Patrick Bohan for Congress: Diversity Policy
We are all equal. The only thing that is diverse about American citizens is our character and our personalities. In 1963, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. declared, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." In his most famous dissent, Justice John Harlan held in the 1896 segregation case, Plessy v. Ferguson, that “our Constitution is color-blind,” that “in this country there is no superior, dominant ruling class of citizens.” In other words, fundamental rights and the law should have nothing to do with color, gender, socio-economic status or any demographic for that matter.
A good example of denying rights based on gender can be found in the autobiography movie about Ruth Bader Ginsberg entitled On the Basis of Sex. The movie centers around the case Moritz v. IRS. In Moritz, a male caregiver was denied a 600-dollar tax deduction because solely because of his sex. In front of the Tenth Circuit Court, a young and ambitious Ginsberg was asked what the quota should be for men wanting to work in the caregiver industry. Ginsberg correctly replied, “there should be no quota”. The Tenth Circuit Court correctly held that sexes were equal based on the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Today, whether schools or businesses admit it, using race or gender as a factor for employment or acceptance into a school is essentially a quota system. Quotas are divisive and polarizing because they deny rights in direct conflict with the Moritz decision and the equal protection clause. For instance, today, Asian Americans are suing Harvard University because their rate of acceptance is extremely low when compared to other races. They are correctly arguing that merit should be the only factor considered for acceptance, not their demographic makeup.