An excellent example of how liberalism is a religion. One reference, dated and methodologically poor, and you hang an entire design for the culture around it. You will not see that because the religion is shared by CC’s original, the blogger, and the commenters.

Your summation of the conservative argument about individual rights trumping others is less than half the explanation. Again, evidence that it is not that liberals do not agree with conservative arguments, they simply do not understand what they are. Not that this makes them any less certain.

First, and before anything else can be learned, must come the humility that maybe, just maybe, there is an elephant in the room you are missing. No, not an elephant. Bad analogy on my part. There are many mice in the room. You must allow yourself to see at least one before you should dare to suggest policy. The rabbinic habit of switching sides before the argument closes might be of help.

Although you are right that the Akaka bill, which is similar to federal recognition of American Indian tribes, singles out a particular ethnic group, I believe you are wrong that this somehow will promote segregation. Within Hawai`i, the bill has uniform support across the races and cultures, and has brought them together behind a single issue, which I’m sure would never happen if Hawai`i currently had segregation. (Do you live there now? If so, how long? I would be interested to know.)

Legislation dealing with indigenous peoples is often complicated and controversial (and different from the integration of blacks and whites in the CONUS) because it is primarily about some small bit of reparation for massive exploitation in the past, even though it is for people who weren’t around when the exploitation occurred.

The best reason I can think of for it is that it is a gesture to show that descendants from a land whose people had been there longer than anyone else would have the rights to conserve their culture. It really wasn’t that long ago that expressing any aspect of native culture was explicitly banned, which I think we can agree was wrong even if we prefer a cultural melting pot. There really isn’t anything in there to physically separate Hawaiians from non – they will continue to interact as before.

So I don’t think you can’t honestly say that this legislation is truly singling out native Hawaiians for special treatment, any more than similar laws for continental American Indians have given them any special advantage over whites (especially since gambling is explicitly not part of the package in this case). Knowing what I do about Linda Lingle, if the bill had any teeth to do that, she (and other races in the Hawaiian legislature) would not support it. I don’t know of any whites who actually feel that they would be better off being an Indian because the Bureau of Indian Affairs exists. (The reservation system, which does maintain segregation, was not really part of those laws, and was originally imposed by whites. Indians were basically herded onto them by whites after it was decided belatedly that maybe it wasn’t right to just kill them all.)