Equality

Apparently, Harriet Harman wants to engineer a new social order with her equality bill. On the face of it this is fine in principle. After all nobody should be discriminated against on the basis of their sex, colour, creed or any other aspect of their person. However, some groups believe that the bill interferes with their freedom. The Pope in particular is up in arms. It seems to me the real problem here is that legislation is not the answer. People just don’t respond to being forced into a corner. In addition there is the problem of unforeseen outcomes.

Recently there has been a lot written in the press about women who are increasingly finding that feminist ideas and legislation are actually holding them back rather than helping them as they were intended to. Feminism was supposed to liberate women and allow them to make all the choices in their lives on their own merits. However they are now finding that sometimes this ideal itself actually has the opposite effect. It is now illegal to ask a women in a job interview if she plans to have a family. Fair enough, but employers know this so don’t ask and women who have no intention of having a family do not get the chance to say so and the employer hires the man as it is less risky for them.

All forms of equality legislation almost by definition have a flip side that encourages positive discrimination. The obvious end-point of positive discrimination is mediocrity and I for one do not want to live in a mediocre world.

What has this got to do with Classical Partners, well, we sometimes meet people with pre-concieved ideas which are getting in their way of finding what they want. These pre-concieved ideas are their prejudices and there is no way we can legislate against them. What we can try and do is educate them to find a better way.

I think it is exactly the same with the proposed equality bill. Learn from the mistakes of feminism and instead of legislating try educating.

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