Some race-obsessed Durham City Council members want strict diversity on the panel it is forming to look into the Durham Police Department’s role in the Duke lacrosse case investigation. According to The Herald-Sun:
The demand for diversity came from Councilwoman Diane Catotti who, last week, was the only council member to vote against launching the investigation. She said Friday that given the initial appointments, the remainder of the slate should include two white women, three black women and two black men, thus leaving the panel 50 percent black and 50 percent female.
“This case raises so many race and gender issues it’s important to have that parity,” she said, conceding that the panel’s eventual composition might vary by “one or two” from her ideal.
This reminded me of what former Reagan Interior Department Secretary James Watt said almost 25 years ago that got him fired:
He made the most odious comment of his career in defense of his widely criticized decision to authorize the sale of more than 1 billion tons of coal from federal lands in Wyoming. He argued that he was immune to criticism because members of his coal-advisory panel included “a black … a woman, two Jews, and a cripple.”
The blunt-speaking Watt was making fun of the diversity and quota obsession that was just beginning to show itself in American society, but, as we have since learned, only liberals can joke about race and diversity and get away with it. Just ask Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
Hats off, though to Council Member Mike Woodard for at least questioning Catotti’s James Watt approach to the panel:
At Friday’s meeting Bell began assigning members to look specifically for people fitting the gender and racial profiles Catotti suggested. But a protest from Councilman Mike Woodard stopped that process short.
“I’m a little uncomfortable with setting a quota for this,” he said. “I want us to find the best seven people we can find to augment the five we selected today.”
Unfortunately, the council agreed to Mayor Bill Bell’s bonehead suggestion that a rape-crisis center member be added to the panel. Now, I’ve known a lot of rape-crisis advocates and most were a little bit crazy when it came to men. To them, every man is a potential — if not an actual — rapist. What possibly could have prompted Bell to make such a suggestion? That’s like putting a KKK member on a diversity panel, just to get the opposing view.
UPDATE: KC Johnson says there’s another bit of diversity needed on this panel: defense lawyers. Makes sense to me. Also, he points out that Catotti doesn’t seem to understand this panel’s mission. It’s supposed to investigate what the police department may have done wrong. Her insistence that a rape-crisis zealot be put on the panel makes no sense, he says, since no one has accused the police of treating the accuser unprofessionally. Also, scroll down in his post for evidence that rape-crisis volunteers and workers hardly make objective observers to anything involving a man and a woman.
UPDATE: I just learned that Thomas Stith was the first to object to Bell’s James-Watt quota plan but he wasn’t quoted in The Herald-Sun. This hearkens to the days when Herald-Sun reporters went out of their way to ignore Republican office holders, unless of course they said something they fell comfortable ridiculing. Just ask Tommy Hunt and Ed DeVito about that. The editors put a stop to that back then. Apparently things have changed.
