Why Racial Discrimination Is Wrong
The statist progressives, the intellectual heirs of the eugenicists of the early 20th century are the ones who believe morality is only whatever the editors of The New York Times and their ilk say.
The Supreme Court’s recent decision on homosexual marriage raises a troubling question: What is the moral case against discriminating on the basis of race?
Once upon a time the answer might have been that the Western code imposes moral obligations on us to act in certain ways toward our fellow man. Exactly what those obligations are, and how qualified they may be, is difficult to say. For a discussion, particularly of the many qualifications posited by scholars, see the excellent piece by Donald Devine here.
The moral obligation to treat people equally is now grounded, among other places, in Thomas Jefferson’s line in the Declaration of Independence, “All men are created equal” (by which the slave-holding Jefferson, who was writing primarily for the French, may have meant, per Jeffrey Hart, only that Englishmen living in England were not superior to the colonists in respect of self-government). Manifestly, all men are not created equal, at least not with respect to brawn, brains, or bank accounts, or perhaps most important, both parents. Some other kind of equality, therefore, must be inferred from those words, which we have made talismanic, whatever Jefferson intended.
What kind of equality? Well, equality either in God’s eyes (in which case, ahem, man should pay close attention) or perhaps only in the eyes of the state. But if only in the eyes of the state, how should we interpret the word “created,” especially in the light of the next clause in the Declaration, which says that all men are endowed “by their creator” with certain unalienable rights?
Skipping the issue of whether the “endowment” came from God or government (will the real creator please stand up?), we can say that there is something, even if we don’t quite know what, fundamental about the obligation to treat people equally.
And that is where the problem lies.
Once you, or the state, start picking and choosing which moral commands are to be obeyed, which ignored, you, or the state, lose your moral authority. And that is true whether you think the commands are grounded in revealed truths or only in the acts of the state.
If we consider the Supreme Court to be the state (but only for argument’s sake here because actually it’s not, and a hearty resistance to it — hey! ho! — would be a good thing; vive the Second Amendment! And if you think the Second Amendment is only about hunting squirrels and other vermin you need to read this column by Walter Williams and learn what kind of vermin the founders thought guns would protect us from)―if we consider the Supreme Court to be the state, the state has now “repealed” a provision of the Western moral code (that marriage is a union between one man and one woman) that has been in effect for a couple of thousand years, and one that was common wisdom, and commonly accepted, until only a few years ago.
If one provision of the moral law (first we’ll consider it to be God’s law) can be repealed by five uber-law-school graduates, why shouldn’t whatever God’s law is on treating people equally, on not discriminating on the basis of race, be repealed by, well, any other group of five people, or by, say, the Confederate States, which consisted of rather more than five people?
Ah, you say, but it’s not really God’s law―it’s not a natural law. It’s just the law of man.
That really doesn’t help, and is quite a dangerous argument. If the legislature, acting as moral arbiter, voted to do in the Jews (yes, I know: no legislature in the Western world would ever do that), what would be the principled objection? Suppose the legislature just decreed that Jews couldn’t go to synagogues?
When the legislature says religious people no longer have the right not to associate with people they consider to be…immoral, where does true morality lie? The District of Columbia has passed a law making it illegal not to hire someone who has had an abortion. Could anyone except a crazy left-winger think there is morality lurking in there somewhere?
And wouldn’t you think blacks would have been more solicitous of the good name of “civil rights” and not have allowed it to be hijacked by the abortionists and the homosexuals? The price for their negligence could be high.
We need to be very clear here. It is not conservatives, or Republicans, or Southerners (all broadly defined) who would be making the argument that the moral proscription on racial discrimination had been repealed. It would be the statist progressives, the intellectual heirs of the eugenicists of the early 20th century. It is they who believe that morality is only whatever the editors of The New York Times and their ilk say it is and can get a legislature to enact, a regulator to impose, or a court to decide. And that kind of morality, morality du jour, can change from jour to jour.
Statist progressives lack the power of morality to guide behavior. In the end, their only power is the gun. In which case…
Vive the Second Amendment! And pray, brothers, while praying is still legal, that we won’t have to rely on it.