Discrimination is bad. Right?
Well, certainly to discriminate solely on the basis of race is. It’s bad to discriminate solely on the basis of religion, or gender, or age, etc. etc.
But is discrimination always bad?
To discriminate simply means to make distinctions, and then to act on those distinctions. If you’re my best friend, and you decide to have an affair with my husband, I may discriminate against you by never talking to you again (or something more dramatic). I’m making a decision to treat you a certain way because of something that you did.
Over the last month we’ve witnessed the anniversary of the September 11 massacres, and we’ve seen tyrants talk at the UN as if they were legitimate leaders. It seems to me that more discrimination is warranted. I think we should discriminate and marginalize those from other faiths who say that all Jews are pigs, or that we should insist that women veil themselves, or that it’s okay to mutilate little girls’ genitals so that they can’t enjoy sex later. These ideas led directly to the jihadist culture that caused September 11, and if we could take a firm stand against it, perhaps we’d be more effective in combating it.
In fact, I think the world could use a lot more discriminating, even in our personal spheres. We need to bring back honest to goodness shame! When people do something that seriously crosses a moral code, we should discriminate against them so that they feel the shame. I wouldn’t force anybody to wear the Red Letter A, like in The Scarlet Letter, but at least telling people that we think pornography use is wrong, or cheating is wrong, or lying is wrong, isn’t bad. It would do society a lot more good if we began insisting on certain moral codes again.
I was reminded of this when the ACORN scandal broke a few weeks ago. Workers from five different ACORN offices gave the fake prostitute and her pimp advice on how to lie to the IRS and how to camouflage the underage girls they were bringing in to be sex slaves. They didn’t try to rescue child prostitutes. They told their “abductor” how to hide them.
But what struck me was this exchange from the Baltimore office, the first to be aired.
Shira: “First of all let me tell you something my job is not to judge people….I don’t like nobody to judge me so therefore I don’t judge nobody else.”
Earlier in the transcript Shira also went on about how “we don’t discriminate against anybody”.
They have taken the language of civil rights—discrimination is bad—and made it mean something totally different.
Discrimination is no longer about treating people badly because of something inherent, like skin colour (which they can’t change). It’s now about treating people exactly the same regardless of how they act (which they can change).
We’re not getting rid of discrimination; we’re getting rid of morality, which, incidentally, was responsible for the civil rights movement in the first place. People knew what right and wrong was, and they wanted to make sure the country reflected that. Now we’re trying to make sure that the country erases all thought of right and wrong.
When you elevate “non-discrimination” as your highest value, as these ACORN workers have, you become proud of yourself simply for not discriminating.
But let’s take this to its logical conclusion. It’s easy to not discriminate against people who are responsible citizens. But if anti-discrimination of any form is your highest value, then the way to express it is to stop discriminating against those who would normally be shunned.
In other words, if you’re really going to achieve your highest value, you need to give people a pass who do truly outrageous things. Otherwise, have you really done anything extraordinary?
So these ACORN workers heard about a girl involved in prostitution and her pimp, and heard how they were going to enslave 13 15-year-old illegal immigrants from El Salvador, and they told them over and over again how they wouldn’t judge them. They probably went home feeling absolutely wonderful, because you can’t get much lower than a prostitute and a pimp engaging in forced child prostitution. To not discriminate against them shows how absolutely non-judgmental they are! They have arrived!
When anti-discrimination becomes the new morality, it can only be expressed in extreme ways. The more moral transgressions there are to ignore, the more you have expressed your tolerance. Being tolerant against the nice and kind is easy; being tolerant against child molesters is much harder. The ones highest up the new morality totem pole, then, are those who excuse the worst. The world has turned on its head.
And over and over again, this verse keeps running through my head:
“Woe to you who call good evil, and evil good.”
(Isaiah 5:20).
Woe to you. And woe to us indeed.
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