Quote of the Week: Vincent Price
Ladies and gentlemen, poison doesn’t always come in bottles. And it isn’t always marked with the skull and crossbones of danger. Poison can take the form of words and phrases and acts: the venom of racial and religious hatred. Here in the United States, perhaps more than ever before, we must learn to recognize the poison of prejudice and to discover the antidote to its dangerous effects. Evidences of racial and religious hatred in our country place a potent weapon in the hands of our enemies, providing them with the ammunition of criticism. Moreover, group hatred menaces the entire fabric of democratic life. As for the antidote: you can fight prejudice, first by recognizing it for what it is, and second by actively accepting or rejecting people on their individual worth, and by speaking up against prejudice and for understanding. Remember, freedom and prejudice can’t exist side by side. If you choose freedom, fight prejudice.
Vincent Price, The Saint, “Author of Murder”
Comments are closed.
Of course, only “unjust” discrimination is wrong.
“Discrimination” and “prejudice” are not synonymous. Prejudice is always wrong. Discrimination is wrong only when its bases are wrong.
Rodak,
It depends on the definition you use. Here is one of the definitions from the Merriam Webster online dictionary:
I will acknowledge that someone who has a discriminating palate is not guilty of wrongdoing, and Tom Lehrer has a funny line in his introduction to It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier when he says, “[T]he usual jokes about the army aside, one of the many fine things one has to admit is the way that the army has carried the American democratic ideal to its logical conclusion in the sense that not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed, and color, but also on the grounds of ability.”
Nevertheless, there is a great danger, it seems to me, in saying things like “They [homosexuals] must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.” It is all too easy to claim that some kinds of discrimination (in housing and employment, for example) are not unjust discrimination.
Take a look at the articles on the online Catholic Encyclopedia (the one that is about 100 years old) and read the articles on women, or blacks, or Jews. You will see that the Church’s idea of what is just and unjust changes over time. Take this, for example:
Women now outnumber men in college, and I believe projections are the ratio will be something like 60-40 within the next decade. (Of course, the Church may disapprove. I don’t know.)
Addendum: Quibbling over what constitutes “unjust discrimination” can be like quibbling over the definition of “torture.”
If one is discriminating categorically, then his bases are wrong because they are based on a prejudice. So I don’t think that we are in disagreement.