In last week’s blog I wrote about DEI programs, but it was not about DEI per se. Instead, it was about the fact that Trump’s attack on them is a prime example of the fact that he does not believe in or embrace the values our country has been trying to live up to since it founding.
Trump’s sick response to the tragic death of film maker Ron Reiner and his wife, Michele, proved how right I was to make that point. Writer Mary Geddry put it succinctly when she wrote that Trump is “what happens when we lose our moral character.”
This is the most important point for every American to get. Moral character matters, and it especially matters when it comes to public leaders, and Trump has no moral character at all.
Let me put it this way. The fact that Trump lies about everything is far more of a threat to the survival of our nation than the lies themselves that he tells.
This is what should define his presidency for every American. Trump could be as great a president as he imagines himself to be and it would not matter because nothing matters more than the moral values on which a life or a nation rests.
We know that whatever a man or woman who lacks moral character does, nothing can make up for his or her personal corruption. The same holds true for nations. Our moral foundation, the values by which we live, matter more than anything else.
This is why Trump’s assault on our values as a people represents the greatest danger we face. It is not hyperbolic to say that Trump is to America what Adolf Hitler was to Germany, an evil force whose very existence is an assault on everything moral, decent, and civilized about our national life.
This is what his attack on DEI programs tells us plain and simple. The whole concept of DEI was our government’s way of putting the 1964 Civil Rights Act and its modern updates into practice.
Rubin Law, the nation’s pre-eminent firm specializing in employment and labor law cases describes DEI as being about “removing barriers to equal opportunity by ensuring fairness, representation, and belonging in the workplace and prohibiting discrimination against employees because of their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, age, disability, or any other protected category.”
Rubin goes on to say, “It’s about providing equal opportunity to people from different backgrounds, while also creating an environment where everyone feels valued and can succeed.”
This is the kind of America most of us want to live in, and it is why making the claim that DEI programs cause “reverse discrimination” is an unfounded lie. By law DEI programs cannot discriminate for any reason, as stated explicitly in the Title VII section of the Civil Rights Act on which they are based. Those violations include discrimination against anyone based on race, sex, religion, national origin, whether favoring majority or minority groups.
If anything, DEI seeks to prevent discrimination in any form, whether biased hiring and promotion, unequal pay for equal work, in consistent standard performance criteria, hiring quotas, or any kind of preferential treatment of individuals or classes of individuals.
Based on the facts, the simple truth is, Trump has made DEI a political issue because of his own corrupt values that make him an enemy of diversity, equity, inclusion, which makes him an enemy of those American values that are the foundation for our being the great nation we are.
Our founders trusted that we would elect trustworthy people. Donald Trump represents our failure in living up to their hopes and expectations. That he was elected twice highlights the degree of our moral decline.
But it is not too late for us to recover from the damage done via his election. Polls are telling us the majority of us now see the mistake those who voted for Trump made that put the nation in the mess we are in.
That’s the only good news there is at the moment, but hope for better days grows stronger by the day as we see the nation’s negative reaction to Trump’s lack of character. The chances of his impeachment and conviction increase as his amoral words and actions increase, something we’ll talk more about after the first of the year.
People’s awareness of the danger Trump’s lack of moral character and enduring values poses to America must continue to grow, along with people’s disgust over what he keeps saying and doing.
If it does, then we all can rest assured that when he is gone, his stain on our national character will be washed away and what he dreads the most will happen to him – he will be largely forgotten, with anything he said or did remembered with appropriate and even colorful expletives to describe them.
linnposts.com 