In this morning’s reading list we start at City Journal and the morphing of the #MeToo movement into a war on merit and excellence.
The great Heather Mac Donald warns us: ‘If the #MeToo movement only reduces sexual predation in the workplace, it will have been a force for good. Its most likely result, however, will be to unleash a torrent of new gender and race quotas throughout the economy and culture, on the theory that disparities in representation and employment are due to harassment and bias.’
She continues: ‘Corporate boardrooms, executive suites and management structures will be scoured for gender and race imbalances. The advocacy group 50/50 by 2020, which argues for equal male and female representation in business, has recently received several new commitments from organizations pledging to achieve gender parity by the year 2020.’
This will turn into a war on merit and excellence. The key question in hiring candidates will not be who is best suited to the job by skills and experience, but what is their gender and skin colour.
The killer comes here: ‘As the #MeToo moment swells the demand for ever more draconian diversity mandates, a finding in the Pew Research Center poll on workplace equity is worth noting: the perception of bias is directly proportional to the number of years the perceiver has spent in an American university.’
We have pointed out before that a university degree is often a degree in Leftism. It seems now it is a degree in victimhood also.
Next, the Institute of Family Studies discusses Jordan Peterson’s radical view on marriage.
Peterson’s view is that we’ve made a chaos out of marriage. In a video, ‘The Real Reason for Marriage’, Peterson notes that people say they want to leave open the possibility of divorce so that they can be free.
‘You want to be free, eh? Really? Really? So, you can’t predict anything? That’s what you’re after?’ he demands, going on to admonish, ‘It’s a vow. It says, look: “I know you’re trouble. Me too. So, we won’t leave. No matter what happens” . . . That’s why you take it in front of a bunch of people. That’s why it’s supposed to be a sacred act. What’s the alternative? Everything is mutable and changeable at any moment.’
This is an important view in light of the attempt to liberalise even further England’s divorce laws.
Finally, I give you Diane Abbott MP (yes, really) and her excellent Guardian piece on why we should be cautious about Theresa May’s plan to make the abuse of MPs a criminal offence.
First, Abbott points out: ‘It is unclear why MPs or other elected representatives should have special treatment in law to protect them.’ She says it is also unclear where the gap in the current law is. Finally, she says: ‘The short answer is that this government typically attempts to legislate away social problems.’ It is true that both Labour and Conservative governments always attempt to do this, and it is my main objection to many policy proposals down the years.
Still, credit where credit is due.
Mark Wallace at Conservative Home has a similar view.
