Somewhere near the top of America's obituary will be the phrase"false equivalence."
That’s what I thought after reading Darren Walker’s Op-Ed in the NY Times about the recent Affirmative Action decision. (I’d add the ever-hilarious and eloquent Trae Crowder’s take on SCOTUS as well, in case you do not know him.)
Five minutes of preference is as bad as centuries of oppression. How does that add up? Actual college students and the families they come from have no standing but owners of imaginary businesses do. Beyond an upset to precedent and a denial of basic SCOTUS procedure, is that an equivalent or a falsity?
I prefer not to hate people but I can not help but wonder who to hate now. Miss Cohen Barret, by all accounts pleasant and sweet and smart and yet raised in the equivalent of a cult designed not to understand how Americans live? Mr. Thomas, whose pleasure at denying his own history parallels the joy he takes denying others the opportunities he benefited from? The ice-cold Alito? The comically unfit Kavanaugh?
One thing is for sure, none of these folks suffer from a surplus of self-awareness, integrity, or empathy. All interpret through the tiny lens of their own belief and ignore the wide angle of what we must all live with, adopting none of the useful blindness justice demands. Indeed, they acted out their roles in this drama predictably and according to a script authored for them over the last forty years by Lewis Powell and The Federalist Society.
Those who plan to make America a theocracy, get rich by so-doing, or both can celebrate because those who wear crosses or whose parents went to the school you want to go to can do whatever they want while those who have dark skin or love people of their own gender move one step closer to official designation as second-class citizens and undesirables.
The self-righteousness of the snake-oil devout and the deep cynism of our worst political actors hardly needed judicial sanction, but now they have it—again. For those at Liberty University and on FOX and in the school board meetings shouting against rainbow flags, an honest journal of American history is unholy. Suspiciously white, they stand first, as the high court just confirmed.
They engineered a political charade to get a gavel on what they most need to believe, that not all people are created equal. To them, equivalence itself is false.