Thursday, February 4, 2010
Formal Equality
The new face of discrimination is formal equality. The Supreme Court can hide behind formal equality when they legalize the exclusion of persons of color from colleges, or the exclusion of women from higher ranking jobs. Most recently, the courts have fallen back on on formal equality to give the rights of citizenship to corporations. They use the argument that labor unions and trial lawyers will be able to spend as much money as they want on campaigns, so it's okay that corporations are able to spend as much money as they want on political campaigns. First of all, they are implying that there are only two possible points of view, that of the labor unions and trial lawyers (which somehow is the same) and that of corporations. Just because trial lawyers support democrats, and labor unions support democrats, doesn't meant they could get along if they had to wait in the same line at Dennys. This formal equality bigotry is pervasive and unstoppable, but worse, it is entirely ungrounded in facts or reality. This February, coming off a fantastic Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I have to think that MLK didn't see this coming, and he would have been upset that the country is using his name, and his most famous words, to promote formal equality at the expense of actual equality.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I think one of my favorite examples is the ruling in Parents Involved, 127_S.Ct._2738 2007--the Court used Brown v BOE to strike down efforts to alleviate the racial imbalance in a local school system.
Another great Stevens dissent:
“There is a cruel irony in THE CHIEF JUSTICE’s reliance on our decision in Brown. The first sentence in the concluding paragraph of his opinion states: ‘Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin.’ This sentence reminds me of Anatole France’s observation: The majestic equality of the law, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.’ THE CHIEF JUSTICE fails to note that it was only black schoolchildren who were so ordered; indeed, the history books do not tell stories of white children struggling to attend black schools.”
Post a Comment