I am grateful for the opportunity to express my vigorous support for the Equal Opportunity Act of 1995, and to present, in the few minutes at my disposal, the essence of the argument against preference by ethnic group. The object of The Equal Opportunity Act of 1995 is to prohibit our Federal Government from giving preference based on race or on sex - and to prohibit the Government from requiring or encouraging others to give such preference. But many well intentioned people do complain, struggling to retain group preferences - some because they seek to engineer a redistribution of goods to match the proportions of the races and the sexes, and some because they think that such preferences give compensation for past injuries. Reasons of both kinds are deeply mistaken.
Equality applies to all.
We give such remedy, rightly - but it is the injury for which remedy is given, not the skin color or sex. There is all the difference in the world between compensation for injury and preference by race. But the notion that that we can redress that historical grievance by giving preference now to persons in the same racial or sexual group as those earlier wronged is a mistake, a blunder. It supposes that rights are possessed by groups, and that therefore advantages given to some minority group now can be payment for earlier injuries to other members of that minority. But moral entitlements are not held by groups.