Tonight’s question is: are Human Rights Commissions useful or obsolete? Something can’t be called “obsolete” if it was never “useful” in the first place.
It is commonplace to insist that the HRCs were a good idea at the time, but they’ve veered off course. Some present at the creation claim they never imagined the HRCs could have evolved into what they’ve become.
I’d argue that they were never a good idea in the first place, and that any precocious 12 year old who’d accidentally watched Truffaut’s adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 on “Saturday Night At The Movies” could have foreseen what they would turn into.
The original mandate of the HRCs was to deal with discrimination in employment and accommodation.
A really embarrassing female politician asked Mark Steyn about one famous example, when he recently testified at Queen’s Park about the HRCs and Section 13. She brought up the hoary old chestnut about signs in store windows that read NO IRISH NEED APPLY.
As Mark Steyn explained to this poor woman, because he’d read about it first on my blog, the real trouble with No Irish Need Apply signs is that they never existed.
Richard Jensen of the University of Illinois studied the issue and wrote:
Read More...The fact that Irish American vividly “remember” NINA signs is a curious historical puzzle. There are no contemporary or retrospective accounts of a specific sign at a specific location. No particular business enterprise is named as a culprit. No historian, archivist, or museum curator has ever located one; no photograph or drawing exists.
The complete absence of evidence suggests that probably zero such signs were seen at commercial establishments, shops, factories, stores, hotels, railroads, union halls, hiring halls, personnel offices, labor recruiters, anywhere in America, at any time.
