Equality: “I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means…”
How about an awards show, called The Salties where salt-pillar trophies are given to the members of the Christian community who made the most difference on behalf of the LGBTQWFNXAIR community over the past year. It sure would be a nice way to say thank you to the hapless Christians who know better than God and can’t be troubled to turn their Bibles to Romans 1.
But there are few concepts which have suffered a worse drubbing than Equality. It is almost Orwellian how gruesomely the Left has twisted the concept of Equality. No one has described it more aptly than LBJ: “[F]reedom is not enough… [T]he next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights is not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result… To this end, equal opportunity is essential, but not enough.” – President Lyndon B Johnson, Howard University 1965
Apparently, the Founding Fathers were slack-jawed idjits. “Equality as a right is so-so”, is what he’s saying. But what he’d really like to see is equality as a result and a fact. So what he and his fellow Progressives have been doing ever since is trying to reverse-engineer our society to arrive at the desired result. This is their playbook. They pick a goal and then twist the existing framework to try to artificially manufacture their desired goal.
They did this with our housing market by punishing banks which refused to lend to sub-prime borrowers. Why? Because that’s how they planned to reach their goal of increasing home ownership amongst the poor. They did this with our currency when they created the Federal Reserve system, which allows them to tinker with interest rates and money supply to achieve their ideological goals. Time and again, they have refused to let natural forces operate and have forced us to suffer through the inevitable course corrections.
There is no way to achieve “equality is a fact” or a “result” without abandoning equality to get there. And what good is achieving something you have to violate to obtain? The first mistake is expecting Leftists to adhere to the laws of logic. The second is expecting them to see beyond their myopic, Machiavellian machinations. In their brilliance, our Founding Fathers realized that no man-made government could achieve equality of results and so they crafted a system that recognized the equal value of each American citizen and offered them an equal opportunity at success and happiness.
The American Dream is not wealth, success, and happiness. Many are born with that in this country or exert little effort to obtain it. No, the American Dream is found in the space between that equal opportunity and achieved success. It is the ability to make the journey, not the destination itself.
(1) The author is well aware that there are Americans who are desperately poor and is sensitive to their plight. He also understands that the number of truly poor Americans is dwarfed by the number of Americans who are perfectly capable of working and perfectly comfortable not working. These are the people who soak up available tax revenues which should be going to those who are truly in need.
