"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds", so the saying goes, at least in some of its many versions. We might, however, yearn for a bit of consistency in the utterances of our liberal brethren and sistren sometimes.
My curiosity was piqued in a piece in ESPN the Magazine's current issue, which I receive as a penalty for wanting to provide commentary on their pieces online once in a while, and to see the works of some of their more popular online baseball writers. It's called a "paywall", meaning no pay, no read. Authors apparently have to gain enough popularity to be hidden from the non-paying public.
But I digress. The Magazine's latest issue had an essay by the writer Mina Kimes, protesting the lack of women in senior executive positions in major league baseball. Now, I will not be the one defending MLB for not having female executives. In fact, if there were twenty females in executive positions in MLB tomorrow, I would sleep just as contentedly as if I were to awake tomorrow to the status quo, which is zero such females in MLB executive positions.
If I were, in fact, a team owner, neither my first, second or third criterion for hiring a new executive would be whether the candidate had (or did not have) a uterus. Experience, yes ... competence, yes ... creativity, yes. Probably a few more thereafter. In fact, I can't imagine gender actually coming up anywhere on the list, because my primary objective as an owner would be making money and winning championships, perhaps in that order. I suppose I am one of those conservatives who is not part of the "war on women", much like, well, all other conservatives aren't either.
However, it isn't quite as simple. Many years ago, before Frank Robinson became the first black manager to be hired (and, inevitably, the first to be fired), the media were assailing MLB for never having hired a suitably-racial manager, even though "so many of the players were black." Similarly, there was and is a similar complaint toward the NFL, where even more of the players are black. The leagues were even obliged to show their racial neutrality by mandating that black candidates be interviewed whenever there was an opening, a form of affirmative inaction that redefined the word "token", and not in the good way. I'm sure more than one such interviewee asked the logical question, "Why, exactly, am I here?"
The issue then, and now, and certainly replicated into the executive suites of the leagues once the head coaching and managing ranks were integrated, was the disparity between the percentages of black players and black coaches/managers. "How can that be?" shouted the press, indifferent to the fact that the skills involved in knocking a ball carrier into the next zip code don't really resemble those needed to coach a team. In fact, given the common progress of coaches, it would seem more logical to count high school and college coaches of applicable race first, right?
So Mina Kimes now writes that it is a terrible thing that there are no women MLB executives, despite the fact that there are indeed no females playing major-league baseball and haven't been, though I imagine Jenny Finch would have been a bit more productive over the course of a hypothetical season than Eddie Gaedel would, and the late Mr. Gaedel does indeed appear in the record book.
Well, which is it, O ye of the left? If the argument mandating more black owners, executives and coaches is that there are and were so many black players, then it would seem there should be no female executives at all, wouldn't it? It just seems that, even though as noted, I couldn't care less if the entire MLB executive ranks were female, or black, or Pakistani or Martian, the two tacks don't coexist very well.
Socialists, as Margaret Thatcher famously noted, eventually run out of other people's money. They also run out of disparaged minorities, at least before the aims of those minorities start to conflict, and render consistent treatment impossible.
It is truly hobgoblinous to be foolishly consistent, but when your inconsistencies sap your credibility, your points fall more likely on deaf ears.
Copyright 2014 by Robert Sutton
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