In the midst of all the turmoil we are going through politically, America should sit back and marvel at how far this nation has come by 2012.
We have an African American President, Barack Obama!
We have an Irish Catholic Vice President, Joe Biden, the only Catholic since John F. Kennedy in 1960.
We have a Mormon Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney.
We have a Supreme Court consisting of six Catholics (Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor) and three Jews (Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan), and also an African American (Clarence Thomas), an Hispanic, (Sonia Sotomayor) and three women (Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan) on the Court.
And we have the third woman Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, after two earlier ones (Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice (one with Jewish heritage and one African American).
So we have a lot to be proud of in 2012, with the tremendous amount of diversity!
Identity politics is a dead end. It’s where merit goes to die. One literally has to overlook merit where it is inconvenient to propagate identitiy politics.
If we are to follow the teachings of Martin Luther King, then we should judge men by the “content of their character” rather than the “color of their skin”. MLK is urging us to consider qualifications rather than social considerations. This suggestion is the opposite of what identity politics urges.
It is not progress in a practical sense to promote identity politics. It is, by definition, institutionalized racism, sexism, classism, and bigotry. You just choose new classes to discriminate against rather than the old guards’ favorites. You are enshrining new prejudices. That sounds more like regression to me. I guess we never learned from MLK.
You are over reacting, as all that was being pointed out was the progress that has been made, that no longer are just white Anglo Saxon Protestant men leaders of our political system, the only group to have political power in much of our history as a nation!