Ever heard of The Law of Merited Impossibility?
The American Conservative is a publication/website I don’t hold much in
high esteem. Basically, The American
Conservative’s point of view is that it is against any American military
involvement anywhere else in the world except for very essential national
interests—in practice, there are very few very essential national
interests. Short of the Swiss army
storming the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in D.C., military responses to provocations
or crisis’s anywhere else in the world are specious over-reactions. The
American Conservative is replete with articles about war-mongering
neo-conservatives, slavish American policies to Israeli interests, and, lately,
how Obama’s “treaty” with Iran concerning its nuclear ambitions is a product of
superior statecraft. Not my cup of tea;
but, to be fair, neither the Democrat nor Republican parties can count The
American Conservative as a friend.
I turn to The American Conservative to read A “Crunchy Con” is an individual who
embraces the hippy/countercultural
lifestyle of his youth while embracing the conservative ideology of an adult. Dreher
left the Catholic Church after covering the Roman Catholic Church’s child sex abuse scandals and converted the Eastern
Orthodoxy
in 2006. For the most part, Dreher
writes about cultural issues and only occasionally about politics.
It is Dreher who came
up with The Law of Merited Impossibility.
Those of us old enough to remember can recall that as legislators were
preparing to vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Senator Hubert Humphrey, a
key advocate of the bill, assured his colleagues that the new law “would not
require an employer to achieve any kind of racial balance in his work force by
giving preferential treatment to any individual or group.” To drive the point
home, Humphrey went so far as to promise, from the floor of the Senate, that if
the Civil Rights Act were ever to be cited as a justification for preferential
hiring practices, he would physically eat, page by page, the paper on which the
bill was written. Humphrey’s assurances
were codified in the Civil Rights Act by Congress’ insertion of a clause
stating that “nothing contained in this title shall be interpreted to require
any employer ... to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any
group because of race, color, religion, sex or national origin of such
individual or group on account of an imbalance ...” Yet, as history shows, beginning with the
behind-the-scenes drafting of “goals and
timetables”, full-blown criteria for “affirmative
action” became a matter of law—all of which were justified in the name of…you
guessed it… the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Of more recent
memory, objections were raised that special legislation ensuring the rights of
homosexuals would lead to “gay” marriage.
Proponents of gay rights legislation
ridiculed such a suggestion as a bogus, silly fantasy made up by nutball religious
fanatics to mislead the public. “Gay
marriage”, all were told, was simply impossible. And yet…..
These two examples
illustrate Dreher’s Law: “It” will never happen, and when “it” does, you are a mean-spirited
bigot if you oppose it.
Here in Hoosierland, as a result of last year’s RIFA fiasco, the
Indiana legislature is working on legislation to protect the rights of LBGT
folk. Our august Indianapolis Star, advocating such
legislation, dismisses any objections that it would compromise religious rights
and that it would mandate that transsexuals would be allowed to use the
restrooms of their choice. Any bets on what will happen?
