt. His autobiography, Up From Slavery (1901), recounted his rise from poverty through honesty, hard work, and the help of kindly patrons...

Many blacks revered Washington as well, especially in the South, but northern blacks increasingly challenged his dominance. ...

Washington's most potent challenge came from W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963).

... A cultivated scholar of refined manners and a distinguished appearance, Du Bois set forth his differences with Washington in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Rejecting Washington's call for patience and the exclusive cultivation of manual skills, Du Bois demanded for blacks full access to the same educational advantages and intellectual opportunities open to whites. Furthermore, he declared, blacks must struggle ceaselessly against all forms of racial discrimination. In his assertiveness and militancy, Du Bois set the direction of black activism in the new century.

—Boyer et al, The Enduring Vision²

Let's look at our symbolic Negro from the Du Bois camp.

From 1957, when Martin Luther King became prominent in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the FBI monitored King's activities under its vague authority to investigate "subversives." ... The FBI's efforts to neutralize or even destroy King were intensified with King's increasing popularity as exemplified by his I have a Dream speech before 250,000 in Washington D.C. in August of 1963. ... The efforts now escalated to include physical and photographic surveillance and the placement of illegal bugs in his living quarters. The tapes of conversations in a Washington hotel were used by the FBI to imply that King engaged in extramarital sexual activities. ... At the very time King was receiving great honors such as the Nobel Peace Prize, Time magazine's "Man of the Year" award, and numerous honorary degrees, the FBI countered with briefings, distribution of the tapes to newspeople and columnists, and congressional testimony about King's ... private behavior. The FBI even briefed officials of the National Council of Churches and other church bodies about King's alleged deviance.

—D. Stanley Eitzen, In Conflict and Order³

---

"Martin Luther King was given to fooling around a bit, apparently, in his extramarital area. So the [FBI] pursued him relentlessly and got his whole life on tape. They'd bug his hotel rooms when he was on the road and come up with some gem like: 'Oh, Martin, your dick is so big!' Then they'd call his wife and play the tape into the phone."

... "The whole world remembers Martin Luther King for 'I have a Dream.' Only J. Edgar Hoover and his pathetic acolytes would remember him for 'Oh, Martin, your dick is so big!'"

—Kinky Friedman, The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover⁴

Let's see how that Galatians passage stands up against his 8/28/63 "I Have a Dream" speech.⁵

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. ... One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the unalienable right of liberty ...

America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

The Declaration of Independence drafted by Thomas Jefferson declared: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." It is customary to grow misty-eyed about the elegance and profundity of that formulation. It speaks in the vocabulary of natural rights, which many Americans find congenial, though without examining the full implications of the vocabulary.

It was indeed stirring rhetoric, entirely appropriate for the purpose of rallying the colonists and justifying their rebellion to the world. But some caution is in order. The ringing phrases are hardly useful, indeed may be pernicious, if taken as they commonly are, as a guide to action, governmental or private. Then the words press eventually towards extremes of liberty and the pursuit of happiness that court personal license and social disorder. The necessary qualifications assumed by Jefferson and the signers of the Declaration were not expressed in the document. It would rather have spoiled the effect to have added "up to a point" or "within reason" to Jefferson's resounding generalities.

The Declaration's pronouncement of equality was sweeping but sufficiently ambiguous so that even slave holders, of whom Jefferson was one, subscribed to it. That ambiguity was dangerous because it invited the continual expansion of the concept and its requirements. The Declaration was not, clearly, a document that was understood at the time to promise equality of condition, not even among white male Americans. The meaning of equality was heavily modified by the American idea of reward according to individual achievement and reverence for private property.

Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah⁶

The passage of time has thrown some light on King's intelligence. Seems he plagiarized his doctoral thesis. Boston University researchers concluded, "There is no question but that Dr. King plagiarized in the dissertation."⁷ Plagiarism falls under (Gal. 5:19-20), "Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; ... emulations."

We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check.

Our world is not all that rich; in some ways we are teetering on the brink of environmental catastrophe. We could use some labor intensive solutions other than importing illegal aliens. But MLK wanted it to be some other way. Gal. 5:19-20, "Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; ... variance."

There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until ...

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal." ... that day when all of God's children, Black men and white men ... will be able ...

It's evident from the list that Martin Luther King was trying to accomplish his goals in the flesh. I mean, "adultery, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings." The people advocating reparations can put it into perspective:

"So some of those [frivolous] filings would be to your best case what historians say Malcolm X was to Martin Luther King. Malcolm made King's once dicey demands look mainstream," observed Hitt. "That's not a bad strategy," replied Scruggs.

—William Grigg, "The True Cost of RReparations"⁸

In the late eighties I worked briefly as a temporary employee for a university. I had a Negro boss. They were monitoring traffic flow to develop a parking plan. One day I was to stand on a corner with a clipboard and write down the license numbers of cars going down the one street. A girl with a clipboard farther down would record the licenses of cars going by her, so we'd deduce the flow, subtracting the ones that had turned off. He explained it to us in his office, then drove us to our sites.

Well, I started recording numbers, but the traffic flow soon increased to where I didn't have time to write six numbers/figures for each, but I could write three. Most plates had three letters and three numbers. Since a three letter combination from a twenty-six letter alphabet gives more unique designations, 26³, than three numbers, 1000, I just wrote down the letters.

At the end of the day the boss picked us up and looked at our clipboard. The girl had written down only the three numbers. The results were unusable for comparison. He asked me why didn't I write numbers instead since he'd told us to use them as we were leaving to go to our spots. I said that I didn't understand what he said as we were entering the car and he was right next to the girl and I was on the other side of the vehicle and there was background noise. I'd just assumed it to be light conversation. We didn't have a budget to do the study again; the parking would be based on those results.

I didn't mention, though it was the case, that it was his lack of diction and poor enunciation that made it difficult for me to understand his speech in the office, and impossible in the field. It's what I'd call typical Black speech, unsuitable for leadership.

Teachers [on] Black English. Typically they view the children's speech as "bad English" characterized by "lazy pronunciation," "poor grammar," and "short, jagged words."

—Dorothy Seymour, "Black Children, Black Speech"⁹

---

It is ... well known that a voice of the right kind is the most precious quality of a man in command.

—Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality¹⁰

We hear quite another line in the media, more of a lamentation when the demographics of positions held do not closely follow population statistics. Is the media always reflecting a true problem by such reporting? Is it even important to?

Journalist Walter Lippman gave this definition of a newspaper's responsibility: "To bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, to make a picture of reality on which men can act."

—Mona McCormick, The New York Times Guide to Reference Materials¹¹

John Allen Paulos, A Mathematician Reads The Newspaper¹²

Company Charged with Ethnic Bias in Hiring

Test Disparities Need Not Imply Racism

The Comedian Mort Sahl remarks that some newspapers might report a nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia with the headline WORLD ENDS: WOMEN AND MINORITIES HARDEST HIT. Sarcasm and hyperbole aside, victimization and the differential treatment of groups, whether intentional or not, are the basis for many a news story. The percentage of African-American students at elite colleges, the proportion of women in managerial positions, the ratio of Hispanic representatives in legislatures have all been written about extensively. Oddly enough, the shape of normal bell-shaped statistical curves sometimes has unexpected consequences for such situations. For example, even a slight divergence between the averages of different population groups is accentuated at the extreme ends of these curves, and these extremes often receive inordinate attention in the press. There are other inferences that have been drawn from this fact, some involving social policy issues such as affirmative action and jobs programs. The issue is a charged one, and I don't wish to endorse any dubious claims, but merely to clarify some mathematical points.

As an illustration, assume that two populations vary along some dimension—height for example. Although it is not essential to the argument, make the further assumption that the two groups' heights vary in a normal or bell-shaped manner (see diagram). Then even if the average height of one group is only slightly greater than the average height of the other, people from the taller group will constitute a large majority among the very tall (the right tail of the curve). Likewise, people from the shorter group will constitute a large majority among the very short (the left tail of the curve). This is true even though the bulk of the people from both groups are of roughly average stature. Thus if group A has a mean height of 5' 8" and group B a mean height of 5' 7", then (depending on the exact variability of the heights) perhaps 90 percent or more of those of 6' 2" will be from group A. In general, any differences between the two groups will always be greatly accentuated at the extremes.

Two Normal Curves



Small differences in the mean lead to large differences at the extremes.

These simple ideas can be used and misused by people of very different political persuasions. My concerns, as I've said, are only with some mathematical aspects of a very complicated story, let me again illustrate with a somewhat idealized case. Many people submit their job applications to a large corporation. Some of these people are Mexican and some are Korean, and the corporation uses a single test to determine which jobs to offer to whom. For whatever reasons (good, bad, justifiable or not), let's assume that although the scores of both groups are normally distributed with similar variability, those of the Mexican applicants are slightly lower on average than those of the Korean applicants.

The corporation's personnel officer notes the relatively small differences between the groups' means and observes with satisfaction that the many mid-level positions are occupied by both Mexicans and Koreans. She is puzzled, however, by the preponderance of Koreans assigned to the relatively few top jobs, those requiring an exceedingly high score in the qualifying test.

The personnel officer does further research and discovers that most of the holders of the comparably few bottom jobs, assigned to applicants because of their very low scores on the qualifying test, are Mexican. She may suspect racism, but the result might just as well be an unforeseen consequence of the way the normal distribution works. Paradoxically, if she lowers the threshold for entrance to mid-level jobs, she will actually end up increasing the percentage of Mexicans in the bottom category.

The fact is that groups differ in history, interests, and cultural values and along a whole host of other dimensions (which are impossible to disentangle). These differences constitute the group's identity and are what makes it possible even to talk about a collection of people as a group. Confronted with these social and historical dissimilarities, then, we shouldn't be astonished that member's scores on some standardized test are also likely to differ in mean and, much more substantially, at the extremes of the test-score distribution. (Much of this discussion is valid even if the distribution is not the normal bell-shaped one.) Such statistical disparities are not necessarily evidence of racism or ethnic prejudice, although, without a doubt, they sometimes are. One can and should debate whether the tests in question are appropriate for the purpose at hand, but one shouldn't be surprised when normal curves behave normally. As long as I'm issuing pronouncements, let me make another: the basic unit upon which our society or, indeed, any liberal society ("indeed" is a sure sign of something pompous coming up) is founded in the individual, not the group; I think it should stay that way.

Aside from having a questionable rationale, schemes of strict proportional representation are impossible to implement. Another thought experiment illustrates this point. Imagine a company—let's call it PC. Industries—operating in a community that is 25 percent black, 75 percent white, 5 percent homosexual, and 95 percent heterosexual. Unknown to PCI and the community is the fact that only 2 percent of the blacks are homosexual, whereas 6 percent of the whites are. Making a concerted attempt to assemble a work force of 1,000 that "fairly" reflects the community, the company hires 750 whites and 250 blacks. However, just 5 of the blacks (or 2 percent) would be homosexual, whereas 45 of the whites (or 6 percent) would be (totaling 50, 5 percent of all workers). Despite these efforts, the company could still be accused by its black employees of being homophobic, since only 2 percent of the black employees would be homosexual, not the communitywide 5 percent. The company's homosexual employees could likewise claim that the company was racist, since only 10 percent of their members would be black, not the community wide 25 percent. White heterosexuals would certainly make similar complaints.

To complete the reductio ad absurdum, factor in several other groups: Hispanics, women, Norwegians, even. Their memberships will likely also intersect to various unknown degrees.¹³ People will identify with varying intensity with various groups to which they belong (whose definitions are vague at best). The backgrounds and training across these various cross sections and intersections are extremely unlikely to be uniform. Statistical disparities will necessarily result.

Racism and homophobia and all other forms of group hatreds are real enough without making them our unthinking first inference when confronted with such disparities.

Who would have anticipated that it would be liberal Republicans in the Nixon Administration who would fulfill the cynical dream of Judge Smith when he added the words "or sex" to the bitterly won civil rights laws of the sixties. Smith thought that the thicket of sex discrimination would ultimately confound and discredit all the antidiscrimination efforts of government—in fact all the highest egalitarian impulses of liberalism. And he may have been right. ...

A key reason for our current failure is the tendency of bureaucrats and social theorists to look upon the society as an aggregation of individual units, scarcely differentiated except in income and employment. This bias is understandable. It derives from a seductive misconception of democracy and of the great moral mandates of our founding fathers. The assumption that "all men are created equal ... endowed ... with certain unalienable Rights" has been interpreted to mean that the laws of the land must be sex-blind: that men and women are essentially the same and wherever possible should play similar roles in statistically similar patterns throughout the economy (and where impossible, we should feel guilty about it). As government attempts to foster equal opportunity for liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is urged to apply the same standards to all citizens as individuals, whether they are married or single, young or middle-aged, male or female. Similarly, when the feminists speak of the need to consider us all "human beings" and "people," what they mean is autonomous rational individuals: men and women without powerful sexual drives reaching into all their relationships and without kinship ties binding them to their very identities. But such "human beings" exist only in actuarial tables and in the minds of fastidious economists and sociologists.

When such thinkers address the problems of equal opportunity, moreover, they seem to think exclusively in terms of individual financial prospects. The pursuit of happiness and the promotion of the general welfare are to be measured in the comparative income, housing, and employment of independent citizens. The sexual constitution is to be ignored. A conspicuous instance of this mode of thought is, of course, the Equal Rights Amendment, which declares it unconstitutional to differentiate between men and women in most public policy.

Yet for most people, the pursuit of happiness is inextricably tied to sexual relationships. The general welfare is best served when most men and women are socialized through love, marriage, and family. At the very core of these relationships and institutions, moreover, are differences — sexual, financial, and motivational. A policy that ignores or counteracts these differences in the name of statistical or numerical equality will tend to retard familial creation and male affirmation, and subvert the general welfare and the pursuit of happiness. The numerical symmetries will come at the expense of possibilities for real equality in human fulfillment. ...

In another major demand NOW "insists" that the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) devote itself to fulfilling the noble legacy of Judge Smith: the EEOC is to enforce laws against sex discrimination "with the same vigor as it enforces prohibitions against racial discrimination." Once again the women are trying to ride on the shoulders of aggrieved blacks. Once again they try to foist on us the notion that the differences between men and women are of no more practical significance than the differences between whites and blacks.

—George F. Gilder, Sexual Suicide¹⁴

---

One particularly offensive tactic of the rampants is to, compare the plight of American women with that of the American blacks—presumably antebellum and Aunt Jemima. Were I a militant black man, and offered this particularly odious comparison by this particular kind of white women, I would be strongly tempted to give her a foot in the tail. The analogy is patronizing, demeaning to the black cause, and of course untrue. Attempted marriages between the lib and the homosexual cause are equally patronizing, demeaning, and untrue.

—Charles McCabe, Tall Girls are Grateful¹⁵

---

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.

We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness....

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishing of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

...

He allows her in Church, as well as State, but a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church.

...

He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God.

...

Now, in view of this entire disenfranchisement of one half the people, etc.

—Elizabeth Stanton, "Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions"¹⁶

In an economic sphere:

Crucial to the sexual constitution of employment is that, in one way or another, it assures that over the whole society, class by class, most men will make more money than most women. Above an absolute minimum that varies from country to country, pay and poverty are relative. What matters most for men, what pay is most importantly relative to, is women. A man who does not make as much money as the relevant women in his life or class, or his place of work, will often abandon his job and will pursue his women chiefly in the predatory masculine spirit that the feminists so understandably deplore.

The feminist contention that women do not generally receive equal pay for equal work, correct in statistical terms, may in part reflect a preference for male need and aggressiveness over female credentials. But in essence, the additional pay is part of a tacit social contract by which men are induced to repress antisocial patterns. On the immediate and superficial level, justice and efficiency—so stressed by the feminists—have little to do with it.

Of course, efficiency will be considered. To make the pay differentials too great would cause serious distortions. The marketplace must ultimately prevail. But a marginal bias in favor of men in the labor force will best promote economic and social order. It can be asserted with the greatest confidence that a modern society that did not socialize its males would be neither efficient, nor tolerable for women. ...

The reasons for unequal pay thus are numerous:

1. the need for male social initiative;
2. the need to give men a way to counterbalance female sexual superiority;
3. the need to give money a positive effect on family creation and maintenance;
4. the social need to induce men to follow careers and validate sexual identity in a socially affirmative way;
5. the greater propensity of males to spend their money on the opposite sex;
6. the greater social damage inflicted by unemployed males;
7. the greater psychological dependency of males on their jobs;
8. the indispensability of the alternative woman's role of socializing males and raising children.

As a general rule, relative female affluence has a negative effect in each of these areas. It retards social initiatives, enhances female dominance, deters family creation and maintenance, and subverts constructive male sexual expression. The money tends to cluster around the woman rather than support a couple. Her economic superiority undermines the sexual constitution and causes social breakdowns.

It should not be surprising therefore that men are paid more than women in virtually every economically successful society in the world. It is surprising that American men so thoroughly support the demand of the women's movement for a major governmental drive to achieve genuinely equal pay for equal or comparable work. For under current conditions of sexual disorder, this "reform" would promote most of the goals of the "extremists"—particularly the dissolution of the nuclear family.

—George F. Gilder, Sexual Suicide¹⁷

Throughout man's history, and above all, among primitive peoples, work groups have always been sexually differentiated. Men work together and women work together. But we rarely hear, either in history or in cultural anthropology, of work groups of mixed sex. Men hunt and women tend the village. Men build boats and women grow yams. In Europe women have traditionally milked cows, in America men; but on neither side of the Atlantic has milking been done by sexually mixed groups.

—Peter F. Drucker, Management¹⁸

Who can lay down the rules?—Physicians, teachers, ministers and parents are often called upon to establish definite rules for the conduct of the unmarried. When such questions come up they must be answered freely and honestly, but before they can be so answered, the instructor must know what he is talking about. The whole subject of sexual science has been so neglected, its essentials have been so clouded in mystery and modesty, that not one man or woman in ten actually does know what he is talking about when he attempts to give advice.

— J.L. Nichols, A.M., Safe Counsel¹⁹

To take on tasks for which one lacks competence is irresponsible behavior.

An institution, and especially a business enterprise, has to acquire whatever competence is needed to take responsibility for its impacts. But in areas of social responsibility other than impacts, right and duty to act are limited by competence. ...

What the limits of competence are depends in part on circumstances. If a member of a climbing team develops acute appendicitis in the high Himalayas and is almost certain to die unless operated on, any medical man in the group will operate, even though he may be a dermatologist who has never done a single operation in his life. The dermatologist, though a qualified physician, will be considered irresponsible and vulnerable to both a malpractice suit and a conviction for manslaughter, should he operate on an appendix in a place where a qualified surgeon, or even a general practitioner, are within reach.

Management therefore needs to know at the very least what it and its institution are truly incompetent for. Business, as a rule, will be in this position of absolute incompetence in an "intangible" area.

—Peter F. Drucker, Management²⁰

Our workplace is getting stressed out because employers are not heeding the right boundaries.

The Thomas Hill episode established a dominant paradigm of sexual harassment. In this paradigm, any manifestation of sexuality in the workplace ... is abusive if someone decides — perhaps long after the fact — that it was 'unwelcome.' Even if they don't mean harm, men who 'just don't get it' bear all the blame for sexual conflicts.

Faludi herself writes that women who are true adults 'acknowledge that sexual encounters are often muddy and fumbled affairs and that ... the response should be nuanced and in scale to the offense,' which sometimes means not reporting it.

Most people with no ideological agenda surely recognize that women contribute a great deal to 'sexualizing' the workplace.

—Cathy Young, "Groping Towards Sanity: Why the Clinton Sex Scandals are Changing How we Talk About Sexual Harassment"²¹

On the other hand, life is rarely ideal. The hours of satisfaction are frequently bought by weeks of drudgery—emotional as well as physical. Some of the more commonly acknowledged disadvantages of attempting the impossible, such as combining several full time activities, include lack of time for oneself (soaking in a hot tub of water is absolutely out), being unable to complete a task begun and—of course—physical exhaustion.

A different kind of disadvantage is the feeling of rage and resentment at the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) discrimination at the office — being denied leadership in a project "because we were sure you didn't want to go out of town," or being asked to take on a larger workload "because you're so efficient at that kind of thing." Life in the changing society has not yet eliminated discrimination against the career woman — it has only been disguised.

In spite of the advantages of independence and autonomy that the career woman has, it is ironic that in some ways, she is forced to become even more dependent on others. The 7 A.M. call from the child-care provider saying she (or he) can't take the children today or the message from the weekly cleaning lady (sexist again?) canceling her commitment for three weeks because she has decided to take an unscheduled vacation are events familiar to every career woman with children and a semi-chaotic household.

The system overload is on the woman who works full time, often coming from logistical breakdowns at home. The pressures at work are traumatic enough. When combined with criticism from other women — who have chosen other lifestyles — about "escaping one's responsibility to stay home and raise her own children," the load can become too much and the career woman may succumb to feelings of defeat and ultimately depression.

All of the above disadvantages have been mentioned by other writers, but there is yet another disadvantage rarely discussed —one that I have come to recognize only in the past few years. I refer to the feeling of apartness, of separateness from others. It is not loneliness but rather the sense of being different and unlike anyone else in practically all situations. Perhaps this sense of apartness could also be interpreted as uniqueness, and one might then wonder why it draws a negative rather than a positive response. A common example of this feeling of apartness is in a male-dominated sphere such as a medical school faculty where questions or statements by female faculty members seem to be challenged more frequently — or worse yet, ignored. The feeling of apartness includes some elements of exclusion, probably based on outdated and inappropriate mores about male-female relationships. Long-term relationships between male and female co-workers are highly suspect, and the availability of a mentor, especially in a highly competitive environment, is sheer fantasy on the part of any aspiring career woman.

Other elements make up this feeling of aloneness. In relating to other career women, even those in one's own specialty, interests and degree of investment rarely overlap sufficiently for close camaraderie. Many professional colleagues have chosen not to marry and/or not to have children. Others do not share the same interests outside of work and home (such as music, weaving, politics, etc.).

Finally, this feeling of aloneness may be exacerbated by a conscious decision by the career woman to generate more aloneness. A promising friendship with another woman may not be pursued because building that friendship requires time, and time is of prime consideration in any career woman's life. Priorities must be set and acted on unswervingly or the full-time career woman may find herself the victim of chaos.

—The Liberated Woman, The Ann Landers Encyclopedia A to Z²²

In a disorganized society, the lack of consensus is further evidenced in the uncertainty with which many of the major roles are defined. The major ascribed statuses and their accompanying roles are especially subject to these ambiguities. The wife in our society is not certain whether she should play the role of mother, gainful employee, glamorous mistress, or light-hearted companion. Some of these roles are mutually compatible and others are not. Many wives attempt to combine all of these roles in accordance with the conflicting expectations of our society, and in the process suffer partial or ignominious failure. The disorganization of the family under such ambiguous conditions is apparent. A woman's attempt to live up to all of these incompatible roles as a wife often results in personal frustration and insecurity.

—C.F. Mirra Komarovsky, "Cultural Contradictions and Sex Roles"²⁴

For it is the spirit of woman that is going dry, not the mechanics that are wanting. Mechanically, woman has gained in the past generation. . . . [But] with our garnered free time, we are more apt to drain our creative springs than to refill them. With our pitchers, we attempt sometimes to water a field, not a garden. We throw ourselves indiscriminately into committees and causes. Not knowing how to feed the spirit, we try to muffle its demands in distractions. ...

In other times, women had in their lives more forces which centered them whether or not they realized it. ... Their very seclusion in the home gave them time alone. Many of their duties were conducive to a quiet contemplative drawing together of the self. They had more creative tasks to perform. Nothing feeds the center so much as creative work, even humble kinds like cooking and sewing. Baking bread, weaving cloth, putting up preserves, teaching and singing to children, must have been far more nourishing than being the family chauffeur or shopping at supermarkets, or doing housework with mechanical aids. ... In housework, as in the rest of life, the curtain of mechanization has come down between the mind and the hand.

—Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift From the Sea²⁵

Modern women are overworked, overstressed, and commonly feel unsupported and overwhelmed with good reason: At no other time in history has so much been expected of them. At least five days a week, they put on a uniform and march into an eight to twelve-hour battle. When they come home, they feel the need to clean house, make dinner, do laundry, love and nurture the kids, and also be pleasing and happy as well as romantically receptive to their mates. It's just too much to ask of themselves, and it's making them feel split inside.

At work, women are required to behave according to the traditional masculine rules of conduct. At home, they have to switch to being warm, giving, and feminine. It's no wonder women complain that they need a wife to greet them with love and tenderness at the end of the day.

Even a contemporary stay-home mother has a more difficult job than her own mother did because, with most other mothers at work and her kids' playmates at day care, she lacks the traditional company and support of other women.

In the past, a woman was proud to say that she was a full-time wife and mother. Now she may even feel embarrassed when asked, "What do you do?" Isolated from the support of other women, she must go it alone, as the value of her commitment is largely unacknowledged by the world.

Still, while women now need more support than at any other time in history, men also miss the ego boost they traditionally received from their mates.

—John Gray, Ph.D., Mars and Venus in Touch²⁶

"The great principle," said Chief Justice Shaw, "advanced by the learned and eloquent advocate for the plaintiff, is, that by the constitution and laws of Massachusetts, all persons without distinction of age or sex, birth or color, origin or condition, are equal before the law. ... But, when this great principle comes to be applied to the actual and various conditions of persons in society, it will not warrant the assertion, that men and women are legally clothed with the same civil and political powers, and that children and adults are legally to have the same functions and be subject to the same treatment; but only that the rights of all, as they are settled and regulated by law, are equally entitled to the paternal consideration and protection of the law for their maintenance and security."

—Roberts v. City of Boston, 5 Cush. 198 (1849)²⁷

THE EMERGENCE OF MALE-FEMALE CONFLICT GROUPS²⁸

Historians seem to agree that for the first time "women emerged in the early nineteenth century as a distinct interest group."²⁹ This means that about that time some women became conscious of their deprivation qua group and sought to challenge and end the subjugation under which they had been collectively placed by men. The challenge to this coercion may be described as a conflict relationship. We may define conflict as "a struggle over values, behaviors, power, and resources, in which each opponent seeks to achieve his goals usually at some expense to the other."³⁰ How "expensive" one wishes to make the conflict for his challenger can be categorized in several ways. One type of conflict may be described as "zero sum." In this conflict A wants to destroy B completely, e.g., the Allies vs. the Nazis in World War II, Far more common is the "mixed motive" type of conflict (or game) in which, while A wants to gain certain objectives, it is decidedly in A's best interest to see that B makes gains too, and conversely for B. For if either A or B is totally "wiped out," then his opponent stands to lose considerable benefit too.

It looks like the cause of women's rights is not going to prevail this year. I for one blame this largely on the concurrent phenomenon called Women's Liberation, which has little or nothing to do with the Women's Rights Movement.

Women's Lib is a radical, even revolutionary, movement which grew out of the radical brouhaha's of the 60's. The Women's Rights Movement is conservative, has a long and distinguished history...

But let a distinguished leader of the Women's Rights Movement, Catherine East, speak out on the differences between the two ... as she sees them:

"The term, Women's Liberation, can be appropriately applied to only a small segment of the Women's Rights Movement ... These women, primarily radical feminists, have thus far been mainly concerned with analyzing the origins, nature, and extent of women's subservient role in society, with an emphasis on the psychology of oppression..."

Mrs. East continued: "The Women's Rights Movement is largely composed of the kind of women that are in the National Association of Women Lawyers, the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the National Federation of Business and Women's Professional Clubs, the Women's Equity Action League, the YWCA and the League of Women Voters, and they are, by and large, pretty conservative as a group." ...

The Women's Rights Movement asks for equality under the law and for freedom of choice for a woman to decide what she does with her life. It does not tinker with the institution of marriage, or impeach the institution of the family, or seek to alter the ordained, and indeed natural, role of the sexes. When the distinction between the two movements is understood by one and all, women's rights will be constitutionally assured, and a good thing too.

—Charles McCabe, Tall Girls are Grateful³¹

Though this first phase of the movement did not achieve full equality for women, its accomplishments were substantial. In addition to winning women the right to vote, to hold office, to own property in their own names, to enter universities, and to enter most professions and occupations, the movement established the legitimacy of employment for women of the middle and upper classes. Previously, there had never been any opportunities outside the home for these women, other than serving as governess to a wealthy family, working in a family-owned business, or entering a [convent]. Thus, in opening such occupations as nurse, teacher, secretary, and social worker, the movement effected a major revolution. After these early successes, however, the movement virtually died out.

The newer women's rights movement, which got under way in the 1960s, picks up where the earlier one left off. It seems to eliminate the remaining forms of economic inequity between the sexes — unequal pay, unequal access to jobs, and unequal opportunities for promotion. But it goes further: despite substantial differences in the specific goals and methods of its leaders, the basic message of the movement is that women must break out of the restrictive molds in which society casts them.

In various ways, leaders of the movement maintain that women, like men, should be allowed to develop, to perform, and to relate to those around them, not as females but as human beings. Thus their great hostility to the mentality (so widespread in the media and advertising industries) that portrays women largely as sex objects. ... Furthermore, they resent the view that women should necessarily be content with a wife-mother role, while men take it for granted that their husband-father role will be supplemented by a meaningful role outside the family.

—Gerhard Lenski and Jean Lenski, Human Societies³²

Women's rights movements have sought to combat these inequities in various ways, although most feminist writers have conceded that they are very deeply entrenched. ... The points at issue here are complex, and feminist writers have tended to be divided about them. The achievement of full sexual equality within work outside the home is not necessarily a desirable end in itself in the context of a capitalist economy.

—Anthony Giddens, Sociology³³

For example, women who center their lives around their husbands and children may consider feminism a threat to their most cherished values. From this point of view, feminism amounts to an effort to revise the law, the workplace, and the family—in short, to remake all of society—according to the radical political agenda of a few. Feminists, then, would dispose of the traditional values that have guided life and protected individual liberties in the United States for centuries. Additionally, some women believe that, in the process of recasting the conventional "feminine" spheres of life, including the home and the family, women will lose rather than gain power and personal identity.

—John J. Macionis, Sociology³⁴

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I've watched those who, largely, led the women's charge, who blunted it and finally discredited it, who messed their own nests until they mutilated their cause.

—Ken Jackson, Control³⁵

During our conversation, one of the editorial board members expressed frustration that it seems as if the playing field will never be level, that racism will never completely end.

With a lot of work, Americans can ensure that someday all people will be treated equally simply because they are human, and with no other considerations.

—Michael Kleckner, "Slavery reparations should be made systematically"³⁶

Many homosexuals worked in the Civil Rights Movement, not because they loved the blacks, but because they shared their plight of "discrimination" and because they were angry and wanted to rebel anyway. The success of the black community after enactment of civil rights legislation in 1964 was not lost on the homosexuals. They realized that they could force acceptance on sleeping Americans if they became active. They got their chance in New York City.

June 27th, 1969, is another "red" letter day in the rise to prominence of the homosexual movement. That was the night the New York City Police raided a homosexual bar called "Stonewall Inn." Instead of slinking off into the night, homosexuals threw bottles and cans at policemen, and a riot ensued. Now each year a "Gay Pride Week" is celebrated with a giant parade in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities. ...

Today they have most of the things they want: privacy, vocational acceptance in most fields, and very little harassment by the police at their favorite bar or bath. The hot-blooded young homosexuals aren't satisfied, however, for their ultimate goal has still eluded them: equal acceptance! Until Americans say "Gay is just as good as straight," they won't give up.

—Tim LaHaye, The Unhappy Gays³⁷

Can we learn anything from a rich man, like Bill Gates? I'm sure Mr. Gates has made some mistakes in his life (like King Solomon) but I recently read some remarks he made while speaking to high schoolers at Whitney High School in Visalia, California that I think fall under the category of good advice. Here are some excerpts:

Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity.
Your grandparents had a different word for
burger flipping—they called it opportunity.

If one is not content, per Paul, per Booker T. Washington, then he may try to fight the system, per MLK et al, using questionable tactics resulting in a stressed out society per Proverbs.

Let's look at how he responded to sincere criticism accusing him of being a troublemaker, and see his example:

Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail"³⁹
The letter was a reply to eight Alabama clergymen who, in a public comment, had condemned demonstrations in the streets.

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling our present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom, if ever, do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all of the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would be engaged in little else in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I would like to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in public schools, it is rather strange and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws. One may well ask, "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: There are just and there are unjust laws. I would agree with Saint Augustine that, "An unjust law is no law at all."⁴⁰

I don't know if you've read Lionel Hampton's autobiography yet—the bookstore had a zillion copies when I bought mine, but since his death, they may have sold out—, but if you haven't you may not be aware of this arcane bit:

I remember one time Walter White, head of the NAACP, ... told me about what led up to the Supreme Court decision in the school desegregation case in 1954. Walter told me he had gone to Roosevelt about school desegregation; he had gone to Truman about school desegregation. Truman told him, "Well, Walter, I'd like to help you, but you know the southern senators won't go for it. I'm sorry I can't help you." So when Eisenhower came in, Walter decided that time was running out and that he was going to take a chance on Eisenhower.

He phoned Eisenhower and requested an appointment. He said he went there and listed all the reasons why school desegregation was wrong. He said that if the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case Brown v. Board of Education and ruled [for] desegregation, it would break the back of segregation in American society. He said, "Mr. President, this is the last chance for you to help us." Eisenhower listened, didn't say a word. But then he picked up the telephone, and said, "Get me Chief Justice Earl Warren." And he got on the phone with Warren, and he said he knew the president was not supposed to put pressure on the Supreme Court, but he was going to send Walter White over to talk to him about the case. And the Supreme Court decided to hear the case and ruled in favor of the NAACP lawyers and desegregation.

—Lionel Hampton, Hamp⁴¹

"The Republican nominee is Frank Fasano, who's as ruthless as they come. A Supreme Court ruling which erodes capital punishment will give Fasano another weapon to pummel you with from now to next November. Caroline Masters owes you—you're the only reason she's there." Glancing at Avi Gold, the Attorney General finished. "You can't call Masters and tell her what to do. But if Avi intervenes, as I've directed, it sends a signal even the Chief Justice can't ignore. And it gives us cover in the next election."⁴²

MLK's "strange and paradoxical" support of the desegregation law while opposing other laws takes on a whole new twist when we find such impropriety in the making of that "just" law. Comparing:

Human Action and Free Will⁴³

To play rugby is to do certain things in accordance with a set of rules and conventions. The players on the field did not themselves invent those rules and conventions. They have a history and a present social context, and unless we take some account of that history and context we shall not understand what is going on. ... An account of what the game of rugby is must involve reference to the rules and conventions of rugby; and the rules and conventions of rugby cannot in turn be defined in terms simply of a given game of rugby: its being a game of rugby at all is dependent upon its conformity with these rules and conventions, which therefore have an existence independent of their exemplification in it. When in 1823 William Webb Ellis picked up the ball and ran with it, he is sometimes said to have `invented' the game of rugby football; but if this has any meaning at all it is a meaning conferred by hindsight. What he actually did on that occasion was to break the rules of the game he was supposed to be playing. The conventions and rules of games change, or are changed, from time to time; but what changes or is changed must already exist in order to change.

Equality, the dominant theme of the Warren Court, made a sensational appearance soon after Earl Warren became Chief Justice in 1953. In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education held that racial segregation in public schools violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. I [Robert H. Bork] have argued elsewhere [The Tempting of America, pp. 74-83.] that, though the decision was correct and could have been supported by an analysis that took into account the original understanding of the amendment's meaning by those who wrote and ratified it, the Court's weak and disingenuous opinion, by the Chief Justice, indicates that the Justices believed they were departing from the Constitution in order to promote a desirable equality. The unfortunate result was that the Justices were encouraged to more adventures in egalitarianism that, unlike Brown, really did depart from the Constitution.

It was in the areas of race and sex that radical egalitarianism proved most potent. So strong was the impulse that, in a masterpiece of statutory deconstruction, the Court overrode the explicit text and legislative history of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (that it is unlawful for any employer "to discriminate against any individual ... because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin") in order to allow preferences in hiring and promotion for blacks and women. The Court usually argued that the preferences were remedies for past discrimination. This makes no sense, since the person now being preferred is not the person discriminated against in the past. Even the requirement of past discrimination was dropped when, in Metro Broadcasting, Inc. v. FCC, the Court allowed racial preference in the grant of station licenses by the Federal Communications Commission despite the lack of any evidence that such grants had ever been tainted by discrimination. These cases all approved what is today known as "affirmative action."

Affirmative action, in the sense of preferential policies, is really a euphemism for quotas, and it is a perfect prescription for racial animosity. At the beginning of the civil rights movement's successes in the late 1960s, what we now know as affirmative action was unthinkable. The 1964 Civil Rights Act explicitly forbade all forms of discrimination on the basis of race or sex. Even so, it would not have been enacted without assurances of its backers, most prominently Hubert Humphrey, that there was no possibility of discrimination against white males. Today, that discrimination is everywhere, from schools and universities to employment, promotion, government benefits, and more.

All of this was done mindlessly and without public debate. As happens all too frequently in the United States today, courts and bureaucrats made the important and sensitive decisions about public policy. The public was, at best, reduced to the status of onlookers. Nobody asked whether blacks should be the only group to benefit from affirmative action, how long the preferences would last, or what the effects would be on race relations. What happened in the United States is what has happened around the world where affirmative action has been tried. Thomas Sowell, a conservative black intellectual, made an international study of government-mandated preferences for government-designated groups and found common patterns:

1. Preferential programs, even when explicitly and repeatedly defined as "temporary," have tended not only to persist but also to expand in scope, either embracing more groups or spreading to wider realms for the same groups, or both. Even preferential programs established with legally mandated cut-off dates, as in India and Pakistan, have continued far past those dates by subsequent extensions.
2. Within the groups designated by government as recipients of preferential treatment, the benefits have usually gone disproportionally to those members already more fortunate.
3. Group polarization has tended to increase in the wake of preferential programs, with non-preferred groups reacting adversely, in ways ranging from political backlash to mob violence and civil war.
4. Fraudulent claims of belonging to the designated beneficiary groups have been widespread and have taken many forms in various countries.⁴⁴

The United States is no exception to the international experience. Preferential policies here were put forward as temporary measures, but Lyndon Johnson gave the game away when he announced that in "the next and more profound stage of civil rights" the object would be "not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as fact and equality as a result.⁴⁵ We have been at affirmative action for over two decades now [1996] and, as could have been predicted, such equality of result as has been achieved is artificial. Proportional representation in various fields has been reached by diktat, by depriving people of freedom, which is what a policy of racial preferences does.

Starting the policy of preferential treatment was a serious mistake. Continuing it would be a disaster. There is no respectable rationale for continuation. The most frequently heard argument is the claim that active discrimination against minorities and women continues in this country. ... [I]t is extremely doubtful that such discrimination is at all common. Let us assume, however, that it is. The attempted justification fails, nonetheless. There are laws upon laws forbidding discrimination in employment and promotion, in housing, in voting, in access to places of public accommodation, in lending, and much more. We have the Civil Rights Acts of 1866, 1871, 1964, 1968, and 1991; we have the Voting Rights Acts of 1965, 1975, and 1982. There is agency upon agency devoted to finding and ending discrimination: the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, the Department of Education's Civil Rights Office, civil rights sections in various government agencies, as well as state and municipal laws and enforcement agencies. There are thousands of such agencies, and more than 100,000 government lawyers, investigators, and agents who spend hundreds of millions of dollars enforcing the laws and regulations. If that were not enough, there are laws providing for private lawsuits and an army of private attorneys bringing discrimination claims. If discrimination is provable, we have far more than adequate means of dealing with it.

This means that affirmative action is generally applied to a pool of minorities who have suffered no discernible discrimination. Imagine a group of one hundred Hispanic men, ten of whom are to be admitted to Stanford under a policy of preference. In order to imagine that discrimination is being cured, it is necessary to suppose that, by a rare coincidence, preference is given to an individual who has actually suffered discrimination but cannot prove it, and may not even suspect it. If there are any victims of undetected discrimination in the pool of one hundred—suppose that there are ten—the likelihood is that none of them will receive preferential admission to Stanford or, at best, one or two will. Statistically, therefore, any person who has been the victim of unprovable discrimination will usually go without remedy, while a person who has not been discriminated against will be given an undeserved benefit. It is difficult to see how a windfall for one cures an unsuspected injustice to the other. Affirmative action is simply irrelevant to discrimination.

Though affirmative action has few if any legitimate benefits, it does have heavy adverse effects. To start with what many will think the least significant, it is obvious that jettisoning the achievement principle for reward according to skin color or genital arrangements has a serious economic cost. Peter Brimelow and Leslie Spencer estimated that affirmative action's direct and indirect costs in 1991 were about $115 billion; opportunity costs added another $236 billion; the lowering of gross national product may have been about 4 percent.⁴⁶ Worse, it all may be wasted. The authors quote Charles Murray: "There's hardly a single outcome—black voting rights, access to public accommodation, employment, particularly in white collar jobs—that couldn't have been predicted on the basis of pre-1964 trend lines." "That's pretty devastating," the authors say. "It suggests that we have spent trillions of dollars to create an outcome that would have happened even if the government had done nothing."

Karl Mannheim, a German sociologist, saw at least as early as 1940 the coming rejection of the achievement principle. He proposed that three principles for the selection of elites—blood, property, and achievement—have marked different historical periods.⁴⁷ Aristocratic society chose elites primarily on the blood principle; bourgeois society on the property principle; modern democracy has stressed the achievement principle. These were never entirely pure principles; achievement, for instance, could lift one into the elite even when one of the other two principles was dominant. Of more interest to our current situation is that Mannheim also wrote: "The real threat of contemporary mass society [is] ... that it has recently shown a tendency to renounce the principle of achievement as a factor in the struggle of certain groups for power, and has suddenly established blood and other criteria as the major factors to the far-reaching exclusion of the achievement principle." If we recognize reward according to race, ethnicity, and sex as aspects or analogues of the blood principle, it is obvious how far the achievement principle has been discarded in America today in the name of equality.

Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah⁴⁸

Are the Negroes thankful for President Eisenhower's intervention? Well, he was mentioned in Lionel Hampton's autobiography we quoted. On the other hand Eisenhower did say, "There should be no hyphenated Americans." Negroes now want to be called African-Americans, a non-American people within America, now with special privileges, affirmative action, just the sort of privilege our American system, with its separation of powers was trying to prevent.

And how did they arrive at getting special privileges? When MLK led protests in violation of laws which he justified in part by white America's slow response to Brown v. Board of Education which was itself enacted precipitously through a disregarding the separation of powers.

Summary

We have been examining how making a servant the boss could be stressing out our society, per the proverb, and the obvious place to look is affirmative action. In our historical context that means we have to consider race relations from a biblical (Pauline) perspective, not the popular one. We have chosen as a point of departure MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech, in particular his thesis that our founding fathers had made a solemn promise to the Negro that "all men are created equal," and like returning to him a check marked INSUFFICIENT FUNDS, America had defaulted on that promise. Since in a sense Affirmative Action is but an attempt to make good that putative promise with interest, it behooves us to examine the premise in the first place. Those closer historically would have understood our beginnings a little better.

Ante-bellum Southerners understood this world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries better than they understood their own. The quest for enlarged opportunities which brought their colonial forebears to America was a personal objective which did not necessarily mean that they believed in the equality of all men. ...

The final clauses in the southern legal codes relating directly to the control of slaves were those governing free Negroes. The laws reflected the general opinion that these people were an anomaly, a living denial "that nature's God intended the African for the status of slavery."

—Kenneth M. Stampp, Professor of American History at the University of California (Berkeley), The Peculiar Institution⁴⁹

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For the revolutionary generation antislavery questions were subordinate to other concerns, and the federal Constitution came to terms with the institution. ...

In 1817 the American Colonization Society was organized with the support of many distinguished political leaders, Southerners John Marshall, James Monroe, and Henry Clay among them. Its purpose was to raise funds to remunerate slave owners and send free Negroes back to Africa. A paper was published and a far flung organization established. The response was wide; at one time over two hundred local auxiliaries were in existence with ministers and churches playing a prominent role. It actually ... accepted fully the notion of Negro inferiority. ... Yet some of the greatest antislavery leaders in the country were associated with it: Benjamin Lundy, Lewis Tappan, Gerrit Smith, James G. Birney, Theodore D. Weld, Elizur Wright, and many others.

—Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People⁵⁰

From December 8, 1819, until March 20, 1820, Congress discussed in all its aspects—legal, Constitutional, moral, political, economic—the problem of whether Missouri should be admitted to statehood with slavery or without it. ...

As Mr. Burrill of Rhode Island pointed out, one could find in the federal constitution not a single word that recognized color as a bar to citizenship. There was, of course, no answer to this argument: all one could urge in rebuttal was the practice of the several states. Even in Massachusetts, there was a law that forbade the marriage of a white person to an Indian, Negro, or mulatto; and did not this prove, said Senator Smith, that "we must look for the reason of this law, as in all the other states, in the universal assent to the degraded condition of that class of people, and from which none of the States would, perhaps, ever think it expedient to raise them?" ... The argument was weird; but the evidence he brought to its support was certainly formidable. In the Constitution of Kentucky it was laid down that "every free white male (negroes, mulattoes, and Indians excepted) shall enjoy the right of elector"; in the Constitutions of Ohio and Connecticut the same provision appeared. Indiana and North Carolina gave them the franchise but would not let them appear as witnesses in any suit against a white man. An Act of Congress of May 15, 1820, made only free white males eligible for the office of Mayor of Washington — although, during the twenty years that Congress had sat there, "a swarm of mulattoes have been reared in the city, many of whom, no doubt, had as illustrious fathers as any in the nation." Senator Smith's list was only a fragmentary one; but he had said enough to show that, where free Negroes were concerned, every state in the Union had discriminated against them in one way or another. Such a general discrimination, he thought, could be construed as a general acquiescence in their degradation; and though this degradation was technically un-Constitutional where the franchise was concerned, acquiescence placed it within the pale of the Constitution. ...

When Mr. Charles Pinckney told the House of Representatives that Negroes were "created with less intellectual powers than the whites, and were most probably intended to serve them, and be the instruments of their cultivation," no man arose to give him the lie. This positive denial of the assertion "all men are created equal" occasioned, of course, no surprise; from the beginning of the Missouri debates, the Declaration of Independence had been under attack. Nor did the fact that Mr. Pinckney had undermined the whole Jeffersonian creed of the equality of man really matter: the Southern Jeffersonians (though not so boldly) had been undermining it in every speech. Even Jefferson, who agonized over the status of the Negro, had been obliged to confess that the Linnæan hypothesis that all men were descended from the same ancient parents might break down when it was confronted with the Negro. Here he spoke and thought as a Virginian and a slave-owner; and though to the end of his days he longed for some proof to set his doubts at rest, and was a more sincere abolitionist than most men to the North of him, he never could reconcile these doubts with his belief in the axiomatic unity of the human race.

Thus we can hardly blame the members of the Sixteenth Congress if ... their assault upon Missouri should have failed because they could not bring themselves to believe in the equality of the Negro. The most humane philosophers had been unable to reach this conclusion.

—George Dangerfield, The Era of Good Feelings⁵¹

It is well to be warned against seemingly self-evident principles such as that all men are equal, that every man is entitled to the products of his labor, and the like. A critical examination of these shows them to be either too vague to give us determinate results, or else productive of repellent consequences when strictly applied. It is also well to note the superior wisdom of the law (as against abstract moralists) in recognizing the claim of custom or the status quo as such. The latter create expectations, and to shock or defeat them is to effect an evil justified only if a greater evil can thereby be avoided.

—Morris Raphael Cohen, My Philosophy of Law⁵²

There had been both Indian and Negro slaves in the Old Colony as early as 1646, at which time the authorities announced their intention of selling Indians or exchanging them for Negroes as punishment for offenses. ...

The Bay Colony had formally recognized the institution of slavery in its Code of Fundamentals, or Body of Liberties, adopted in 1641, being the first of the colonies to do so, anticipating even Virginia in this. Three years later, the "peculiar institution" was implicitly recognized in the articles of confederation drawn up by the United Colonies.

Chief Justice Samuel Sewall—peace be to his gallant soul—was one of the first to speak out against human slavery. In 1700 he published The Selling of Joseph, A Memorial, which upset many of the conservative. ...

When James Otis declared in his great Writs of Assistance speech in 1761 that slavery violated the inalienable rights of man—that all men should be free—, John Adams "shuddered at the doctrine he taught."

Slaves continued to be sold at Boston as late as 1788, when the traffic at last was forbidden. Massachusetts shipmasters, of course, continued their slave traffic ...

—George F. Willison, Saints and Strangers⁵³

If southern colonists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did little to improve the lot of propertyless laborers, their neighbors were hardly in a position to criticize them for it. To the north and to the south of them Englishmen, Dutchmen, Spaniards, and Portuguese held Indians, Negroes, and whites in bondage. This being the case, their use of unfree labor demanded of them a minimum of soul searching. Since their social institutions were not peculiar in any fundamental way, they lived comfortably in their world.

—Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution⁵⁴

This helps us to understand a Christian response to slavery. From a religious perspective the status quo would be the "civil religion."

Like other institutions of the culture, the churches, too, are susceptible to the pull of the civil religion and may be drawn into affirming an unthinking uniformity of purpose rather than responding to their expected roles as critics of the culture. To use an historical example, it is one of the scandals of American religious history that so many American religions failed to cry out against the practice of slavery and in fact often defended it. ... When American culture condoned first slavery and in the twentieth century segregation, religious groups responded slowly to issues of social justice because, perhaps even unwittingly, they sensed that they were up against not just "the world" or "government" but another religious system immensely more powerful because it was not split up into many different denominations but instead had a hold on the whole culture.

—Mary Farrell Bednarowski, American Religion⁵⁵

A former slave, in recalling his life⁵⁶ on a Louisiana plantation, thought it was but "simple justice" to observe that his owner had been a "kind, noble, candid, Christian man, ... a model master, walking uprightly, according to the light of his understanding."

—Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution⁵⁷

Here is one professor's explanation of historical progression:

What the U.S. Constitution means is usually more a reflection of its readers than its authors. Consequently, the meaning of the Constitution keeps changing along with the changing generations of its readers. Although the framers' intent is certainly important, from a practical standpoint it has been the historical moment when our society read the Constitution that has shaped the history of its interpretation. ... More than this, the community's role in the reading is even justified because the Constitution is the product and property of the community more than of an individual.

When a text is central to a people or a nation, as the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution is, the history of its interpretation can serve as a window into the history of that people. One socially charged analogy in American history can illustrate. The landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954) overturned "separate, but equal" (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896) educational facilities for races as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that guarantees all citizens "equal protection of the laws." This corresponded to a changing American social landscape more than it did to the intent of the authors. The different interpretations of the Constitution in 1896 and 1954 reflected the changing social context of the interpreters. The text had not changed, but the readers and their social context had.

—William M. Schniedewind, University of California, Los Angeles, How the Bible Became a Book⁵⁸

Dates⁵⁹

Korzybski's time signal is especially useful for events in process, where the change is clearly recognizable. Seeing the date, one stops and reflects that the situation now is not what it was a hundred years ago, or a year ago, or ten minutes ago. Britain₁₀₆₆ is not Britain₁₉₂₀, and Britain₁₉₃₉ is not Britain₁₉₅₃, and to speak of "The American Way" as something fixed and unchangeable is to speak nonsense.

Again, it wasn't until President Eisenhower's meddling with the Supreme Court that a major hurdle was cleared for civil rights.

The Supreme Court was instrumental in sparking the civil rights revolution. Chief Justice Warren's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the school desegregation case, occurred during the relatively quiescent Eisenhower years and helped commit both Eisenhower and subsequent presidents to an activist role in the area of equal rights for minorities.

—Forrest Chisman & Alan Pifer, Government For the People⁶⁰

---

"Look at it this way," she said. "The people who owned slaves, back in the nineteenth century, most of them considered themselves to be decent, upstanding, God-fearing Christians. They honestly didn't think what they were doing was evil. It would be easy to say yes, that owning slaves made them evil. But they didn't go around thinking they were evil. They thought they were doing the right thing."

"But they weren't," Sharia said. "And so they were evil. If I was to kill somebody, even if I thought it was a good thing, it'd still be wrong no matter what I thought."

"And yet we sometimes say that killing is justified. Look at war. The death penalty."

"Owning another human being is never justified, however you look at it."

Claire was not winning this; in fact, she suspected she was only confirming Sharia's absolutist thinking. And perhaps Sharia was right. Perhaps it was due to a sort of moral laxity on her part that Claire had let everything become so clouded.

"Think about it," she said. ... "A hundred years from now, society may well think that killing and eating other animals is evil. Everybody's seen the light, and they're all vegetarians in the twenty-first century. And they look back on us in the twentieth century and say, How could they not have known that it was wrong to eat meat? How could a whole society have been so evil? But of course we don't go around thinking of ourselves as evil. And yet the future may think we are.

"That's silly," Sharia said. "There's nothing wrong with eating meat. We have to eat meat. It's part of nature. You can't compare eating meat to owning slaves. They're two totally different things."

"We see it that way now," Claire said forlornly, ... "but the slaveowners thought it was natural to own slaves. So what if we're just as wrong about what we think is natural? What if the future judges us just as harshly as you're saying we should judge the past?"

—Paul Russell, The Coming Storm⁶¹

Perhaps it would help to take an individual perspective. From Anita Taylor et al, in Communicating:⁶²

The psychologist Abraham Maslow's analysis of human needs suggests that many needs of varying importance motivate human behavior. Describing the needs as a hierarchy, Maslow argues that the need actually motivating behavior in any situation depends on whether or not needs lower in the hierarchy are satisfied. Figure 6-1 shows this hierarchy.⁶³

Survival... At the base of the hierarchy are survival needs. To survive, certain basic physiological needs must be satisfied. These include shelter, food, water, air, reproduction—all the requirements necessary to sustain life. The need to maintain a constant internal environment provides some of our most basic, though often unnoticed, motivations. Survival motivations underlie many other needs and under most conditions must be satisfied before other needs will motivate. A person gasping for lack of oxygen will seldom be strongly motivated by less basic needs. Yet there are complex interrelations in human motivation. As you know, some people do deny themselves survival to satisfy other basic needs. Parents reenter a burning building to save a child; police officers live with the threat of bodily harm; a hero may risk death to stop a mugging. ...

Esteem... At the fourth level in the Maslow hierarchy are the needs for esteem. ... They involve needs for acceptance and respect by others and self.

On a personal level it works that way; achievement has to come before esteem. A church's newsletter acknowledged Maslow's needs hierarchy when it quoted Bill Gates: "The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself."

My own story illustrates my main point. I was a conscientious objector in the Vietnam era based on some eastern religious beliefs I held at the time. I got converted in the Jesus Movement and wrote to my draft board saying my beliefs had changed and I hadn't worked out my new position on war yet. They allowed me to keep my status but wanted me to do civilian alternative service in a hospital for two years. I got a job as a dishwasher in one.

After a month I quit and came back to Oregon to serve the Lord. We were not supposed to quit like that. I just lived on a Christian commune, didn't tell the draft board my address, and didn't worry about it.

One day they made an announcement that our commune had acquired the status as a place where conscientious objectors could do their civilian alternative service. So I wrote my draft board, apologized about not keeping them informed of my address, and told them I'd like to do my service there at that Christian ministry.

It was much like Paul trying to square the runaway slave with his owner Philemon: (Philem. 1:10-14) "I beseech thee for my son Onesimus, whom I have begotten in my bonds: Which in time past was to thee unprofitable, but now profitable to thee and to me: Whom I have sent again: thou therefore receive him, that is, mine own bowels: Whom I would have retained with me, that in thy stead he might have ministered unto me in the bonds of the gospel: But without thy mind would I do nothing; that thy benefit should not be as it were of necessity, but willingly." Although I was serving the Lord, the Lord wanted me to go back and square things with my draft board.

They wrote back giving me credit for the month I had worked in the hospital, back credit from the day I first joined that ministry, and I only had three months to go—which I gladly served out.

Now, draw an analogy: My draft service the servitude of the slave Onesimus the manual labor such as the Negroes, per Booker T. Washington, were to do to prove themselves useful to the whites. It must have seemed too much for Onesimus, otherwise why did he run away? I know the dishwashing seemed hard to me and the two years to go an eternity to a young man. The Negroes did not care for their lot either, and there seemed no end in sight.

So they didn't want to patiently wait for the Whites to accept them; they protested, rioted, and made speeches. Eventually to restore calm some civil rights legislation was enacted, but it was bitterly fought and not everybody was or is pleased with it, political correctness notwithstanding.

Okay, let's look at a best case scenario: The Blacks now went on to serve a higher ideal, just as I went to a commune to serve the Lord.

It is young republicans and libertarians, those who believe that the main measure of a person is their character and their ability to produce for themselves and society, that are now the true defenders of justice and the highest ideals of a society based on individual accomplishment.

—Bret Jacobson, "Racist charges undermine core beliefs"⁶⁴

      That's cowboy logic; every cowboy's got it.
      He's got a simple solution to just about anything.
      If it's a job, do it.  Put your back into it.
     'Cause a little bit of dirt's gonna wash off in the rain.

In this nation exalted by its righteousness, over half our prison population is Black. Inasmuch as "sin is a reproach to any people," that character fault attaches to them so th