A great read that has special applicability to Canadians who watch as our fundamental freedoms are eroded by evil Trudeaus and their evil "Charter of Rights and Freedoms" which don't provide any freedoms.
There were times in the history of Ireland, during the agitations of the 19th century, when it was impossible to get a jury conviction against any nationalist even for cold-blooded murder, because Irish jurors either sympathized with the cause or else feared that anyone who voted to convict would be killed next. Britain therefore had to make certain crimes subject to trial by magistrate, using state-of-emergency laws known as the Coercion Acts, renewed annually by Parliament.
Imagine if, instead of passing annual Coercion Acts, Parliament had permanently abolished the right to trial by jury, not just for political crimes but for every crime and not just in Ireland but in the whole United Kingdom. This is akin to what Congress did when it passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Organizations are forced to err on the side of political correctness because civil rights law is fundamentally vague, even self-contradictory. Affirmative action at professional schools is defended on the grounds that minority populations are better served if they have doctors and lawyers who look like them. When Walgreens was found to be assigning black managers to stores in certain neighborhoods on the logic that black customers are better served by managers who look like them, the resulting anti-discrimination case cost the company $24 million to settle. When Ann Hopkins sued Price Waterhouse for sex discrimination for not making her a partner, the court found in Hopkins’s favor because the firm had ignored objective criteria, like dollar value of business brought in, in favor of subjective measures like personality. Last year, a judge upheld Harvard’s admissions policy against the lawsuit brought on behalf of rejected Asian applicants because she found that Harvard must be allowed to ignore objective criteria, like test scores, in favor of subjective measures like personality.
Race-conscious, colorblind, subjective, objective—the less consistent the law is, the more power left-wing activists have to define what the rules really are. The result is to keep ordinary citizens in a constant state of nervous deference. Even “speculating, wool-gathering, or talking off the cuff” was now legally risky, Caldwell writes. “Americans in all walks of life began to talk about the smallest things as if they would have their lives destroyed for holding the wrong opinion. And this was a reasonable assumption.”
