When Martin Luther King Jr. gave his 1963 “I have a dream” speech, people of goodwill dreamt along with him.

Over the past decade, though, his dream has been stolen. People may be talking about “anti-discrimination”, but King wouldn’t even recognize the goods they’re trying to sell. Let me tell you a story to show you what I mean.

A few weeks ago the American ACORN scandal broke. ACORN, the association of community organizers, has a Canadian presence, but in the United States they receive many millions of government funding to help low-income people access banking and government services. They’ve been convicted of voter fraud in numerous states, though, and it’s been suspected that their activities may be of a more nefarious nature.

Over the summer, two enterprising 20-somethings conducted a sting operation. Using a hidden camera, they walked into at least five ACORN offices posing as a prostitute and her pimp, who wanted to obtain a mortgage so they could operate a brothel, where they would be employing over a dozen 13-year-old girls smuggled in from El Salvador.

Instead of calling the police, workers in each office advised them how to lie and cheat to the bank and the IRS, and how to disguise their underage sex slaves.
But what struck me, when watching these sting videos, was this exchange. At the Baltimore office, the worker who helpfully explained how they could classify these sex slaves as “dependents” to get tax credits, assured these intrepid journalists, “my job is not to judge people.” And earlier she promised them, “we don't discriminate against anybody”.

They have taken the language of civil rights--discrimination is bad--and made it mean something totally different. Discrimination is no longer about treating people badly because of something inherent, like skin colour (which they can't change). It's now about treating people exactly the same regardless of how they act (which they can change).

We're not getting rid of discrimination; we're getting rid of morality, which, incidentally, was responsible for the civil rights movement in the first place.

But let's take this to its logical conclusion. It's easy not to discriminate against people who are kind to their neighbours and nice to their pets. But if anti-discrimination of any form is your highest value, then the way to express it best is to stop discriminating against those who would normally be shunned. Being tolerant against the nice and kind is easy; being tolerant against child molestors is much harder. So if non-discrimination is your highest value, then the best way to demonstrate it is to ignore serious moral transgressions.

It’s hardly surprising that Hollywood, the mecca of “tolerance”, has jumped on the bandwagon. Last week we witnessed star after star expressing their amazing tolerance as they defended Roman Polanski, convicted of drugging and raping a 13-year-old back in 1977. He’s been on the lam since, and it seems that many Hollywood “artists”, including Debra Winger and Woody Allen, think that his incredible film success should excuse sexual assault of a child. Whoopi Goldberg even said on her TV show The View that it wasn’t “rape rape”, even though Polanski admitted he knew the girl was thirteen, and admitted that he plied her with drugs. I wonder what Whoopi would consider rape.

Personally, I think we need more discrimination. We need to discriminate against those who harm children. And we need to discriminate against their apologists, whether they receive government money or whether they receive our entertainment dollars. I’ll never look at Whoopi Goldberg or Woody Allen the same way again. In fact, I hope I never look at them at all. Call it discrimination if you want, but I’m proud of it.

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Labels: columns, social issues