… Supporters of affirmative action cogently point out that this sort of “affirmative action” for athletes (as well as for alumni children) has never, at least until now, elicited cries of foul on the ground that it violates meritocratic principles. Somehow that kind of indignation seems to arise only in response to the putative advantages of minority candidates.

For some reason, every time this point is made — and it is made in virtually every defense of racial preferences — it is always made with a sort of breathless sense of discovery, as though the author had just come up with an unanswerable “gotcha!” that will drive the final nail into the coffin of racist or redneck or Republican (but, from a liberal point of view, I repeat myself) objections to affirmative action.

Here are the two fallacies on which that argument depends:

1. The Merit Fallacy

I’m sorely tempted to call this one The Meretricious Fallacy (Meretricious: “tawrdrily and falsely attractive”; “superficially significant” — Merriam-Webster Collegiate Online). Anyway, this is an argument that no one who accepts the legitimacy of criteria based on anything other than merit can make a principled criticism of racial preferences. It is a fallacy because it wrongly assumes that the only criticism of racial preferences is that they offend the merit principle. That is not true. They also offend, and more fundamentally, the principle that no person should be rewarded or punished based on race or religion. For example, merit is totally irrelevant to the illegitimacy of an admissions office in a public institution giving preferences to Presbyterians. (And preferences to Jews or Catholics or wiccans would have been equally illegitimate, even if the rationale were to compensate for past discrimination.)

2. The Fallacy of Fungible Discriminations

This is the argument that all discrimination is alike; if you can discriminate for one reason, you can discriminate for any reason. Thus if it’s acceptable to give preferences based on athletic or musical ability or the alumni status of parents, it’s also legitimate to give preferences based on race or religion. Preferences, in short, are preferences; if one is O.K., all are O.K.

In some respects No. 2 is simply the other side of the coin of No. 1. The Merit Fallacy says that if you accept any exception to merit you have no principled basis to criticize any exceptions to merit, and The Fallacy of Fungible Discriminations says all discriminations are on the same moral plane….

I bring this up now because the never dormant Invidious Ubiquitous Non-Sequitur has just raised its ugly head again, in the form of a hopelessly confused misunderstanding of anti-Asian discrimination and disparate impact theory by Matthew Yglesias in SLATE, which I have just criticized here.

How about if Israel simply “buys” (without necessarily conceding lack of current ownership) the extra land from the Palestinians?  And not by giving the money to the Palestinian government, but by giving every man, woman, and child in the West Bank $5,000, payable over a five-year period.  The total cost: approximately $10 billion.  Make the offer, and let the Palestinians decide in a referendum whether they’d rather continue the conflict, or would rather have more money than most of them have ever seen (GDP per capita $1,000), plus their own state, plus peace.

I think this proposal is brilliant, perhaps in large part because it so closely resembles an idea of mine about how to end the impasse over affirmative action. Way back in 2003 I wrote that “I would be willing to consider sympathetically something as difficult to justify as reparations for slavery if they could be limited in amount, in duration, and be paired with abandoning all forms of racial preference.”

I still think that’s worth discussing. As I concluded here last fall, after documenting only some of the astronomical amounts we spend on various affirmative action projects, “Outright reparations might be cheaper, in fact much cheaper, than our current ‘diversity’ ransoms.”

“The view that states should have free rein to change their election laws even in places with a history of Jim Crow seems to be gaining traction within the Republican Party,” Gerstein writes.

“There certainly has been a major change,” said Rick Hasen, a professor of election law at the University of California at Irvine. “Now, you have a whole bunch of credible mainstream state attorneys general and governors taking this view. … That would have been unheard of even five years ago. You would have been accused of being a racist.”

Surely Hasen, who is indeed a highly regarded election law expert (although not without a critic), knows that one big thing hasn’t changed at all in the past five years: Section 5′s critics will be called racist just as loudly now as then, as evidenced by Gerstein’s article itself, whose last line quotes Juan Williams asserting that “there’s a racial element” to the current criticism. For what it may be worth, this is the same Prof. Hasen who has recognized how radical and utterly unique Section 5 is: “Never before or since,” he has written, “has a state or local jurisdiction needed permission from the federal government to put its own laws into effect.” [Quoted in Abigail Thernstrom's masterful "Redistricting, Race, and the Voting Rights Act," the best short overview of the Voting Rights Act available.]

The best example of misleading voting rights obfuscation in Gerstein’s article, however, comes from Gerstein himself. “An intensifying conservative legal assault on the Voting Rights Act could precipitate what many civil rights advocates regard as the nuclear option,” he asserts: “a court ruling striking down one of the core elements of the landmark 1965 law guaranteeing African Americans and other minorities access to the ballot box.”

No one — I repeat: no one — these days objects to minorities having “access to the ballot box.” What conservatives criticize is the “construal” of the Voting Rights Act that converted its original guarantee of non-discriminatory access into a charter granting minorities the right to elect “candidates of their choice” and requiring, as Thernstrom put it in the article linked above, “racially gerrymandered districts carefully drawn to ensure that minorities are elected to public office roughly in proportion to their share of the population.”

No wonder liberals want to put the lipstick of “equal access” on that pig.

Has anyone considered the import of this new mandate? The president of the United States has just ordered private companies to give away for free a service that his own health and human services secretary has repeatedly called a major financial burden.

On what authority? Where does it say that the president can unilaterally order a private company to provide an allegedly free-standing service at no cost to certain select beneficiaries?

Well, yes. Someone has considered the import of this new mandate.