Supreme Court on Civil Rights

Your editorial denunciation of the majority decision in Wards Cove Packing vs. Atonio was itself an exercise in obfuscation and ideological double talk. The crux of the matter is simply that equal employment opportunity is a right but preferential hiring and preferential treatment on the basis of gender and ethnic or racial background should not be tolerated.

After 20 years of wandering in the ideological swamp of so-called “affirmative action,” the high court has begun to re-examine the thesis that special treatment based on some highly abstract and quite vague notion of historical debt is owed to persons simply because they have a certain skin color or gender or ethnicity or other characteristic. Preferential treatment as embodied in these “affirmative action” mandates is the road to national divisions and future civil war.

When we speak of equal employment opportunity we insist on clear and specified objectivity. But when we couple this with so-called affirmative action, we simultaneously insist that subjective decisions on the person’s race or gender or ethnicity shall prevail. In other words, we are in a hopelessly contradictory situation which defies ordinary common sense.

Millions of incompetents have been hired because of federal mandate. Other millions who are fully competent have been turned away. A new terminology is used which refers to minorities and women as “protected” groups, meaning that everyone else is not protected, clearly a titanic attack on constitutional rights and privileges. The Supreme Court is slowly emerging from its insulated ideological cocoon and coming to realize that unless preferential treatment is halted, the time will come when those whom affirmative action will have crucified will resort to massive insurrection, the like of which has never been seen in the United States.

MICHAEL SOUZZI

San Diego