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Mandating that women must be on corporate boards based on their biological makeup is sheer discrimination, but progressives do not seem to realise the hilarious hypocrisy of such a law.

Contradiction is not a glitch in Woke ideology, it’s a feature.

This was perfectly illustrated in California, where — until last week — it was illegal for a business to discriminate against people on the basis of gender, and illegal for a business not to have at least one woman on their board of directors.

Wait. What?

Yes, you read that correctly.

In California, it was illegal to discriminate against people based on gender, except when appointing board directors, in which case you were required by law to discriminate against people based on gender.

As I often say: Cognitive dissonance, thy name is Leftism.

Not Fair

The Women on Boards law called for fines ranging from $100,000 for failing to report board compositions to the California secretary of state’s office to $300,000 for multiple failures to have the required number of women board members.

The law would have required companies to have a minimum of three female directors this year.

Fortunately, the Los Angeles County Superior Court has not been drinking the Woke Kool-Aid.

The Court ruled last week that requiring businesses to have female directors was unconstitutional because it required them to explicitly distinguish between individuals on the basis of gender.

No kidding.

It’s funny how Leftists always think the way to correct a perceived injustice is to implement actual injustice.

They typically address claims of sexism with actual sexism, and claims of racism with actual racism.

But that wasn’t the only hypocrisy.

Peak Trans

The law designed to promote gender equity defined a woman as anyone who “identifies as a woman”.

In other words, you could have an all-male board so long as one man thought of himself as a woman because — let’s face it — that’s close enough.

Leftists can’t even say “women’s rights” without making fools of themselves!

Judge Maureen Duffy Lewis ruled that the purpose of the law requiring gender quotas “was gender-balancing, not remedying discrimination”.

Leftist politicians, according to Duffy Lewis, had used the law, not for the protection of citizens, but for their own special brand of social engineering.

The Democrats — convinced they knew what was best for Californians, and convinced Californians were so hopelessly mired in misogyny that they would not choose what was best — decided to force Californians to perform the Party’s idea of best.

Diversity

It’s a wonder those same legislators didn’t also demand equal treatment for high school dropouts. They could have insisted that every corporate board must comprise at least three people who have absolutely no clue. Except, of course, that all those people were already working for the Democrats.

I’m only half-joking. The decision to overrule gender mandates came just a month after another Los Angeles judge found that a California law mandating that corporations diversify their boards with members from certain racial, ethnic or LGBT groups was unconstitutional.

Say what you like about the Right’s supposed homophobia, transphobia or Islamophobia; the Left match all of that and more with their raging meritocracy-phobia.

The point here is not whether it is a good thing for more women to be on corporate boards. At issue is whether private companies should be forced, under threat of penalty, to appoint people based on genitalia rather than on merit.

Coerced

When the Women on Boards law was stuck down, Lieutenant-Governor of California Eleni Kounalakis tweeted:

“The number of women directors on California boards went from just 766 in 2018 to 1,844 just 3 years later. It’s disappointing to see this setback for such an effective tool to help us achieve equal representation.

Well yes. It’s amazing what can be achieved with “such an effective tool” as the threat of punishment.

And it’s hardly fair on women.

One can say that 766 of 766 women serving on boards prior to 2018 were there because they deserved to be. The same cannot be said for the 1078 women appointed at threat of gunpoint.

Is she a woman?

Is she a token?

Is she a man pretending to be a woman, doubling as a token?

Who would know in the crazy social justice world that Leftists are always trying to force upon free people?

The best display of the Left’s topsy-turvy worldview was CA’s Secretary of State Shirley Weber who told Politico:

“I’m deeply disappointed in the court’s decision to allow the State to revert to policies that allow systemic gender discrimination to create an impenetrable wall”

Huh?

What could be more “systemic” than legislated quotas? And what could be more discriminatory than demanding one particular gender is favoured, by law, on the threat of sanction?

These are rhetorical questions, of course. Leftists have no interest in addressing them. Contradictions, remember, are not a glitch, they are a feature.

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Originally published at The James Macpherson Report.
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Photo by cottonbro.