Equality is the chief faux virtue of our time.

Selwyn Duke writes in The American Thinker,

Our obsession with it brings to mind the great G.K. Chesterton’s observation, “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”

…the equality lie is best illustrated by its proponents. Consider: despite sanctimonious talk about “glass ceilings” disadvantaging females, within “the feminist grievance narrative, there is no whining about women being ‘excluded’ from working-class male-dominated professions,” American Thinker’s Katie El-Diwany wrote last month. “There is more than plenty of talk about the dearth of women in science, in engineering, in upper management positions, and as CEOs. But there is no one asking: where are all the female garbage-collectors, the female elevator technicians, the female landscape laborers, the female oil rig workers?”

…That their rarity approaches unicorn status is why men constitute 92 percent of workplace deaths, another unequal outcome seldom addressed. There’s also the intersex wage-gap controversy, which persists despite conclusive evidence that women earn less because of their different career choices, not discrimination. Nonetheless, while we hear incessant complaints about women’s lower pay in sports, acting, or elsewhere — a market-forces-driven phenomenon — there’s nary a word regarding how female fashion models greatly outearn their male counterparts.

As El-Diwany concludes, “All of this reveals that feminist clamoring for ‘equal representation’ is not about equality at all. It is about power and prestige.”

In truth, “equality’” today has the same kind of meaning “peace,” “freedom” and “strength” did in Orwell’s 1984 dystopia. It’s ploy not principle, self-righteously deployed as rallying cry to gain advantage and further a politically correct brand of inequality.

Equality dogma has also invited statist hell. For if all groups are equal in worldly capacities, as the dogma holds, then inter-group performance differences must result from discrimination. This justifies social engineering as “remedy”; ergo, quotas, affirmative action, set-asides and disparate-impact rulings that destroy relevant merit-based standards.

Thus, equality-obsessed movements are contrary to nature — they fight and must try to defeat it (e.g., Lysenkoism). Imagine the intrusive, perverted control required to (vainly) try to achieve equality in a lion pride or gorilla troop. In man’s civilization such schemes beget bizarre social engineering, meritocracy’s destruction, suppression of the successful, oppression and, when applied zealously enough, the Khmer Rouge killing fields.

…Our Founding Fathers also emphasized equality; of course, they’d recoil at its current perverse manifestations. Yet they nonetheless erred, a result of a (very human) overreaction to European classism. Far better, and truer, than “All men are created equal…” would be “All men are created sacred.” Then, subsequently, the 19th-century socialists picked up and ran with the equality ball — and the rest is dark history.

Read more here.