Rick Hess, Jeanne Allen, and the boss have all explained how historically inaccurate the Left’s latest talking point on school choice is: Tuition vouchers — allowing parents to send their child to whatever school they choose, with the government paying a set amount toward tuition — are supposedly racist because a segregationist county in Virginia used them in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education. In fact, the idea goes back much farther in history; the idea that it “originated” in segregation is simply not true.

Beyond that, of course, lies the question of whether a policy that is adopted with impure motives must be considered forever tainted. If the answer is yes, we will have to abandon many of our nation’s most significant reforms:

— In many places, including most of the territories of the western expansion (Kansas, to take just one example), opposition to slavery was motivated not by humanitarian concerns but by a desire to exclude all blacks, free and enslaved, and establish a “white man’s country.”

— The 15th Amendment, guaranteeing black men the right to vote, was enacted by Republicans to ensure continued Republican dominance at the polls, since it was understood that blacks would vote for the party of Lincoln.

— Jonah Goldberg has written extensively about how support for contraception was firmly based in an enthusiasm for eugenics. (“More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief issue of birth control,” wrote Margaret Sanger.)

— The second territory to adopt women‘s suffrage, in 1870, was Utah. The main proponents were Mormons, who favored letting women vote because it would increase Mormons’ electoral power and enable them, among other goals, to protect the practice of polygamy. (Mormon men had more wives than gentiles did, and Mormon women were thought to be more motivated to participate in politics than gentile women.) It worked so well that Congress overruled the territorial legislature and abolished women’s suffrage in 1887.

Would the teachers’ unions ban buses because seating in them was segregated in some places half a century ago? That would make as much sense as this latest exercise in illogic.