Wednesday, May 14, 2008

In Defense of Discrimination

It is always a joy to read the words of Dr. Alice von Hildebrand.
Years ago, the word "discrimination" was primarily used to make intelligent distinctions. A discriminating person was one capable of perceiving the crucial difference between good taste and bad taste, between beauty and ugliness, between a cultivated person and a coarse one, between moral good and evil, between normal and perverse. To call a person discriminating was a compliment.
The Sixties brought about not only political revolutions but religious, artistic, and cultural ones as well. Today discriminating has assumed an almost exclusively negative meaning: to be prejudiced, intolerant, unfair, politically incorrect. Many are those who live in constant fear of a lawsuit because of an accidental remark they made that is (willfully) interpreted as discriminatory. There are plenty of lawyers who specialize in cases of discrimination. This historical fact had the regrettable consequence of making us totally forget that we should be "discriminating."
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