Boondoggles breed more corrupt boondoggles - Beware the Cure by Scott Beyer

Every town and village and hamlet gets it commissions and and high exalted commissioners. Even wealthy small towns have their own welfare offices and now one race towns will get their offices for their very own Human Rights Commission. Suddenly, problems that never existed, exist. Where race and sex and any other perceived slight to a perceived victim's feelings are ferreted out, the full force of the law comes down on them, again and again and again. m/r

Beware the Cure by Scott Beyer - City Journal

Across the country, human rights commissions cause more harm than they prevent.

19 June 2013

Is racial discrimination enough of a problem in Charlottesville, Virginia (population 43,000) to justify the creation of a human rights commission? Time will tell, but Charlottesville is clearly part of a trend. Once just a mainstay of big cities, HRCs have proliferated throughout America’s small and midsize municipalities, even as overt displays of discrimination have waned. Their geographic reach has spread as their mandates expand: nowadays, HRCs not only address race and gender discrimination, but also, increasingly, bias involving sexual orientation. Everyone from employers to landlords to public institutions is subject to commission oversight.

These commissions began appearing in the 1940s to quell tensions caused by segregation. After the passage of the landmark civil rights laws in 1964 and 1965, cities began to create new HRCs, with enforcement powers. These HRCs could mediate discrimination complaints at the local level, instead of allowing such disputes to proceed to state courts. Decades later, this logic has justified the formation of commissions in places like Morris, Minnesota; Waterloo, Iowa; Northampton, Massachusetts—and, a few weeks ago, in my hometown of Charlottesville.

Charlottesville suggested that the commission would help people avoid the burdens of litigation. It was also seen as a way to reconcile the city’s modern image as a progressive university town with its sordid racial past—which has included, against the backdrop of Jefferson’s Monticello, slavery, segregation, several years of “massive resistance” following public school integration, and the paving over of the historically black Vinegar Hill neighborhood for “urban renewal” in the 1960s. But the HRC became less popular when the city council determined that, rather than being solely an advisory body, the commission would have enforcement powers. A lone dissenting councilor expressed concern that the commission’s potentially arbitrary decisions could hurt the business community. Others felt that in such a heavily Democratic city, the commission might impose politically correct diktats at the expense of free speech.

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