Reason has a “Nanny of the Month” feature highlighting an official’s inane and wrong-headed effort to regulate or restrict activity in a community. This month, the winner’s “Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Human Rights James Kirkpatrick.”
How did he win? Well, Kirkpatrick is “the state bureaucrat who’s thumbing his nose at the great Kool & the Gang anthem by cracking down on bars and restaurants that offer ladies’ night (it discriminates against men, you see).”
One can — and should — believe in equality without engaging in a campaign to eliminate all the distinctiveness and uniqueness from private life. The quest for equality of experience isn’t a quest as much as a tyranny, whether petty (against ladies’ night) or grand (conformity in speech, faith, association). It’s still oppressive, and so it’s wrong.