by Cass Sunstein

In the midst of all the discussion of race-based pupil assignments and affirmative action, I've now received an Op-Ed from someone at the same institution as the person who sent me an Op-Ed on climate change. (Or was that a parody?) I print this one because it seems to me to capture some widespread views in the popular press and perhaps even to overlap, at least a little bit, with the Court's analysis yesterday. (Or is this a parody? What do you think?) "Reverse Discrimination" "They" call it affirmative action. I call it reverse discrimination. If we can't discriminate against them, they shouldn't be able to discriminate against us. Doing that is still discrimination, even when they're doing it. The Constitution itself says that the law must always be "the equal law." When they discriminate, the law is against the Constitution. Even the Declaration of Independence, by Thomas Jefferson, says that "God creates everyone equal." Reverse discrimination is against the Declaration of Independence. Martin Luther King said it best: "the content of their characters, rather than my children's "happening to be black." And Martin Luther King was himself a black. He wrote before the "affirmative action," and he was against it even then. He didn't say you could do it. At Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln was also against it, four score and seven years ago. He didn't say you could do it. They put "equal law" into the Constitution after the Civil War. You can't change that. Even the Supreme Court said you couldn't do it. They said that "separating them is not equal." That was in 1959. Now "they" want to "separate them" (by discriminating) and say it is still "equal." Is hypocrisy equal? It doesn't even help them. It just makes them "inferior." We should go back, before it's too late.