Quote from article # 2:
"Proposition 209 seeks to lock shut the window for state and local action that [court] decisions . . . have so painstakingly left open," the challengers said in Coalition for Economic Equity v. Wilson. They said the law violates the Constitution's equal protection guarantee by preventing governments from specifically favoring women and minorities."
Dew:
"How is the equal protection guarantee effective if it gives preferrential treatment to anyone? If ANY one person gets an advantage, it is not equal. If the field is to be truly levelled, all people, regardless of race, gender or creed should have to put forth the same amount of effort to attain the same goals. Until that happens, the field will never be level."
I believe the argument here would be that if women and minorities come from disadvantaged backgrounds, it would not really be treating them equally to refuse extra assistance. The people challenging the law are arguing a vision of equality as an intended outcome of legal practice whereas the response you are giving treats equality as a procedural stipulation. By the former preferential treatment for the oppressed is consistent with equality, by the latter it isn't. I see no inherent reason why one or the other model should be used, though I would note that this sentence appears consistent with either approach:
"If the field is to be truly levelled, all people, regardless of race, gender or creed should have to put forth the same amount of effort to attain the same goals."
By the equality-as-policy-objective approach this statement could be used to overcome practical disadvantages, thus ensuring that minorities and women do not have to put forth an onerous amount of extra effort to get the same results.
By the equality-as-procedural-requirement approach the this statement would require all laws to treat everyone equally, thus leaving everyone to their own devices and disentangling the government from complex calculations of personal need.
I suspect you meant the statement to entail the latter approach, and I am not entirely adverse to that vision of justice. But the former approach is at least logically consistent. And the latter does leave open questions about what to do about impoverished communities or consistently oppressed segments of American society. I can accept that Affirmative action might not be the answer, but if it isn't then adopting the strictly formal approach makes it even more critical to formulate viable programs aimed at supporting minority comnunities, and I'm not sure what to do for women in that case. There is a real sense in which much of the discrimination against women is informal, even largely unconscious. But they do not occupy an identifyable community of their own. To the extent tat they face double-binds or a glass ceiling, affirmative action is the only resolution I can think of.
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