The Urgent Need To Discriminate

     I’ve written about this before. I meant it then, and I mean it now. In light of some recent developments, it’s acquired overwhelming force.

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     A couple of weeks ago, Ashe Schow wrote about the current feminist pogrom against college-aged men:

     If a student has been wrongly accused of sexual assault on their college campus, how are they supposed to prove their innocence?...

     After what [Emma] Sulkowicz claimed was a brutal rape in which she was pinned, beaten and choked before being raped, she sent [Paul] Nungesser numerous messages asking to hang out, even telling him she loved him. Nungesser tried to get those messages introduced as evidence during his Columbia University hearing, but was denied. Nungesser, who has since become the victim of a public campaign of defamation by his accuser, was exonerated anyway....

     A similar situation played out at Vassar College when Peter Yu introduced Facebook messages showing his accuser apologizing to him for the evening. She apologized for leading him on and said that she had "a wonderful time" with him. But a year later, when Yu produced these messages for the disciplinary panel, his accuser claimed they "did not correctly reflect her feelings" because she was in a state of "shock and disbelief" about the encounter. The disciplinary committee bought her claim and expelled Yu.

     Clearly, these “disciplinary committees” exercised no discipline over their own procedures. To steal a phrase from Joseph Schumpeter, they had the sentence of death in their pockets, and they were going to pass it regardless of any and all developments. Nor are Nungesser and Yu outliers; when it comes to accusations by women of sexual assaults by men, the trend on university campuses is exactly as they experienced it.

     Meanwhile, universities are experiencing an accelerating imbalance of young women in their enrollees. Marriage-minded young women complain that eligible young men are avoiding them. Employers are finding new and ingenious ways to avoid hiring young women, regardless of their credentials. And Friday nights find quite a lot of young single women sitting at the bar surrounded entirely by...other young single women.

     In other words, young men are learning to discriminate against young women.

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     Discrimination works when it’s tried. Here’s a case where it badly needs to be tried:

     It just got surreal. George Washington University Law School Professor John Banzhaf filed a human rights complaint to the D.C. Office of Human Rights against Catholic University for hindering Muslim students’ free exercise of their faith due to the “excessive” amount of “Catholic imagery” on the campus. It seems that this man – who teaches at a different school across town – thinks that Catholic University’s adherence to the cultural aspects of Catholicism (we have a lot of artwork, Crucifixes, and statues in every nook and cranny) keeps muslim students from praying the required five times a day.

     Banzhaf, who already has a pending lawsuit against the university over ending its policy of allowing mixed-gender dormitories and has a history of filing civil rights suits on such topics as childhood obesity and smoking, filed the complaint alleging that Muslim students are not given their own prayer rooms.

     He alleges that the university, “does not provide space – as other universities do – for the many daily prayers Muslim students must make, forcing them instead to find temporarily empty classrooms where they are often surrounded by Catholic symbols which are incongruous to their religion,” according to the Tower, Catholic University’s student newspaper.

     Let’s leave aside this idiot Banzhaf’s obvious hatred for Catholic institutions and the Catholic faith. What makes allegations of his sort possible at all? That there are Muslim students at Catholic University! And why, pray tell, is that?

     A number of Catholic institutions have succumbed to the lure of increased revenue by admitting non-Catholic students. Some have even hired non-Catholic faculty and staff. As an example of arrant insanity, this would be hard to top – and given current trends in labor law and nondiscrimination law, it will be very hard to undo. But monetary considerations aside, it will require Catholic University and similar institutions to brace themselves for a necessity that will no doubt pain many: the need to say to a non-Catholic applicant for enrollment or employment that “You don’t qualify.” Upon being asked why, the sole adequate answer will be the one all of America has been inhibited against uttering:

“We discriminate in favor of Catholics.”

     And there must be no exceptions granted.

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     Riots in Ferguson. Riots in St. Louis. Riots in Baltimore. Massive looting and property destruction. And all the participants, to within the limits of measurement precision, have been black.

     Whites don’t riot. Even the highly disruptive “Occupy” demonstrations were never riots. Whites don’t assault random passers-by on public streets. Neither are whites inclined to rally around a convicted murderer because of his race. (See also this recent case.) In just about every situation where distinctions on the basis of race occur, those distinctions operate in Negroes’ favor and against Caucasians, regardless of any and all other considerations.

     At this point, even the most diehard, race-is-a-social-construct / I-don’t-see-skin-color leftist is aware that concentrations of Negroes are highly dangerous to non-Negroes. When the black population of a district passes a certain level, crime rates rise, conditions for ordinary commerce deteriorate, and white flight begins. As this happens even in left-liberal-dominated coastal cities – indeed, it’s most pronounced in exactly such cities — the claim that it’s only “racist conservatives” doing the flying is ridiculous on its face.

     What are we to make of this? Yes, there’s a strong argument that left-liberal policies give rise to the sort of cultural accretions that correlate with local deterioration...but so does race. Given that the politicians are elected by the local populace, the only credible responses are to disperse the populace or to confine it behind an impassable fence. Both constitute discrimination -- discrimination in defense of life and property. If this is forbidden, our rights to our lives and our property are shams. But then, the very people doing the forbidding are also working to deprive us of the instruments of self-defense, aren’t they?

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     Discrimination has become a moral, social, and political imperative. Sorting among one’s personal associates isn’t yet illegal, thank God. But most other forms of discrimination are either banned outright or have been made torturously difficult. Indeed, with its “diversity” programs the federal government, which now controls approximately one-third of all spending in the United States, has added financial incentives to the maintenance of a “diverse” work force.

     Yet it must be so. There remain ways to do it. Some of those ways are gaining adherents by the day. And they are finding that their lives, their states of mind, and often their fortunes are being improved thereby.

     Discrimination isn’t bigotry; it’s a response to conditions. And it works.