900 Left Feet - Why "diversity" trips up the Democrats.
BY JULIA GORIN - WSJ.com
I have mentioned before how conservative Blacks are. These numbers on Gay Marriage are revealing.
Recently I received an electronic petition that apparently has been making the rounds on the Internet for the past year. The petitioners were asking me to register my opposition to the Federal Marriage Amendment, a proposed constitutional amendment that would officially define marriage as consisting "only of the union of a man and a woman."
Co-sponsored by three Republican and three Democratic lawmakers concerned about lawsuits that seek to redefine marriage, the amendment draws its most vocal support from a group called the Alliance for Marriage, a coalition of predominantly black civil-rights and religious leaders. In March the group released a national Wirthlin poll showing that 63% of Hispanics, 62% of blacks and 63% of the working poor support an amendment affirming the traditional definition of marriage. Two of the three Democrats sponsoring the amendment are black. (The other is from Texas.)
Who knew one protected class could hold different values from another protected class? Who knew diversity was a double-edged sword? Certainly not the Democratic Party, which relies on and boasts a platform of inclusion.
I'm reminded of the way I couldn't help relishing the immediate post-Sept. 11 disorientation of many American Jews, as the left wing of my tribe found out that the non-Jewish left overwhelmingly supports Palestinians over Israelis. Or the subsequent firings of two Israeli scholars from an international British scientific journal as part of an academic boycott of Israel--despite the scholars' own longtime stances against Israeli policy. More rich, however, was the blacklisting of ultraleftist Rabbi Michael Lerner at an antiwar rally in San Francisco because he doesn't oppose the existence of the state of Israel. Taking it all in wasn't unlike the joy of watching Bill Clinton thumb his nose at the woman's movement every time he groped another staffer.
When the substance of a political party's platform is inclusion, as opposed to inclusion being a natural result of doing what is right for the country, it makes for a fancy balancing act--one that can be sustained for only so long. A strategy of pandering to groups, as if their interests are at odds with those of the rest of America, is bound to produce perverse consequences.
How thrown off Bill Clinton must have been during the 2000 U.S. Open, when he congratulated Venus Williams on her playing and she demanded to know what he was going to do about her high taxes. What was the genius elocutionist's response? "You really worked hard."
Mr. Clinton must have walked away scratching his head. A rich black woman? Didn't see that coming. I thought Oprah was an aberration.
It gets worse when you find out that the groups you've been pandering to can't stand one another. For example, how do you pander to both Jews and Arabs? Especially since the loyalty of the former can no longer be assumed now that Jews have sensed which way the wind blows from the Democratic camp as concerns Israel.
Just as diversity can backfire when the object is inclusion, so eventually do the included get burned by the policies that such a political party pursues.
A black guy, a gay guy and a paraplegic walk (or wheel) into a bar and apply for a job. Who should be hired? In the government's eyes, all are equally qualified in misery (with race often equated to physical handicap, sexual proclivity and mental illness), and are equally likely to be turned down by the prospective employer. In practice, however, the least likely to get hired is the wheelchair applicant, thanks to the stringent requirements the Americans with Disabilities Act puts on employers' shoulders. Even small-business administrations have been known to quietly advise businesses against hiring the disabled because of the burdens of accommodation (reconstructing the building, essentially), and the near impossibility of ever firing such an employee--putting the disabled at a double disadvantage.
Another law, one that was passed with much fanfare, backfired just two weeks ago at the sentencing of a young Muslim man named Mazin Assi, who last September attempted to firebomb a Bronx synagogue. The crime was the first to be charged under New York state's brand new Hate Crimes Statute. What would have ended in a fine or probation for the ethnically sympathetic culprit became the maximum five to 15 years in prison.
Question God's existence, but not his poetry. The Assi case demonstrates that progressive legislation meant to target society's whiter and, when relevant, straighter elements has already gone awry (albeit not for law enforcement officials, who are glad to make use of any tools allowing them to be tougher on crime). Premised on punishing motivation over crime, and on the logic that killing a Jeffrey Dahmer because he is gay is worse than his killing people because he gets hungry, application of hate-crimes laws promises to get even stickier: According to the Justice Department's National Crime Victimization Survey, 90% of interracial crimes involve a white victim and a black perpetrator. Yet witness the dearth of charges resulting from the 2001 Fat Tuesday mob violence against white celebrants in Seattle. Will things get even stickier if a black man one day decides to beat up a gay man--or, worse, kill a black lesbian, as may have been the case in Newark, N.J., last week?
At the same time, amid the Bush-bashing over Texas' death penalty, the bashers demanded harsher treatment for the three white men who dragged James Byrd behind a pickup truck to his death--two of whom in fact were sentenced to die. What would the liberals have done if they'd gotten their way long before and had the death penalty abolished? Organized a lynch mob?
Democratic incoherence extends beyond policies involving protected victim groups. Consider the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law, which passed with little Republican support. Within days after President Bush signed it into law last year, 24 Democratic lawmakers held a closed-door luncheon to discuss strategies for evading it. The meeting culminated in the formerly supportive Sen. Hillary Clinton exploding at Sen. Russ Feingold. No doubt they all breathed a sigh of relief this month when a federal court struck down most of the law as unconstitutional.
Between the narrowly averted transit worker strike last Christmas, which would have left workers stranded in a union-happy New York striving to be a worker's paradise, and the mirror held up to the left internationally when the European Union found itself unable to meet Kyoto environmental targets while pressuring the U.S. to adhere to stricter ones, the day draws nearer when all will come running to the Republicans to undo the damage and fix the fixes.
Ms. Gorin is a contributing editor of JewishWorldReview.com.
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