Fundamentally Immoral

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 Fundamentally Immoral


The scales of Justice symbolize the eternal truth that Justice is a critical moral value that must exist in every law. The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is one such law. It demands citizens be treated equally. Discrimination, on the other hand, is the exact opposite of this law. It essentially describes a situation where an individual is treated unjustly because that individual is part of a particular group.  If discrimination is outlawed by the Fourteenth Amendment, it stands to reason that all variations of discrimination are fundamentally immoral also.


Allan Bakke, a white male, applied for admission to the University of California Medical School at Davis in 1973 and again in 1974. Both times, Bakke was denied admission. Bakke charged that his application had been treated unfairly. The school, according to Bakke, had committed “reverse discrimination” on the basis of his race. Bakke argued that his application was processed contrary to the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. Reverse discrimination has been described as any act favoring individuals belonging to groups known to have been previously discriminated against. In layman’s terms, equal individuals are being treated unequally. If discrimination is abhorrent and immoral in society, obviously reverse discrimination is abhorrent and immoral as well. 


In Bakke’s court cases, both the State Court of California and the Supreme Court of California ruled that Bakke had established that the medical school had discriminated against him on the basis of his race. Even the United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of Bakke. It was Justice Powell that acknowledged “the rigid use of racial quotas, by the medical school, violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” In this case, the Justice system, supported by the Fourteenth Amendment, agreed that discrimination in any form would not be tolerated. The medical school was ordered by the court to admit Bakke. This case’s outcome set a precedent that discrimination is fundamentally immoral and shall not be tolerated.



Although Allan Bakke was never personally accused of discriminating against others, he was forced to bear that burden when the medical school twice denied his admission only on the grounds that he was not a minority. While the medical school’s objective to seek ethnic diversity was desirable, Bakke suffered an injustice due to the racial quotas that the school established to achieve its goal. Justice triumphed, in that Dr. Bakke graduate from the University of California Medical School at Davis and has been helping society in the medical profession ever since. The reverse discrimination Bakke suffered is a form of discrimination and as such is fundamentally immoral as embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment of the U. S. Constitution. 





Calabresi, Steven G. and Salander, Abe, "Religion and the Equal Protection Clause" (2012). Faculty Working Papers. Paper 213. http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/facultyworkingpapers/213

https://www.britannica.com/event/Bakke-decision 

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/59354NCJRS.pdf

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