The Equality Act . . . A Most Discriminatory Piece Of Legislation
By JOHN LYON
“The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General” — Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1961).
- + + It is possible that we shall have to wait another sixty years (120 years from Vonnegut’s publication of this story) to get these Amendments passed, but there are more expeditious means to this goal, via executive and legislative action, and judicial interpretation, with Big Electronic Brother ceaselessly softening up the rigors of common sense and reasonable morality along the way.
We are, however, moving rapidly toward that goal with the passage by the House of Representatives of the so-called Equality Act of 2021. By 2081 we may find popular lyrics that celebrate the United States as land of the free and home of bravado.
In the first paragraph of his statement praising the Equality Act passed by the House of Representatives this February, President Biden proposes that “every person should be treated with dignity and respect” and that this bill is a step toward “ensuring that America lives up to our foundational values of equality and freedom for all.” The wild card in that statement is obviously the failure to define “person”; consequently this statement should be taken as mere verbal claptrap, for we treat individuals obviously of our species as disposable refuse and not “persons” if they have not yet achieved extra-uterine life.
As once we treated certain classes of individuals vaguely referred to in our constitutional documents as, e.g., three-fifths of a person. As we shall doubtless in future classify other human beings — the terminally ill, the congenitally deformed, the superannuated, and others legally determined to be “life unworthy of life.” The state gives, and the state takes away. Blessed be the name of the state.
This claptrap is emphasized by the fact that the same man who celebrates the Equality Act, particularly designed to discriminate in favor of rainbow warriors, has, by Presidential Edict, excluded from the blessings of personhood those conceived and variously gestated but not yet born.
Sheer “Double Speak.” Yet we are merely 73 years from the announced prophecies and proclamations of the Ministry of Truth (1984; published 1948). It is “back to the future” for us.
“Discrimination” used to have a positive connotation and, covertly, still does, its opposite indicating the lack of taste, of the ability to make necessary distinctions, of any sense of appropriateness. Now, in our useless (because potentially endless) orgy of self-incrimination about the constitutional institution of slavery, the original sin of the United States, we indiscriminately bracket with human bondage various forms of social and political discrimination, from the obviously serious to the patently trivial. Our intentions are good, sometimes even honorable. But perhaps we lack discrimination.
One would think it part of the job qualifications for those who claim to serve and represent the people that they realize that bad things often come of good intentions. The Fourth Crusade, for instance, set out to take Jerusalem from the Turks, but wound up taking Constantinople from the Christians. We seem to be on a Children’s Crusade to rid the country and then the world of discrimination and inequality. Macro- or micro-, one form fits all. We shall be equal every which way, crusading under the aegis of the shadow-filled, penumbra-sporting Fourteenth Amendment.
Given the Equality Bill we are about to try again to convert into law, and the polymorphous perversion our species seems capable of enjoying, why should the murky elasticity of that amendment (or other available legal precedents) not cover yet unspecified forms of cis- or trans-sexual/species entertainment: polygamy; polyamory; S-M unions; pederasty; bestiality; incest; necrophilia, transhumanism? We may fly nominally under the flag of the Divine Right of the People, but our actual ensign is the Divine Right of Majorities, and we know that majorities can be manufactured and dissolved by suborning appropriate segments of the ministries of education, media, and entertainment.
President Biden notes in his “Statement” that one of the purposes of the Equality Act is to “codify the courage and resilience of the LGBTQ+ movement into enduring law.”
The world as will and resilience. Truth, as some correspondence between thought and nature, or God, or tradition, or any empirical, pragmatic sanction is caput. The world is what I want it to be right now (though I may want it to be otherwise shortly)! And words mean exactly what I want them to mean at the time I use them! Hello, Alice!
The president’s “statement” concludes and sums up by proclaiming that “no one should ever face discrimination or live in fear because of who they are or whom they love.” Let us set aside the president’s patent discrimination against the conceived but unborn, and the mobility of gender identity (what legal implications are there for self-sought “sexual reversion”? There are such cases, e.g., the Keira Bell situation currently in the UK).
Why should anyone ever pay any significant attention to such drivel? Key words — “one,” “discrimination,” “are,” and “love” are simply emotive grunts uttered to one’s constituency. This statement is at least as vacuous as Justice Kennedy’s “mystery of life” proclamation. What meaning can it have other than “Vote Democratic and do what you will!”
Eighty percent of the material in the Equality Act itself consists in legalese specifying how the “findings and purposes” of the supposed or proto-manufactured current majority on equality and nondiscrimination are to be appropriately inserted in already existing federal laws governing citizens’ behavior. Amidst the legal verbiage, however, we find substantial acts of discrimination. For instance, “Sec. 1107. Claims” simply proposes to annul the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. And throughout we are stereotypically warned against discrimination, and discriminatorily warned of stereotypes.
In Vern Sneider’s delightful Teahouse of the August Moon (and the play and movie based on it) there is a most illustrative episode for our purposes. One of the gifts that “Uncle Sam” is bringing to occupied Okinawa after World War II is, not quite “equality,” but certainly the absence of “discrimination.” This has led many of the island’s lower-class women in the locale where the account takes place to demand that the local beautiful Geisha teach them how to be Geisha Girls. Captain Frisby unsuccessfully tries to convince them that Lotus Blossom, the Geisha, has certain qualities that the U.S. government cannot supply them with. Unconvinced, they threaten to write to “Uncle Sam,” and demonstrate and shout outside Frisby’s Headquarters. Sakini, the interpreter, tells Frisby that they are riotous over “discrimination.” Frisby replies that we cannot have any of that! Sakini replies, “No, Boss! You got that all wrong! They not against discrimination! They just want some!”
Is there not a general truth in this statement? Is any political faction or any social group demanding, for example, liberty, equality, fraternity, really against discrimination across the board, or are they merely morally masquerading, simply wanting some discrimination themselves?
Perhaps it is the case that demands for the immunity from “discrimination” of certain conceptions and practices pertaining to gender rights, sexual orientation, and personal “identity” are merely the political strife for power under the cover of “equality” — the manipulation, on something vaguely resembling moral grounds, for a shift of discrimination from one group to another? RFRA out! HR 5 in! If so, there must be a greater adjudication in the court of reason, common sense, moral discernment, and practical experience than has taken place, or perhaps can possibly take place, in a fractured society such as ours.
Oh, you know, not to be stereotypical about it, our strength lies in our differences. Yet, as often noted, one can go to Hell for lying also.
