The Sixth Circuit panel’s 2-1 decision overturning Michigan’s Proposal 2 — which banned racial preferences in public institutions and was passed by almost 60 percent of the electorate — is unbelievable. The decision states that eliminating racial and ethnic preferences would unduly burden minorities and would therefore be a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. They have completely reversed the meaning of equality, no longer to signify equal protection for individuals under the law but equal protection for groups, which quickly translates to equal outcomes for groups. Grutter prepared the way by placing accommodation for racial preferences in the Constitution (supposedly for the bogus educational benefits of “diversity”), and now this decision takes things a further logical step, constitutional permission to guarantee equal group outcomes –truly, racial socialism. Although PC does not permit anyone to say it, the decision clearly assumes that minorities are less intelligent than whites and perhaps Asians, and are unduly burdened if asked to meet the same standards as those groups. Yet minorities are still entitled to the same goods under a regime of racial socialism.
We can’t go on pretending that America is a country devoted to individual rights and prating about American exceptionalism if things like this are advanced and go unchecked. What are we bringing to other countries, the tribalism that we are developing here?
There is a grim irony in the fact that many conservatives have been unwilling to say that the Constitution is color-blind and to use “equal protection” straightforwardly to oppose preferences, while here the pro-preferences side is unabashedly willing to use “equal protection” in its exact opposite meaning to support their views.