Category Archives: morality

Misunderstanding “Equity”

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A letter writer in Friday’s Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section badly misunderstands this artificial, modern “liberal” construct of humans and the human condition. She writes

Mr Stone seems to have confused “equal” with “equity” [in his WSJ Cross Country op-ed] We aren’t all created equal, and this is why there is DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion.
Equity isn’t about being “created equal.” It is about creating equality. This means that no matter if you are tall or short, blind or sighted, wheelchair bound or not, rich, poor, male, female or any other gender, etc., these characteristics won’t be permitted to hamper your equality of treatment, opportunity or access.

Therein lies her misunderstanding. Equity doesn’t create equality at all; instead, it destroys it. The characteristics she ascribes to the equality being created by equity are the characteristics of equality that all human beings are born with: we start out owed equal treatment under law because we are all equal in the eyes of God. This is why we have those laws demanding equal access—to protect our intrinsic right to equal opportunity.

Equity, on the other hand, singles out specific groups of Americans for special treatment, and does so at the direct expense of other groups of Americans, both specific and generalized. Equity does this in the name of the equal outcomes that the ideology holds as its underlying tenet. That is the very definition of unequal treatment and the destruction of the equal nature of us under law and under God.

That’s Nice

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The organization Do No Harm had been writing about how the Association of American Medical Colleges has been pushing DEI in medicine; its report delineating all of that can be read here. Now the AAMC has taken information regarding how it uses that DEI claptrap from its Web site.

Shortly after Do No Harm released its report, [AAMC] removed information about DEI-related grants from its website. They also restricted access to information about a database that tracked the race and sex of medical personnel[.]

That raises the obvious question: what is the AAMC hiding? Laura Morgan, who wrote the Do No Harm report, also wondered.

Considering their laser focus on all things DEI, it’s curious that the AAMC would take down a web page that described the federal and private grants it receives, especially when it contains information on programs that are DEI-focused

Whether AAMC has removed its DEI claptrap from its actions, overt and sub rosa, remains to be seen. After all, the same management personnel who ran the organization while that claptrap was put in place are still there.

I’m not holding my breath on this.

Time to Walk Away from the NCAA

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The NCAA president, Charlie Baker, has issued his ultimatum. When Senator Josh Hawley (R, MO), in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing over legalized sports gambling, asked Baker about the NCAA’s policy that transgender student athletes should be able to use the locker room, shower, and toilet facilities in accordance with their gender identity, Baker’s response was blunt and appalling [emphasis added]:

Everybody else should have an opportunity to use other facilities if they wish to do so[.]

No. Men do not belong in women’s facilities, nor should they be competing against women in women’s sports. Title IX provides for substantially equal facilities for male and female sports; it does not provide for substantially equal facilities for male and coed sports.

So much for the organization’s obligation to protect women.

It’s time for women athletes, and male athletes with any sense of morals, to answer Baker’s disgusting ultimatum and use other facilities. Those other facilities would be competition facilities that don’t have men horning in.

Walk away from the NCAA en masse and form their own amateur athletic association, use those other facilities for their competitions. It would be good if the NCAA member semi-pro athletic education institutions did the same, even led the way, but I’m not holding my breath on that.

Bad Deal

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As I write on 12 December, Hamas appears to have agreed to a deal, put together by the Egyptians and supported by the Biden administration, that would see a 60-day cease-fire in Gaza, Israeli troops remain in Gaza “temporarily,” and that would release 30 hostages, including some Americans. In addition, Israel would release an unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners and allow greater humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza. Israel has not agreed, so far.

That last bit regarding humanitarian aid is a clear red flag regarding this…proposal. Any agreement by Israel to this condition would be an Israeli admission that they are the ones doing the restricting. Israel isn’t the one restricting aid flow, though; the terrorists are stealing the aid and deliberately endangering aid deliverers by using them as shields against IDF responses. Hamas is restricting aid flow.

There’s also this bit of Hamas disingenuosity:

Hostages could be freed shortly after signing the deal, and more time would be given to Hamas to establish the names of remaining hostages, their whereabouts, and their state of health[.]

The terrorists don’t need any time for that: they know full well where they’re holding all of the hostages and all of the murdered hostage bodies: the terrorists are the ones who grabbed them, and the terrorists are the ones who’ve been moving them around.

This is a bad deal. Any “cease-fire” must include Israeli forces remaining in Gaza for as long as the Israelis deem necessary along with the release of all of the hostages, including the bodies of the dead hostages. Anything less than all of the hostages, by itself, must be a deal breaker. Beyond that, while there might be a cease fire, the war Hamas has been inflicting on Israel cannot end short of the utter destruction of the terrorist entity. As long as Hamas exists, it will be a terrorist threat to Israel.

A Bad Ruling

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US District Judge Richard Bennett (Maryland District) ruled that the US Naval Academy can continue to use race as a “factor” in its admission decisions. Never mind that the Supreme Court recognized in its Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard decision that using race in determining admission fitness is intrinsically racist.

This is a terrible ruling on two counts (at least). One is Bennet’s decision to ignore the Supreme Court’s rescission of Chevron Deference as a factor in assessing the legitimacy of a regulation or, by extension, a law. Bennett, in his ruling, chose to ignore the Supreme Court’s rulings in Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo and Relentless v Department of Commerce, the two cases the eliminated Chevron Defense as a court decision criterion. Bennett deliberately chose to apply the Chevron technique to his USNA ruling. He closed his ruling with this:

In short, this Court defers to the executive branch with respect to military personnel decisions. Specifically, as noted by Justice Kavanaugh in Austin v United States Navy Seals, “the President of the United States, not any federal judge” ultimately makes such decisions.

Bennett chose to elide in that cite that Austin predates Loper and Relentless, and so any deference aspect of Austin is overridden by them. At least as tellingly, Bennett chose not to disclose that Kavanaugh was writing in the Court’s decision to stay the case pending a lower court’s decision and, more directly to the present matter, that Austin concerned the Navy’s decision to mandate vaccination against the Covid-19 virus; it was wholly irrelevant to any question of the place of race in getting into the Seals (or the Navy or any of the Navy’s training institutions) in the first place.

That’s the technical part of this bad ruling. Bennett also wrote this:

The US Naval Academy is distinct from a civilian university. … During the admissions procedure, which is distinct from that of a civilian university, race or ethnicity may be one of several non-determinative factors considered.

More briefly treated by me, but far more important because it’s on the merits of the matter, is the question of racism in our government institutions. Racism is racism regardless of where it is practiced. That it’s done by our military academies in no way legitimizes it; on the contrary, it deprecates those academies and their ability to train the officers who will lead our men and women in combat. Bennett’s ruling is every bit as racist on this side of the question as was then-President Franklin Roosevelt’s (D) decision to refuse to integrate our military on the other side. Race must be wholly irrelevant in admissions (and everywhere else), neither emphasized in order to block nor emphasized in order to push forward.

This is a ruling that badly wants overruling on appeal.