Final Anti-Discrimination/Equality Frontier: Promote Stupidity

Our society probably has ‘advanced’ sufficiently in the past four decades to recognize that onetime U.S. Senator Roman Hruska actually was onto something and just ahead of his time in his widely disparaged support of a less than stellar appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court.  

       The appointee was one G. Harrold Carswell, who Richard Nixon, bitter over the rejection of an earlier appointee, tried to put on the court in 1970.  Mr. Carswell was recognized as being a good many lumens shy of being the brightest bulb in a very low drawer.

       In defending the ultimately unsuccessful appointment, Senator Hruska, in a statement for which he was widely reviled, proclaimed that the nation’s mediocre lawyers deserve to be represented on the bench of its highest court.

       It’s now time to pick up the good senator’s fight against one of the last vestiges of discriminatory denials of equality. The relic is one that adversely impacts half of the nation’s people based solely upon their shared inherent trait – stupidity.  Our motto should be:

Up With the Stupid

       After all, almost nobody chooses to be stupid. It’s not their fault.  As was said in the fight for equal treatment for homosexuals, it’s who they are – they're born the way they are.

       Half of the nation’s people are, by definition, less than or just average in their cognitive abilities.  They are not responsible for being intellectually deficient . . . and let’s not use that term.  We instead should refer to them as being intellectually challenged and give them a leg up.

       They deserve equal treatment.

       It is time to institute a program to ensure that people at every level of the span of intellectual capabilities in the nation’s population are fairly represented at every level in all of its institutions – at every level in business and financial organizations, the professions, academic institutions (among both students and faculty), the sciences and in scientific research, our courts, etc.  This, of course, will require drafting people higher on the scale to replace a good many of those currently in our government . . . but let’s not get bogged down in minutia at the outset.

       The point is to be fair.