I’ve previously said that anti-discrimination laws are not necessary, for a few reasons.
Without government sanction of discrimination, it becomes much harder to perpetuate the idea that discrimination is OK or good. In the time period up to the 1950s and 1960s and the enactment of civil rights laws, government itself not only allowed discrimination, but encouraged it. This is the actual rejection letter of a black woman, Pauli Murray, who applied to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the 1960s for graduate school in sociology:
“Under the laws of North Carolina, and under the resolutions of the Board of Trustees of the University of North Carolina, members of your race are not admitted to the University.”
Would a letter like this be sent today?
Nothing is said in the letter about society at large; the decision was based on North Carolina’s actual Jim Crow laws and on the Board of Trustees’ resolutions only. The government was holding up this discrimination, not just society, and that wouldn’t happen today. The United States Supreme Court had already struck down a similar decision by the University of Missouri School of Law at this point, but that didn’t matter to another part of government that wanted to discriminate. Anti-discrimination laws should only exist in one format, and that is for all aspects of the government itself (of which public universities are a part). There should be absolutely no discrimination by any type of government entity, which must serve all the people.
However, private businesses and organizations are a different story. If they don’t want to serve a certain type of customer, that should be up to them. They can suffer the consequences, too– boycotts, ridicule, lost business, and probably eventually a going-out-of-business sale. Without the government itself endorsing that type of discrimination (although many believe the government still does actively create other forms of discrimination…. but that’s another story), it becomes much harder to support a discriminatory society, and businesses who engage in that sort of revolting discrimination will find it much harder to survive. There are no Jim Crow laws these days, and society has changed, or anti-discrimination laws would not have been able to be passed in the first place.
But, you may say, this isn’t a very big deal, no one should discriminate and the laws don’t hurt anyone. However, one law governing a private individual inevitably leads to another, down a slippery slope, until all of a sudden, 40 years later, you have today’s society with its many unconstitutional laws.
As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms. — in Remarks on the First Part of the Amendments to the Federal Constitution, under the pseudonym “A Pennsylvanian” in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789.
If you’re sick and tired of the politics of cynicism and polls and principles, come and join this campaign — George W Bush
I must confess, I was born at a very early age — Groucho Marx
If you can read this you’re not aiming in the right direction —
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February 21st, 2008
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Jim Crow Laws » Blog Archive » Government-Sanctioned Discrimination
February 22nd, 2008