‘Rights Gone Wrong’ by Richard Thompson Ford — Book Review - NYTimes.com: There’s no more polarizing legal battle in America today than the one over the meaning of discrimination. On the left, many progressives insist that any policies and practices that disadvantage people on the basis of race, sex, age or disability should be illegal, and some have carried this principle to illogical extremes — suing to block ladies’ nights at singles bars, for example, or even to forbid Mother’s Day. On the right, many conservatives insist that the Constitution is so colorblind that the government may never take race into account under any circumstances, and the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has carried this principle to similarly illogical extremes — claiming that policies designed to integrate public schools, for example, are impossible to distinguish from those designed to segregate them.
