Who Supports Discrimination?

One of the enemies of Justice is institutional racism. A governmental body that uses its power to discriminate is differentiating among people not on the basis of anything they have done, but on who they are, which is by definition unjust.

In the wake of the SCOTUS decision in Parents Involved v. Seattle School District (pdf), some are making a Federalist argument that the States should have the right to discriminate in order to rectify their earlier segregation, or in the Seattle case, some societal problem not explicitly caused by the government or the school.

Unfortunately for that line of thinking, one of the few things that the Federal government is Constitutionally mandated to enforce is equality before the law. Specifically, the Fourteenth Amendment and its equal protection guarantee is not up to the States to enforce -- there having been a war between the States over the matter, so to speak.

So it is the actual Constitution, rather than the fantasy one that the diversity activists believe in, which must be followed.

Congress is on very firm ground when they apply the Fourteenth Amendment. So is the Court. Equal protection of the law ought to mean that the laws apply equally to everyone, not that everyone is discriminated against equally.

There is a huge, and the Court says dispositive difference between implementing a policy of diversity to fix a problem caused by the government segregation, and implementing a policy of diversity to get racial diversity for its own sake. The Court has "repeatedly" declared racial balancing to be illegal, so any diversity plan must be more than just a race test, and must be clearly designed to reach some educational goal.

What most conservatives and I think all libertarians want is for the government (to the degree possible) to ignore a person's race when dealing with that person. And now I know why I always feel so uncomfortable with Census takers and other busybodies ask my race.

Because it's none of their business.

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