Dave Mason - Helping Real People use Real Computers in the Real World!

Discrimination has become one of the most
powerfully negative words of our time. 9/16/00

Discrimination has become one of the most powerfully negative words of our time. But the Government does not always discourage discrimination, it actually encourages it. In fact, Federal law often requires discrimination!

Consider the discriminatory tax code. Thousands of tax breaks are given to specific groups, businesses, and special interests. Look at the marriage tax, whose repeal was very recently quashed. Why would the Government discriminate against us married folk? What have I done wrong by being married?

The tax plans of both presidential candidates discriminate against certain groups. If some of us deserve a tax break, what have the others of us done to deserve to be denied it? Isn't it our money anyway? Who gave the Government the right to take more from some of us than others? Do we want the politicians whose weaknesses and frailties we are all too familiar with, making these discriminatory decisions? Why do we accept this obvious discriminatory behavior on the part of our Government? Isn't discrimination wrong? Or is it just discrimination we don't agree with or personally benefit from?

Let's look at the affirmative action laws. In order to end discrimination against one group is it really necessary or even defensible to discriminate against another? If discrimination is bad, then it's bad. We can't have it both ways. So long as we try to, discrimination is only perpetuated.

We have somehow decided that Governmental discrimination is good, and individual discrimination is bad, when in fact individual discrimination is easier to deal with. I can choose not to do business with a bigot. I can't choose not to do business with the Government. I have to play their rules. They are the only ones by power of force and rule of law that can discriminate against me and still force me to deal with them. The Government is like Archie Bunker in Meatheads clothes. "We're going to discriminate, but it's only for a really good reason. We're going to help people, whether they like it or not!"

We have come to believe that people in the Government are somehow able and can be trusted to manipulate things in our lives, when the very same people in business would be strung up for attempting to impose themselves on our lives in that same manner.

Many people claim to want the death of discrimination, but I see through many of them. Much of the anti-discrimination thing has become a cottage industry. Without discrimination, what would all the special interest attorneys do? What would the Rainbow Coalition do? People would lose fortunes, power, fame and political office. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would have to get real jobs! George Dubya and Algore wouldn't be able to manipulate us for votes anymore.

Discrimination will always be with us. There will always be bigots. If we continue to use their presence as an excuse for the Government to take over our lives, we all lose. We've replaced a bunch of relatively powerless, ignorant individual bigots with a gargantuan, trillion dollar bigot with it's own Police Force and Army. Do we really want the Government to continue as the biggest, baddest Archie Bunker around?

This country was founded on strong principles. We have abandoned those principles and politicized everything in our lives. Let's return to those principles and get the Government and our tax money out of the discrimination battle, and undertake this battle personally. Then we no longer have the false distinction of good or bad discrimination. Only then will discrimination begin to be challenged.