Conservatives: do you support Equal Opportunity for all?

Umm that's not true. The racism has come mostly from the left side of the aisle. You need to study your history more.

 

Yes, and it should be the right of the one fired or evicted to make it known publicly that the owner of said business is a bigoted piece of used toilet paper so that no one will do business with them.

 

Historically, with respect to 'race' (including anti-Semitism) the Left championed equal rights, and the Right opposed them or was at best indifferent to them. In the past, it was the state which enforced inequality. The Left's focus was on getting the state to treat everyone equally, with respect to race/religion.

Thus in England, Jews and Catholics had various civil disabilities applied to them -- not allowed to vote or hold office. In the US, Blacks were prevented from voting by various tricks, enforced by government. The state did not extend equal protection of the law to Blacks in the South, and to some extent, everywhere.

Anti-semitic discrimination was more subtle: Ivy League colleges enforced a 'Jewish quota', to limit the number of Jews who, if admission was merit-based, would be admitted to these elite institutions far in excess of their proportion in the population, Jews being significantly more intelligent than others. Other sorts of private discrimination existed: motels would advertise themselves as being "close to a church", to signal that they were only for Christians. But this sort of discrimination did not have the devastating impact that anti-Black discrimination apparently had. Jews didn't need to be hired as construction workers -- they became professionals or started their own businesses, and in general worked in areas where their merits led people to deal with them.

And of course, the state-sponsored incarceration of Japanese Americans -- citizens of the US, but of Japanese ancestry -- is notorious, and was approved by both Left and Right at the time. (And there may have been a commonsense, superficial justification for it -- although that justifcation, as history showed, was wrong.)

The unconscious assumption of the Left was that it was these state-enforced disabilities that held Blacks back. Give them equal opportunities, and they would thrive, like any other American ethnic minority.

This has turned out to be not true. Why it's not true is a tough question. You'll find more honest thinking on the Right on this issue, in publications like Manhattan Journal, than on the Left, which cannot face the brutal reality. Their ideology requires them to put all blame on the powerful, without examining the behavior of the relatively powerless. Thus the phrase "acting white", which President Obama understood very well, is unknown to many white leftists, although it's been well researched by a Black Harvard economist. ("Acting white" is the accusation made by other Blacks against Blacks in school who seem to be succeeding academically. As the late Judith Rich Harris has shown, peer pressure is far more powerful than anything parents or school can bring to bear to affect behavior. But how to crack this horrible barrier to Black success?)

Thus the dismal performance of Black children academically is blamed by Bernie Sanders, in his latest education proposals, on something called "implicit racism". Noone knows what this actually is, least of all Sanders -- who probably knows it's politically-correct nonsense -- but it sounds good, to Leftists.

This is a real shame, because the Left needs more people like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who saw the real problems and wanted to deal with them. i notice that Democrat Corey Booker, who is also a realist, is now being heavily attacked by the Left for his support for Charter Schools. Too bad!

 

When I got laid off during recession under Obama as a Diabetic, I was refused Medicaid or any form of assistance by the government for insulin. When I spoke to government representative, they asked if I was a minority. Hence, as a white person who paid taxes for almost 30 years, I was not considered equal or worthy. I ended up going with little to no insulin for a short simply because I couldn't afford it and was sick the entire time. Is that fair? I am not angry at people, but the system that divides the country in more ways than one.

 

Obviously, something is wrong with the system in this case, and probably in a lot of other cases.

How about this: just as everyone, almost, has to contribute to their old-age pension fund, called 'Social Security', make everyone, unless they go through some very conscious opt-out procedure, contribute to a health-insurance fund. Not one tied to your job, or to a certain state.

Do it like Singapore, a country not known for its liberalism or socialism. (I think it's actually against the law to be a liberal in Singapore.) And they don't have much of a drug problem, despite being located near the 'Golden Triangle' of heroin production, because they simply hang their drug dealers, and pretty quickly too. American conservatives ought to study Singapore.

 

Good point. In a business that involved inspecting other businesses for property value, wind, hail, fire, liability, burglary hazards etc. for insurance companies, we received an assignment from one of our most important clients to inspect a string of adult 'bookstores'. I don't recall how many there were, maybe five or six? I was not going to assign our female employee that task and after considering that our one male employee at that time was a devout evangelical Christian, I didn't want to ask him to do it. My husband/partner was out of town that week and we needed to get it done. So I did it. Admittedly it was hard not to ask 'what does this do?' and bite my tongue a lot not to say 'you're kidding'. And I felt pretty creepy and dirty being in those places but I got it done. (I do not judge those who don't find those places dirty and creepy though.)

Was I right to do it myself instead of assigning to other employees out of respect for them? I like to think so. And that definitely is a form of discrimination. Would my Christian employees be within their rights to refuse that kind of assignment? Technically no. But I as their employer considered their sensibilities. Would I have been within my rights to refuse to accept that assignment from the insurance company? Absolutely. I didn't refuse for purely practical reasons, but I certainly could have.

Nor, in my opinion, would the bookstore owner(s) have been able to force me to do so on grounds of unfair discrimination.

I think decent people can appreciate that business people have consciences too, and while something is perfectly okay and righteous to one or most people, it may not be to this or that business owner. And if they choose not to be present in a particular venue or participate in a particular activity, it should be their right to refuse.

 

I chose the first, although they are both good choices although I absolutely agree with both choices.
Here is my vote:

1. * Yes, equal opportunity for all citizens.
2. No, private sector should have right to discriminate however they like

 

Agreed absolutely.
I can see, on pragmatic grounds, for a time-limited period, some form of government coercion regarding hiring: say you have a situation like India, with deeply-ingrained caste prejudices. And I think the US was like that fifty years ago, with respect to Black people.

But once the power of near-unanimous custom is broken ... the government should step back. The market and human decency will solve most of the problems. Of course there will be prejudice of various sorts (a fellow Texan -- a gay woman -- once told me that when Yankees hear her Texas drawl, they automatically deduct 30 points from her estimated IQ). And 'statistical prejudice' will always be with us.

In the US today, the reality is that if you're Black, and have an education, corporations will kill to get you. The problem is with young Black people (and to a lesser extent, Hispanics) who don't have a good education, who don't get the skills -- including social skills -- that they need.

That is where our attention should be focussed. What's wrong with education in schools where whites are a minority. The so-called 'gap'. And the problems seem to be spreading to lower class whites.


I follow the education debate pretty closely, and it's very dismaying to see the sort of utter nonsense that is generated there.

 

Religious preferences are protected by the First Amendment of the U.S.Constitution. As for denying gay people services, there may be some individuals who do that. But there are people who deny things to religious people too. Everybody isn't going to do what you think they should do but for the large part we all manage pretty well, gay or straight, religious or not. And life goes on.

 

Equal opportunity includes everyone can be discriminated against and denied services for whatever reason, or even no reason whatsoever.

 

From congress. No where else

So we should just scrap public accommodations entirely then, since “life goes on”, right?

 

almost 42% of Conservatives believe discrimination should be legal.

wow.

back to Jim Crow huh?

 

only in a backwards world where Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa were "free countries".

 

I think most employers are smart enough to hire the most qualified candidates they can without respect to who they are.
A huge problem nowadays isn't discrimination . It's that most people applying for jobs suck, most ofvthe people they have to hire are very poor employees.
Sorry to bring up stereotypes but young people yeah talking mostly about you.

 

Of course this is the real problem.

Jews were definitely discriminated against in all kinds of ways. Vietnamese and Chinese and Japanese immigrants to the US, the same. But these peoples have flourished in the US, despite discrimination. And in fact that discrimination has largely vanished, in part precisely because they flourished. You may not like Jews, but if you want the best doctor, the sharpest lawyer, the best price ... your self-interest will override your prejudice.

America's real problem is the bottom quarter of its population, not all Black by the way. If these people do not get saleable skills -- not just technical skills, but the social attitudes which allow them to work with others -- then all the anti-discrimination laws you can think up will not help them.

That's what politically-minded people ought to be concentrating on. And it's not an issue in which there is, or should be, an automatic Left/Right split. I'm a conservative, but some of the people I admire most are liberals -- or at least non-conservatives -- who are genuinely concerned about the quality of education. (In fact, I would say liberals have made the running here more than conservatives.)

 

Yes. And that is why a H.R. person or a boss looking over a batch of resumes for a few people to call in for interviews might just intuitively pass over the name that doesn't sound like a serious person and choose one that sounds like a better fit. Most of us running businesses are not running social institutions and aren't in the business of training or rehabilitating problem employees. So you look for people that aren't going to require a great deal of wet nursing, that are going to get along with and work well with other employees, and otherwise won't be a pain in the butt.

Having said that, the current administration's economic policies have created a full employment seller's market for labor that I haven't seen in my lifetime. Which is why so many of those formerly hard core unemployable people are getting jobs. Unemployment of teens, almost all minority groups, women etc. at record or near record lows. Most employers don't have the luxury of dozens, even hundreds, of resumes to choose from to fill a position these days as it was during the previous administration because full employment means there are a lot fewer qualified people to choose from. And even then, he is going to choose the resume that LOOKS like the best fit to interview first.

And even the latent bigot is hiring people he might have passed over in other times. And if they are smart, they will do their jobs in a way that will win him over and he'll no longer be a bigot.

And that is how culture is changed for the better and you achieve equal opportunity for all.

 

Could not vote in your poll as every citizen has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yet, I believe that all people have a right to live among their own kind. If this was not true then we wouldn't have immigrants coming here flocking to cities of their own kind. The problem is that some minority groups feel slighted because other groups thrive better than themselves. Most politicians would have you believe that diversity is the answer. I have worked for many companies with diverse work forces and I have watched what the people do during lunch and after work. The trend seems to be that like minded groups of races eat lunch together and at the end of the day most go to neighborhoods of the same class. The Chinese may be able to bring in all classes of people to their restaurants but they go home at night mainly to neighborhoods like themselves. Are the Jewish and Arab neighborhoods integrated? Do other groups move out and leave the area when blacks become the dominant population? Do the Irish and Italians take pride in the neighborhoods they are from?

It's all an illusion. If the government wasn't so overbearing, in forcing people to except what it dictates, we all would be happier. It comes down to tribalism. We may not want to admit we have feelings of mistrust or dislike for other groups; it's just human nature. I would rather work with a all white crew than a mixed crew for the simple reason if a member screws up then you can verbally reprimand them without being sued or accused of racism or sexism.

 

Racism is racism. Our goal (those of us opposed to racism) is to see an end to it in all its flavours. Our greatest fight is always with those who've convinced themselves that their version is acceptable - or worse, not even racism.

 

You don't have the right to end racism..
If people want to be racists that's their choice.. a stupid choice mich like voting Democrat but it is their choice and as an American it's your obligation yes obligation to tolerate their personal choice to be that way. If you aren't willing to do that you don't understand the very basics of what it means to be free.
Again you have no right to end racism.
You have the right to try to end racially motivated crime but not racially motivated thought.

 

Jim crow was enforced by law and no one is proposing that

 

Nm wrong post

 

Democrats usually support abortion

 

Yep i miss typed and respond to the wrong post.

 

I believe in equal opportunity but not equal outcome.