One of you readers saw Dreher bait in this story about Harvard law professor Nancy Gertner, who calls for more state involvement in the labor market to dictate sexist quotas gender equality in the workplace. Excerpt:

After all, there is a “business case” to be made for gender equality in law firms and workplaces, “beyond the obvious need to tap a rich vein of talent,” said Gertner. In a diverse world, workplace diversity adds to “the texture and the richness of the dialogue,” she said.

This is classic diversity-speak: defining “diversity” as having met a numerical quota for women and minorities in a particular workplace’s population, and then garbing racial and sexual discrimination in language that would embarrass a second-rate marketer to sell an unpopular, immoral policy. Discriminating in hiring against people based on their sex and/or ethnicity is evil when it is done in ways that Nancy Gertner and her allies dislike, but when it is used against people of whom Gertner et alia disapprove, it enhances “the texture and the richness of the dialogue.” Just like adding French vanilla-flavor Coffee Mate to your morning cup.

More Gertner:

In the end, feminism’s mission of workplace parity has been stalled by the three factors of the maternal wall, implicit bias, and the opacity of discrimination, Gertner said.

Ah. The reason we don’t have “workplace parity” is because too many women live in false consciousness, and would rather be home raising children than working in an office. Because if women knew what was best for them, they would choose to be like Nancy Gertner (women are allowed to be diverse, as long as they make choices approved by feminists). As for the other two factors, the lack of evidence that discrimination against women is the cause (“implicit”, “opacity”) is evidence that discrimination exists? Really, Nancy Gertner?

What to do now?

But all this is not enough. “The most important thing is: We have to be unsatisfied,” Gertner told her largely female, professional audience.

Stay perpetually aggrieved. That’s the advice Harvard Law professor Nancy Gertner has for women. What a fulfilling and attractive way to go through life.

Some seasonal advice from one of America’s leading progressive Episcopal theologians. Excerpt:

Dear gay male comrades:

Have you talked with each other lately about how important vaginas are? Or about the women who need to guard those precious organs at nearly every turn from the hands of prying male politicians? If you’re gay and white, have you talked with each other lately about the poison of white supremacy infecting our relationships and sabotaging social progress?

As a white gay man, I am dismayed by the near-deafening silence from my gay brothers concerning the twin poisons of sexism and racism in our society. This is deeply troubling, especially since homophobia is the result, not the cause, of a much deeper confluence of male privilege and white supremacy in our history in our world today. If we fail to link male privilege with white supremacy, we do so at our own grave peril.

Where would we be without progressive Episcopal theologians? I bet those boys’ daddies have been trying for years to get them to talk about how important vaginas are.

UPDATE: An Episcopalian friend writes: “What’s next? ‘The Vagina Vespers’?” Mmmph!

That’s a pastor from a church in Houston talking about how he’s encouraged members of his congregation to get tattoos to show their love for Jesus. I dunno. I’m skeptical. If you want a tattoo, why not just get one? Why do you have to drag God into it? I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I’m reminded of Hank Hill telling Bobby: “You’re not making Christianity better, you’re making rock and roll worse.”

On the other hand, I think I have a ministry that involves making whisky sours with Meyer lemons and sitting on my front porch in the rocking chair. It makes me feel emergent.

OK, hive mind, help me figure this one out. One of my kids has had spectacularly fierce allergies this spring. Like nothing I’ve ever seen. His eyes have been swelling horribly, and burn so bad on occasion that he screams. Constant coughing, sneezing, but worse than I’ve ever seen with seasonal allergies. Today he saw an allergist, and went through the awful scratch test: 66 punctures on his back, each one smeared with a different substance, to see what he’s allergic to.

He and his mother are not back yet, but the short answer is: Louisiana. The longer answer is: Louisiana + soy. Apparently he has a major soy allergy. I thought at first: that’s no big deal. He doesn’t eat tofu. Silly me: I didn’t realize that soy is in everything. “The doctor says we’re going to have to go through everything, and watch like hawks, because soy is ubiquitous, especially in fast food,” said my wife. I just did a cursory glance at stuff in our pantry. She’s right. Soybean oil, or soy derivatives, are in a lot of ordinary things (though apparently not all soy oil is allergenic). Got to avoid legumes. Basically, if you want to steer clear of soy, you have to watch out for processed food. 

Good thing this isn’t me; I live on tofu and beans during Lent. But let me ask: are any of you allergic to soy, or living with a family member who is? How do you deal with it? What should I be doing now for my kid?

Allergy shots for the kid prescribed for twice a week to counter all this. It would have to be that the one child of mine who loves being outside more than any of us would be allergic to the outdoors here. I hope these shots work, because he can’t live like this. We were having to put steroid eye drops in his eyes, just so he could sleep. I’m telling you, this stuff is excruciating.

UPDATE: OK, I have the kid’s chart from the allergist in front of me. All the allergens are tested on a scale of from 0 to 4, with 4 being the worst; 2 or higher indicates a significant allergy. Like I said, the boy is allergic to Louisiana. He got 4+ on Johnson grass and rye grass. He got 4+ on live oak trees, pecan trees, and sweet gum trees, all of which are ubiquitous here (he also scored 3 and 4 on varieties of trees we don’t have here, like ash). He got a 3+ on Bahia grass, which is also common here. And a 4+ on soy.

On the up side, he is not allergic to cedar or pine, which I’d figured were surely in the mix. Nor is he allergic to mold, egg, milk, corn, wheat, peanut, or shellfish. So, yay for that.

Have you been following the case of Trayvon Martin, a black teenager in Florida shot to death in his own gated community by a white man who took him to be a threat? Ta-Nehisi Coates has been posting extensively on the matter, and I suggest reading his stuff. It appears that the trigger-happy guy who shot him, George Zimmerman, was a paranoid neighborhood watch guy who disobeyed a police dispatcher’s order to cease pursuing Martin, and who also disobeyed national Neighborhood Watch policy. The Orlando Sentinelreports that in the 13 months prior to the shooting, Zimmerman called 911 an astonishing 46 times. This is not a vigilant neighbor; this is a paranoid with a 9 mm handgun. Trayvon Martin was not an interloper; he was Zimmerman’s neighbor, and he was gunned down only yards from his own door.

The issue here is not only that Zimmerman shot and killed Martin, who, again, was in his own neighborhood, and doing nothing wrong. The issue is also that Zimmerman was not arrested by the police, who appear to have done a slipshod investigation (see here).

Via The Browser, here is a long, detailed, absorbing response to that notorious op-ed by Greg Smith, the departing Goldman Sachs executive. It’s by a woman named Jacki Zehner, who was also a high-level Goldman exec, though one who left in 2002. She writes critically of Smith’s op-ed — not entirely dismissively, but skeptically. She says that he could be telling the truth, 100 percent, in which case he’s a hero, and the things he dishes about Goldman need to be made public, so the institution can change. But he might not be telling the truth, she says. If he is, though, then the firm she left has changed significantly since 2002, and for the worse. The reason she thinks Smith might be onto something is because Wall Street and its business have changed, and no, not for the better.

This essay teaches you more than you may want to know about how the finance business works, and how it has changed. The key, though, is this:

This I know to be true: If you promote people into leadership roles who are bad people, the outcomes will be bad over the long term. If you promote people who are all about their paycheck, the culture will be all about the paycheck. The opposite is true as well.  Has Goldman become full of bad people who really only care about money, money, money? I will leave that to the board of directors to figure out. I sure hope not.

That seems so obvious: the leadership elite within an organization will set the cultural tone for the organization, for better or for worse. But it seems so often ignored. Longtime readers know I am fond of citing one of the few things from political theory class that my abused brain cells retained: Schumpeter’s observation that over time, elites will come to believe, falsely, that the interests of the organization or institution that they lead are identical with their personal interests. (Was that Schumpeter? Professor Arango, where are you to help me remember?). Anyway, it makes sense when you consider the bubble that any elites live in.

My go-to example will always be the Catholic bishops, but I’ve seen the same thing in newsrooms where I’ve worked, and I’ve heard friends in academia and other lines of work say the same thing. People wonder why the bishops allowed things to get so bad within their dioceses, re: the abuse scandal and related corruption. In some cases, it was deliberate, conscious corruption, or so I believe. But in most cases, I’m convinced, it was a more subtle thing. You are surrounded by yes-men, people (not all of them men, by the way) whose livelihoods and prospects for advancement depend on your favor. At the lower levels, when you interact with folks, chances are they are going to be polite and respectful, and never tell you anything that might trouble you. What’s in it for them, anyway?

Moreover, you may come to think of yourself as being a better (wiser, more moral, etc.) man because, hey, you’re in leadership, aren’t you? When and if you do hear complaining from down the ranks, perhaps it’s okay to downplay or ignore it, because the complainer may be nothing more than a crank with his own agenda, and not a team player. If Mr. Whiner is so smart, why isn’t he in leadership, like you? And you may come to believe that only those at your level really understand the burdens of leadership, being superior people like yourself. Naturally you’ll want to promote the sort of employees who can be trusted to carry the corporate culture that you embody, so you select for people like yourself.

And so it goes. Again, I think this is human nature. The ties that bind us within organizations also blind us to our limitations, keep us from knowing things, and, most crucially keep us from wanting to know things that threaten the system over which we preside. When any institution — academic, governmental, business, religious, what have you — comes to be led by a class of people who a) behave as if the mission of the organization is to perpetuate themselves, and b) fail to establish effective mechanisms for holding themselves accountable to the real mission, then corruption is bound to take hold. It’s got to be very, very difficult to avoid its stain, too. Think of the reformist Congressional class of 1974. Think of the reformist Congressional class of 1994.

UPDATE: This just in. I edited it for clarity and to protect the correspondent’s identity:

What made me think of this reading your entry was the way nobody can talk about this issue at our office. Senior management has made its diversity priorities very clear. If you bring news to them that contradicts what they want to believe, you are taking a really stupid risk. At my level, we have had to come up with various work-arounds to accommodate this policy, but that only gets you so far. At the top level, the managers have insulated themselves from hearing anything negative about diversity, because they have sent the message that if you are not on the team on this issue, you are probably a sexist/racist, and not to be promoted.

Just so you understand what I’m getting at, the system here is designed to promote people who can show “progress on diversity goals.” Our overall business has been declining for a while, and we have suffered layoffs —  it’s the recession, I get that. You can’t blame diversity. However when you see co-workers who were good at their jobs getting pink slips, but others who aren’t very good holding on to their jobs, and they just happen to be “diverse,” you can’t NOT notice that. It saps your morale, because you know that however good you are at your job, you could be next on the chopping block, because you are not diverse. You know that it doesn’t matter how objectively successful you have been in building the company’s business, because the people who run the company have defined a major component of success as a factor that has nothing to do with actually increasing our business and selling more product. Talking to some of my friends who work  in [the same industry — RD], I know that it’s the same damn thing in other offices. There’s no getting away from it.

This will sound like whining to your readers, if you publish this, but the point I want to make is about leadership and accountability. It is crystal clear in our company that diversity is a huge deal, and that the top level management does not want to hear anything that contradicts it. No matter how bad our revenues get, diversity can’t fail. I don’t want to give the impression that our business has been off because of diversity. That would be false. I just think it’s real interesting that, to use your example, you could have every one of our top-level managers and ask them to analyze the Catholic Church’s problems from a purely managerial standpoint, and they could put those MBA’s to work taking the issue apart and identifying the blind spots, etc. They can’t do it here, because from a perspective of the internal dynamics of our company and its corporate culture, which is set from the top of the company, what they’re doing makes sense in the short run.  In the long run, it is hard to forecast how any company can sustain itself over the long term by ignoring certain data sets that could impact the bottom line. If the thing we can’t talk about wasn’t diversity, but the subpar performance of the CEOs relatives working in the company, it would be the same thing. When a category of relevant information is declared officially or unofficially to be off-limits for analysis, the company will suffer. How can it not?

If I want to get ahead here, I’m going to have to play the game too, even though I know it’s rigged. If I stay here and move up the leadership ladder, will I start believing what I know from my experience at this level is a lie? How will I know that I’ve drunk the kool-aid? I’m still relatively young in my career, but I can see the compromises I will have to make if I want to get ahead in my company. It makes me ill, but I also want to have a family one day and be able to support them. I know this is nothing new. In a former era, this company overlooked the slacking by white males who were socially connected — that’s a big reason we have this diversity stuff today, and I think it’s too easy for conservatives to forget that. In 2012, however, my industry faces hardcore competition we didn’t have in the past. The margin for putting up with second-rate performance is razor thin. Before long I’m going to have to make a decision about if I want to stake my future on a pretty good company whose leaders don’t realize how much the business environment has changed, and who insulate themselves from information, incentivize promoting certain values and practices over others, and penalize paying attention to certain things and acting on that information.

I understand this perspective. An even greater challenge, though, is the kind of thing that Jacki Zehner, the ex-Goldmanite, identifies, and that I talked about in the “How to Become a One-Percenter” entry: how to succeed in  an environment that doesn’t penalize failure, and rewards short-term, cutthroat thinking? Zehner’s entry indicates that Goldman Sachs built its sterling reputation on ethical dealings, but the business environment changed so much that Goldman may have begun cutting ethical corners to maintain its success. In the long run, that’s likely to be fatal. But we are so focused on the here and now, the quarterly results, that we don’t seem to factor in these things. Can an honest, straightforward, truth-telling man or woman succeed at Goldman Sachs? Can he or she succeed in any industry? Put another way, what kind of company or industry can thrive if it doesn’t value and reward truth-telling (even when it’s about things the management doesn’t want to hear) and the highest standards of ethical behavior? As Zehner remarks about the culture of high finance and investment, trust is everything. You lose trust, you’ve lost it all.

Be warned: you will never, ever be able to unsee or unhear this. The adorable tykes are members of a Komsomol social and environmental justice youth choir mentored by Seeger. Me, I would rather watch Johnny Rotten singing “The Lonely Goatherd” with a chorus of toothless teenage meth-heads from deepest Mississippi. But that’s just me.

Ben Stevens writes at First Things:

If you have paid any attention at all to the current and ever-livelier dialogue between the LGBT movement and the Christian community, you have no doubt heard the question being asked of Christians everywhere: Do you realize how bigoted your views are? This is of course a trick question, and Christians are not doing themselves any favors by trying so hard to answer it.

A number of different suggestions have been made as to the most civil and sensible way for Christians to respond to accusations of bigotry, but the best is to simply point out what is being ignored in the accusation itself: the fundamental realities of modernity.

Stevens then quotes the eminent sociologist of religion Peter Berger’s observation that the condition of modernity is one of a highly contentious pluralism. Why? Because you can take so little for granted. Things you thought were settled questions — that were, in fact, settled questions — no longer are. Stevens adds:

To the extent that a society becomes “modern,” then, it will be packed with people who hold to widely divergent beliefs and values, any of which may be questioned. And the glue of this system is not that we all agree with one another but that we make a commitment to not always equate disagreement, or even disapproval, with bigotry.

Following this logic, to the extent that the LGBT movement calls any disagreement with its own premises an expression of bigotry — which is to say, irrational hatred — it might be thought of as an anti-modern movement. Recall, then, Pius IX’s infamous 1864 anti-modern document, the Syllabus of Errors, which, while not using the precise phrase, depended on the principle that “error has no rights.” Similarly, the position of many LGBT activists and their supporters seems to be that to opposition to their position is not only incorrect, but so immoral it doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously (because that is ascribing a viewpoint to “bigotry” implies).

Stanley Fish says holding a double standard — one standard for one’s allies, another for one’s enemies — makes sense. He discusses this in criticizing those who pointed out that liberals excused in Bill Maher and others what they condemned in Rush Limbaugh. Excerpt:

If we think about the Rush Limbaugh dust-up from the non-liberal — that is, non-formal — perspective, the similarity between what he did and what Schultz and Maher did disappears. Schultz and Maher are the good guys; they are on the side of truth and justice. Limbaugh is the bad guy; he is on the side of every nefarious force that threatens our democracy. Why should he get an even break?

There is no answer to that question once you step outside of the liberal calculus in which all persons, no matter what their moral status as you see it, are weighed in an equal balance. Rather than relaxing or soft-pedaling your convictions about what is right and wrong, stay with them, and treat people you see as morally different differently. Condemn Limbaugh and say that Schultz and Maher may have gone a bit too far but that they’re basically O.K. If you do that you will not be displaying a double standard; you will be affirming a single standard, and moreover it will be a moral one because you will be going with what you think is good rather than what you think is fair. “Fair” is a weak virtue; it is not even a virtue at all because it insists on a withdrawal from moral judgment.

I know the objections to what I have said here. It amounts to an apology for identity politics. It elevates tribal obligations over the universal obligations we owe to each other as citizens. It licenses differential and discriminatory treatment on the basis of contested points of view. It substitutes for the rule “don’t do it to them if you don’t want it done to you” the rule “be sure to do it to them first and more effectively.” It implies finally that might makes right. I can live with that.

Ah. Useful to get that learned.

The challenge to all of us who live in modern societies is to figure out how to defend what we believe is morally true while living with a decent respect for those who disagree with us, and having a decent respect for their liberties. It’s hard to do, in part because not all positions, or people, can be reconciled. It’s even harder when you find people who are only using the language of liberalism — especially words like “dialogue,” “diversity,” and “tolerance” — tactically. The strategy is always the same, though — and in that sense, I’m not being sarcastic when I say that Fish’s argument really is useful to get learned. It will keep you from being surprised when the apostles of Fairness and Tolerance turn out to be anything but.

This poor guy in Greece, Fotis Antonopoulos, tried to supplement his income by setting up an Internet-based business selling olive products. And that’s when his trouble began:

It took him 10 months — crisscrossing the city to collect dozens of forms and stamps of approval, including proof that he was up to date on his pension contributions — before he could get started. But even that was not enough. In perhaps the strangest twist of all, his board members were required by the Health Department to submit lung X-rays — and stool samples — since this was a food company.

“I laugh about it now,” he said. “But it wouldn’t be so funny if I didn’t have a very good job with very good pay. It would have been an absolute nightmare.”

With Greece’s economy entering its fourth year of recession, its entrepreneurs are eager to reverse a frightening tide. Last year, at least 68,000 small and medium-size businesses closed in Greece; nearly 135,000 jobs associated with them vanished. Predictions for 2012 are also bleak.

But despite the government’s repeated promises to improve things, the climate for doing business here remains abysmal.

Antonopoulos tells the NYT that his experience is absolutely typical of what faces entrepreneurs in Greece today. Get this:

The worst moment, he said, was when representatives from two agencies came to inspect the shop and disagreed about the legality of a circular staircase. They walked out telling him that he “would have to figure it out.”

Meanwhile, resourceful and desperate Greeks in one impoverished town are sick and tired of their government, and are creating a cashless economy. Excerpt:

Choupis said there was a new mood abroad in Greece, a determination to “move beyond anger to creativity”.

“You are not poor when you have no money,” she said, “you are poor when you have nothing to offer – except for the elderly and the sick, to whom we should all be offering.”