It’s time to hate the National Hockey League.
That’s the
siren call
put out by the popular sports and social justice writer Jemele Hill at the Atlantic.
The NHL’s main offense — worse even than allowing one player to skip a rainbow-flag-themed pregame skate — was canceling a very specific career fair.
The fair, slated for Fort Lauderdale, was not available to all applicants. Instead, the NHL explained: “Participants must be 18 years of age or older, based in the U.S., and identify as female, Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, Hispanic/Latino, Indigenous, LGBTQIA+, and/or a person with a disability. Veterans are also welcome and encouraged to attend.”
So a refugee from Libya would be barred from this job fair unless maybe he could sneak in under the “+” in “LGBTQIA+.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office objected to such a job fair in their state,
announcing
: “Discrimination of any sort is not welcome in the state of Florida, and we do not abide by the woke notion that discrimination should be overlooked if applied in a politically popular manner or against a politically unpopular demographic. We are fighting all discrimination in our schools and our workplaces, and we will fight it in publicly accessible places of meeting or activity. We call upon the National Hockey League to immediately remove and denounce the discriminatory prohibitions it has imposed on attendance to the 2023 ‘Pathway to Hockey’ summit.”
Hill was disappointed in the NHL’s response: “Rather than take a bold stand against DeSantis — who’s vying to be the GOP’s most prominent anti-‘woke’ warrior — the NHL buckled.”
It’s totally unsurprising that a progressive writer would want the league to take her ideological side over DeSantis’s. But there’s an extraordinary omission from Hill’s argument that DeSantis and the NHL were in the wrong.
Read her piece
. What you won’t find is any rebuttal to Florida’s argument. Hill flatly states that Florida’s anti-discrimination position is wrong and “embarrassing,” but she dedicates zero sentences to arguing for this point. In certain circles, it seems, it goes without saying that discrimination is just fine.
Not every article needs to justify every premise, but it’s shocking that the anti-anti-discrimination position has become so entrenched on the Left that it goes without even needing a defense.
America’s aversion to discrimination has, until recently, been nearly a first principle among the enlightened media class. Almost every sort of discrimination was outlawed, and whenever some reporter couldn’t find a law explicitly barring every particular type of discrimination, we got a breathless story: “In ____ States, You Can Still Be Fired for Being ____!”
Our anti-discrimination fervor is so extreme that Colorado continues to maintain that Christian bakers must bake cakes exalting transgenderism.
“Discrimination will not be tolerated!” they shout, justifying their use of government power to coerce individuals to violate their own conscience.
But of course, they do not mean it. They do not mean it at all. Because if they did, everyone
attacking Jack Phillips
would attack Jemele Hill and would have joined Ron DeSantis in blasting the NHL’s original plan.
The thing is, there actually is an argument Hill could make, but it would involve admitting that this other massive machine of the Left—the one currently trying to get every single conservative fired and driven out of business — is totally full of crap.
Hill’s unstated argument is that discrimination is not bad in itself — that only some forms of discrimination are unfair and harmful, whereas others are perfectly fine and prudent.
If two young women were seeking a housemate, of course they are in the right to demand it be another woman. Same if two men insist on a third man for their bachelor pad.
Of course, if you were filling out an editorial board at a newspaper and you had no black writers, you might be in the right to insist on a black writer. Same if you had all women as your Sunday School teachers and insisted there be at least one male teacher.
If a young Jewish mother wants her child raised Jewish, could she place the child with an adoption agency that discriminates — on the basis of religion — regarding which families it will place a baby in?
Anti-black discrimination has played a particularly damaging role and has been so clearly unjust that we decided we needed to stomp it out. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the most visible part of that effort. Somehow in the 60 years since then, we’ve started putting every sort of discrimination on the same plane as Jim Crow.
When the Left freaks out that some adoption agency or Catholic School is discriminating, we should give that freakout zero credence.
Our elites don’t actually mind discrimination. They only pretend to when it’s convenient.
