Policy Review Difficult to weigh and measure with precision as these results may be, they are already being given unhappy expression in countless ways among us. If nothing intervenes to break the grip of this policy - and it is hard to see what will - they will be given countless more, and even unhappier ones, in years to come. FROM BACK TO PATRIARCY (BY DANIEL AMNÉNS VII Affirmative Action ONE WONDERS HOW many people who profess sympathy with feminism have read such books as George Gilder's Sexual Suicide, George Roche's The Balancing Act, Nathan Glazer's Affirmative Discrimination, or R. F. Doyle's The Rape of the Male, books that explain how the feminist program affirmative action, free day-care centers, E.R.A., divorce subsidized by husbands, the abandoning of the rational socialization of children, and so forth-works to undermine the family and civilized society. The present chapter is concerned with the first of these, affirmative action. The university where I teach recently joined the hue and cry for what is designated by the Orwellian expression "Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action." The solidus between the two halves of the expression is intended to mean that my university believes in both of the stated principles: Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action. If, however, one translates the name of this program out of Orwellese into plain English one finds that the translation of "Equal Opportunity" is "You will be employed, paid, and promoted on the basis of merit, motivation, and achievement," and the translation of "Affirmative Action" is "If you are a member of an unsuccessful group, a government bureaucracy will reward you for your membership in that unsuccessful group and will finance your reward by discrimination against Caucasian males." No person of integrity should affect to believe that these two contradictory policies are capable of being reconciled and combined into one. It is perhaps to the credit of feminists, in one sense, that they do not even profess to demand Equal Opportunity. Here is Linda Jenness, the Socialist Workers' Party candidate for President in 1972. Writing of "women and Blacks and other oppressed nationalities [sic]" and asserting that the plight of blacks is "just as dismal" as that of women, she says: One proposal is that recently hired women and This is only fair. It is hardly the fault of Blacks And then this: Special seniority provisions are not new to the union movement. Ever since World War II, for example, some unions have guaranteed men drafted into war their jobs upon return. In addition to their jobs, they were given the seniority they would have earned had they not been drafted. Another proposal is to insist that layoffs cannot be used to reduce the percentage of women or Blacks in a particular workplace. In other words, this means preserving a minimum quota of jobs for Blacks and women.1 As though a woman, by virtue of her nonsuccess on the job market, were entitled to the same gratitude from society as a soldier who had given years of his life for the benefit of his country while others remained at home safely earning fat paychecks. According to a feminist publication called Spinning Off, WOMEN-OWNED BUSINESSES are being sought Women-owned businesses, that is to say, are being sought by feminists and house-males who have crept, climbed, and intruded themselves into the fold of the Los Angeles School District and who feel themselves entitled to break the law by using the taxpayers' money to discriminate on the basis of sex. To borrow the words of Linda Jenness, this is only fair. According to Professor Thomas Sowell of UCLA, himself a black, "If the 'affirmative action' program were merely inane, futile, and costly, it might deserve no more attention than other government programs of the same description. But it has side effects which are negative in the short run and perhaps poisonous in the long run." He goes on: While doing little or nothing to advance the posi- According to the same publication, The Public Interest, Winter 1976, single men professors earn less than single women professors, and black professors have higher incomes than similarly qualified whites. The fact is that discrimination does not exist on college campuses-or did not until the introduction of affirmative action programs whose beneficiaries are underqualified people and the parasitic bureaucrats who run these programs: people like J. Stanley Pottinger and his pestilential hustlers and carpetbaggers in HEW and other federal agencies. According to one of these hustlers, a Labor Department lawyer named David P. Callett, Federal guidelines for affirmative action programs It is when employers design their programs as a In other words, men, most of them breadwinners for families, are to lose out on jobs to women so unmotivated that they haven't even bothered to apply for them. We need affirmative action the way we need green golf balls. |