After reading these two posts I wounder as to your views on affrimative action. And, if in favor, should it be expanded to include members of the LGBT community.
The rationale for affirmative action goes something like this:
Certain groups of people have been disenfranchised socially and economically. Over many generations their ancestors have been denied the chance to achieve and compete in society. If this has been systematic the effects are worse. In effect, they have been taxed and penalized.
Affirmative action is an attempt to quantify that penalty and provide something that counter its effect. Sometimes it has been done well. Sometimes it has been done poorly. In essence it says "We realize that we have systematically taken from you what was or should have been yours. We wish to elevate you not to what you might have been but to the point where some of the effects of that theft are mitigated and you have close to the same shot at proving yourself that anyone else has."
Aboriginal peoples who have had their
treaty-guaranteed lands, mineral wealth, water rights, health care and religion stolen should certainly be entitled to the value that was taken from them and the financial benefits they could have reasonably expected to get. An old proverb goes "He who sells what isn't his'n must buy it back or go to prison". That's why, with every new Administration there's the ritual holding of the Secretary of the Interior in contempt of Court when he or she fails to provide an accounting for Indian water, timber, uranium, oil leases and the Indian Health Care Service.
For four hundred years people almost all people of African descent were unable to profit from their own work. The fruits of their labor were systematically stolen from them. They were denied the right to the education, homestead land and other things by which people of European descent bettered their position. Even with the end of slavery there was more than a century of discrimination as official policy. To this day there is an abiding distrust of Africans in this country that stems from those policies to the point where mere skin pigment makes people question a man's ability to hold high government office. Affirmative Action for Africans was supposed to make up for that stolen wealth and allow entry where old methods of social control place an extra burden on them.
By any measure women have been subject to universal systematic discrimination in pretty much every sphere. It has cut across all economic, ethnic, religious and social classes. There are plenty of people alive today who lived in a time when women could not vote. In some parts of the country they could not own property, hold most jobs, enter into contracts or - again - all those other things which men enjoyed and which allowed men to manage their own affairs to their own benefit and accumulate the wealth that would naturally accrue from their work.
When I was a child I remember serious discussions as to whether a woman should be allowed into the professions if she were married, should female welders be considered welders or simply prostitutes and if it were proper for an unescorted woman to eat in a respectable restaurant. Until certain Supreme Court decisions and other laws married women were not permitted to own anything in their own names. In fact, they were considered extensions of their husbands for all legal purposes. There were and still are undeniable barriers to the entry of women into many fields and positions based solely on their gender. The point of Affirmative Action is to provide them not with everything that they might have had, but some reasonable approximation that allows women today a just chance to compete on the basis of their actual abilities rather than the unquestioned assumption of male superiority.
Various groups of immigrants have suffered greater or lesser discrimination. "Man Wanted: No Irish Need Apply", The Anti-Chinese Society, questions about whether "Papists" could be loyal Americans and so on have all had their season. Once long ago I read old debates about the Sullivan Act. One of them which has some traction was the contention that it would keep guns out of the hands of "Jews, Italians and other criminals".
My father and grandfathers were denied jobs and subject to educational quotas based on being Jewish. In those days "quota" meant that
no more than a certain number of Jews was admitted to a university. The systematic effects of that oppression were really did not last more than forty years. And from the beginning Jews had access to intra-ethnic support and the ability to open legitimate businesses which they could own in communities which were permitted to support them. Capital was more difficult to acquire, but there were not artificial and official barriers to them gaining and using it.
In almost all cases it was short-lived. The people on the receiving end had their basic civil rights and could hold legal jobs, own property, enter into contracts, open businesses without legal restraint and accumulate and invest their property and labor as they saw fit. I would say, therefore, that Affirmative Action would not apply. These people were certainly sinned against, but it was transient and did not affect all of them collectively in a long-term systematic fashion.
Glebits - my own collective term for the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered - have certainly been on the receiving end of some pretty harsh treatment including imprisonment, execution, medieval torture disguised as medical treatment, rape, beating, vandalism and murder. But there is a difference. There have not been the same sort of multi-generational structures that steal the fruits of the labor of anyone who wasn't a Tab A in Slot B kind of person
and all of their great-to-the-nth grandcestors. The children of Glebits do not suffer the effects of six or seven generations of inability to function in society, to benefit from their own work and so on taken away from them. The Glebit Tribe has never had its reservation lands taken and been forced to walk from Florida to Oklahoma at bayonet-point.
So I would say no. Affirmative Action as it has been traditionally understood would not be appropriate as a collective remedy for issues surrounding sexual orientation. Protections
against current discrimination in housing, public accommodation, employment and firing, military service, marriage, adoption and a number of other things are only just. And insofar as Glebits are subject to all of these
as a group it's only acknowledging reality to recognize and deal with it the same way.
Ensuring that people are treated no worse or differently than anyone else is not the same as mandating that they be treated differently. The "Special Rights" that make the Family Values Crowd mindlessly screech about in terror are pretty reasonable . The queers want the right to marry free competent adults whom they choose to marry. They want the right to serve their country in the Armed Forces. They want to be able to take a job, rent an apartment, adopt a child, buy property or settle a spouse's affairs without the feat that should their membership in the Glebit Tribe become public knowledge it will be taken away.
Compare that to just a few of the Special Rights that their strongest detractors enjoy and arrogantly demand as their natural due:
- The right to decide who gets married to whom
- Tax Exempt status for their meetings, their buildings and their attempts to indoctrinate people into their beliefs
- The right to introduce their agents into the military at the country's expense and to proselytize soldiers
- The right to stick both trotters into the Federal trough through the Office of Faith Based Initiatives including the right to use that money to lobby the government
- The right to impose their beliefs on people who are seeking to buy medicine
- The right to remove science from science classes and replace it with their un- and usually anti-scientific propaganda
- The right to put people in jail for teaching science (cf. Scopes)
- The right to put people in jail for expressing alternative beliefs - There are still blasphemy laws on the books in several places although they have been ruled unenforceable
- The right to give their sexual taboos the force of law
- The right to force people to stop their legal business and private affairs on some arbitrary days. Yes, there are still Sunday Closing laws in parts of the country
- The right to dictate choices about divorce, hair style, clothing, and the suitability of other religions to enjoy the same status that they do
I could go on. If that's what they consider their natural due you can see why they fear "Special Rights". Fortunately, the Glebits aren't interested in that. They just want what regular non-Glebit citizens already have. If they try force through laws that make all single straight men subject to summary interior decoration and wardrobe consultation I will fight them to the last. We don't seem to be anywhere near that point :shrug:
