Lamar Howell's Weblog

When a free society creates a protected class, all institutions and individuals will eventually be forced to serve the interests of that class. Those new ‘human’ rights will trump all other rights, even the First Amendment.

Speech: you can’t criticize the protected class.
Religion: you can’t question the behavior of the protected class.
Press: you can’t print anything which would ‘shame’the protected class.
Assembly: you can’t exclude the protected class for any reason.

This doesn’t protect anyone’s rights, only their feelings.

We attempted to create a protected class when we instituted affirmative action. It has not has the desired effects and resulted in strange quotas, lawsuits, and not a little resentment.

We are doing the same thing today by creating a protected class based on sexual orientation. It we think it will be settled once this new class has marriage rights in every state, think again. It will only be the beginning of long, protracted confusion, contradictory regulations, family lawsuits, court battles, and broken lives.

Roe v. Wade was thought to have solved the rights of a newly protected class (the unwanted pregnant woman). But forty years later we find ourselves still fighting that battle, with the most vulnerable as its victims.

The Civil Rights Act of 1965 was supposed to settle all claims of racial injustice. We are coming up on the fiftieth anniversary of that watershed event next year, and we are no closer to a settlement than we were then.

My point is: we cannot safely, let alone constitutionally, create a protected class. As Ayn Rand said, The smallest minority is the individual.