Thinking with your Epidermis and Genitalia



On Sunday (15 March 2020) Joe Biden announced during the CNN Democrat debate, "If I'm elected president, my cabinet, my administration, will look like the country. I commit that I will, in fact, pick a woman to be my vice president." Fitness for the position, apparently, is a secondary consideration. Where is Christopher Hitchens when we need him? In a 2008 article he wrote:
People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of ‘race’ or ‘gender’ alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason.
Hitchens died in 2011 and so missed the worst of the latest obsession with identity politics, but it is worth looking back at the arguments of this intransigent writer. And David Wolcott will be writing more extensively about this soon, in "What's Wrong with Human Rights?"

Harry Wiren

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