Men: Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Via Peg at What If?, I found this piece by Selwyn Duke at Ameircan Thinker, "The Dehumanizing of Men."

There's nothing new here - if you've been following this sort of thing - but in our PC age, it's amazingly galling:

While flying on Qantas Airlines, New Zealander Mark Worsley was asked to change his seat. You see, the airline viewed him as a threat to the child seated next to him. What was Mr. Worsley’s crime? Was he on a sex-offenders database? Far from it.

The shipping manager and father of two-year-old twins was the victim of a blanket policy, adopted by Qantas and Air New Zealand, whereby they prohibit all men from sitting next to children traveling alone. Said a shocked Worsley,

“At the time I was so gobsmacked that I moved. I was so embarrassed and just stewed on it for the entire flight.”

Now, Duke notes that businesses have a right to adopt policies, even stupid ones, for the "protection" of their customers.

But he notices an odd inconsistency:

Now, what these statists imply is true enough, most sex-offenders are men. But it’s also true that virtually all the terrorists who currently bedevil Western civilization are Muslim and that certain minorities commit an inordinate percentage of crime. Yet, I can’t imagine liberal bureaucrats rubber-stamping policies designed to minimize crime that visited discrimination upon them. Why, we’re told that we can’t even subject Moslems to greater scrutiny at airports.

So, while this is not a policy I would institute under any circumstances, it isn’t its wrongheadedness itself that angers me. No, in fact, as I was pondering my feelings (as opposed to my thoughts) on the issue, I realized something. If this policy were embraced within the context of a society unencumbered by the insane and inane sickness of political-correctness, a civilization wherein group differences were recognized, acknowledged and factored into policy across-the-board, my attitude would be markedly different. Sure, I would still think it stupid, but I’d be able to laugh it off as just so much foolishness. I can’t do that now, though, because evident in this situation is hypocrisy, the acceptance of an unjust double-standard and discrimination of a most invidious sort.

This invidiousness is of course endemic in our society; when half the population is guilty until proven innocent (of potential sexual assault, of being the lesser parent in divorce court, not to mention every variety of domestic violence) without regard to the fact that the percentage of males Quantas is worried about is a tiny fraction of the percentages of other identifiable groups that could be similarly profiled (leaving out, for a moment, the morality and ethics of profiling in the first place) should be enough to get half the population up in arms.

Posted by Mitch at December 14, 2005 05:33 AM | TrackBack