Some Funny Anti-PC Items | Center for Equal Opportunity

The Washington Post Magazine’s end-page is always a column by humorist Gene Weingarten, who’s very funny but extremely liberal. His column this week, however, makes fun of Bowdoin College’s political correctness, which I recently wrote about, in the sombrero scandal.

Mr. Weingarten’s column is styled a plea for forgiveness and addressed to the Bowdoin student government; he wants forgiveness for his daughter having dressed up as an Indian (complete with feather, horrors!) many years ago. It’s very funny, and if even a big liberal like Gene Weingarten agrees things have gotten out of hand, then maybe there’s hope.

Another funny item is the Stanford Review’s demands for change. Sample: “WE DEMAND that Stanford recognizes that half-lives matter, and establishes a committee to fund the Chemistry and Physics Departments accordingly.” It’s also very funny, and — I hope — also evidence that this shark has been jumped.

Alas, not all Stanford students are as enlightened as those on the Review. But our friend and frequent ally Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, does a great job here of setting straight that campus’s students wildly indignant about nearly everything. (Readers of a certain age will get the “s.w.i.n.e.” reference in the preceding sentence; others can look here.)

Better Thinking through Politically Correct “Diversity”? – Not so much, according to a spate of sources last week. See our friend John Rosenberg (reporting on some recent social-science research on social-science research) here, some other researchers here, Jonathan Haidt’s interview with Tyler Cowen here, and even (sort of) Russell Jacoby here.

Hiring Discrimination at the University of Louisville – There’s an important article in the Spring 2016 issue of Academic Questions, giving chapter and verse on how affirmative action in faculty hiring works at the University of Louisville. As I’ve noted before, the law is more hostile to such preferential selection in faculty hiring than it is to student admissions — there’s no “diversity” exception to the ban on discrimination, for example — but schools don’t seem to care.

A Couple of We-Told-You-So’s – One of my co-contributors at National Review Online is David French, and he noted last week that “The Cost of Radical Police ‘Reform’ Is Blood on Chicago’s Streets.” And this week (in hard copy) the Washington Post — yes, again the Washington Post — has a story headlined, “Chicago grapples with a staggering rise in homicides amid police shake-up.” Related to David’s article and the “Ferguson effect” is yet another recent Washington Post article, headlined, “Police are dying by gunfire at over twice last year’s rate.”

And in the run-up to the Supreme Court’s decision last year on whether “disparate impact” lawsuits may be brought under the Fair Housing Act, I warned that, if the Court said yes, then landlords would be pressured to stop excluding tenants based on their criminal records. Well, the Court went the wrong way, and this week the New York Times has a story about the Obama administration’s expected “guidance” that will indeed limit the use that landlords make of tenants’ criminal records.

A Mixed Civil-Rights Bag in Congress – Just a quick update on recent civil-rights goings-on in Congress.

The good: Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), bless his heart, continues to harass the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, this time by requiring it to play by the same rules it wants the companies it regulates to play by. Also good: There has been anti-disparate-impact legislation introduced by Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-AZ), and there’s more in the works.

The bad: The House (isn’t that supposedly controlled by the Republicans, by the way?) has passed some bad legislation with gender preferences in it.

And the ugly: Some Senators want to give arguably the worst agency in the federal government, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, more money to spend on policing campus sex.

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Finally, the New York Times this week published my response to Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner’s disappointing op-ed:

“Representative Jim Sensenbrenner calls for the passage of his Voting Rights Act of 2015 to overturn the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder. But no new legislation is needed.

“The Supreme Court struck down only one provision in the Voting Rights Act — which was indeed unconstitutional and was never a permanent part of the act anyway — and there are plenty of other voting rights laws available to ensure that the right to vote is not violated. And notwithstanding Mr. Sensenbrenner’s suggestion to the contrary, those provisions can be used to stop discriminatory voting practices before they affect any election.

“The bill that Mr. Sensenbrenner has drafted is not only unnecessary but also affirmatively bad. For example, it does not protect all races equally from discrimination; it includes dubious expansions of federal power that have nothing to do with the Supreme Court’s decision; and it itself violates the Constitution by prohibiting practices that are not actually racially discriminatory but only have racially disproportionate effects.

“The bill is not really bipartisan. It is intended to give a partisan advantage to the left, which is why nearly all its support comes from those across the aisle from Mr. Sensenbrenner.”

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