The Ayatollah Itch is a disease that manifests in an urge to use government power to coerce conformity to quasi-religious agendas. The disease is not confined to clerics in foreign theocracies. Consider Seattle.
Next week, Joshua Diemert, who for eight years was a city employee administering social services, will get what the city wants to deny him: his day in court. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit will hear his argument that a district court erred by granting summary judgment in favor of Seattle.
That court held that no major factual issues are in dispute. Oh? Here are undisputed facts laden with legal significance:
In 2004, Seattle’s government, as woke as a rooster at dawn, adopted the Race and Social Justice Initiative, which was more than a program to promote workforce diversity. Rather, it was a program of compelled racial identity.
Its explicit purpose was to change “the fundamental nature of local government” by embedding “racial equity and social justice principles” throughout city “programs, budgets, and culture.” This involved evaluating city employees through a “racial equity lens.” Facially illegal and presumptively unconstitutional, this monomania featured the full spectrum of now-familiar nostrums and policies. They are divisive, bullying and, by now, boring.
Favoring a colorblind society is stigmatized as “racial evasion.” What normal people consider elementary adult virtues — e.g., punctuality, individualism, perfectionism — are residues of “white supremacy culture.” Diversity, equity and inclusion trainers told trainees that racism is “in white people’s DNA.” Although it is against the law to “limit, segregate, or classify” employees by race “in any program, established to provide … training,” Seattle inflicted mandatory, race-segregated sessions. The preferred euphemism for such evasions of the law is “affinity groups.”
They separate White people and BIPOCs (Black, indigenous and people of color). Seattle seems unaware of how close it has come to formulating a 21st-century version of the Jim Crow “separate but equal” doctrine.
