Ed Brayton on Warren Moon

From Ed Brayton on Warren Moon:

It all brings to mind for me the absurdity of judging people based on superficial traits. It's not just skin color, it's religion (or lack thereof), ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and more. It's the same illogic that makes people think that gay men and women can't be good parents, or can't be good soldiers, or can't be committed spouses and partners. When judging people and trying to predict whether they can handle a job, we should look only at the situation and at the traits that situation requires in order to be successful. Forget about all the irrelevant traits.

If you're looking for a store manager, a company CEO, a quarterback or a military officer, what possible effect could the color of someone's skin or the gender of who they love have on their ability to do those jobs? For all of those positions, you need intelligence, ambition, discipline, the ability to work with others, and many other traits, none of which are associated any more with skin color or sexual orientation than they are with eye color, hair color or whether they're left handed or right handed.

Martin Luther King famously dreamed of a world where his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. What is true of race is just as true of every other superficial trait upon which we tend to judge people. Every single person should be judged according to the content of their character, not according to their skin color, gender, sexual orientation, shoe size, religion, or anything else. This, surely, is among the most self-evident truths one could possibly imagine. All the more wonder, then, why so many don't understand it.