Affirmative Action is Reverse Discrimination Essay -- Argumentative Pe

Affirmative Action is Reverse Discrimination    When the Civil Rights Bill was being debated on the floor of the Senate, Barry Goldwater predicted that this particular bill might be abused. Herbert Humphrey, however, stated that he would eat every page of the bill if ever it were used to justify discrimination against anybody on account of race or sex. The bill eventually passed and became the Civil Rights Act. From college admissions to government contracts, the Civil Rights Act has been grossly abused by giving race and gender primary consideration in admissions and hiring, resulting in blatant reverse discrimination. Paul Craig Roberts and Larry Stratton, co-author of The New Color Line: How Quotas and Privileges Destroy Democracy, document the silent change of the 1964 Civil Rights Act from a statute forbidding preferences based on race and gender into a weapon to coerce employers to adopt and implement quotas. This change is not so silent today. Roberts and Stratton show that, "quotas are based on an intentional misreading of Title VII and are strictly illegal under the 1964 Civil Rights Act." An explicit example of this intentional misreading, or abuse, of the Civil Rights Act is when a person is fired to fulfill a quota. On August 8, the Federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. The court ruled that the Piscataway, N.J. Board of Education violated the Civil Rights Act when it fired Sharon Taxman, an "overrepresented" Jewish female school teacher, to make room for a black woman under the school system's affirmative action plan. The school district was ordered by the court to pay $144,000 in back pay. The judges' decision was based on their own investigation into the legislative history of Title VII ... ...they are black? There is no question that racism did exist in our society and still does today, but the solution is not reversing the discrimination. It is hard to imagine that segregation of our schools was still legal in California as late as 1974, it is even harder to imagine that university admissions are still based on race in 1996. The solution to preferences in hiring and college admissions should be stricter penalties to those who discriminate based on race or gender. Also, it is a little late in the game to squeeze unqualified students into graduate school. We should be working with these students in grade school. Our universities and our government will unlikely look at any logical solutions because of their reputation of putting bandaids on social problems. There is no doubt, if Herbert Humphrey were here today, he would be eating a lot of paper.