The Missing Discrimination Protractor

The barest nub of a definition for the word discriminate has always been simply the neutral ability to discern one thing from another, reflecting its discriminare Latin origin. You “discriminate” when you can distinguish red from blue, sad from angry, hot from cold, etc.

The colloquial use nowadays is much more negative, covering acts of unjust distinction along axes that are considered beyond the pale. This lexical shift matched related legal and social developments, starting around the late 1800s and fully cemented by 1960s Civil Rights Movement. But what exactly distinguishes neutral discrimination — discerning any differences — from unjust discrimination?

I’ll demonstrate that there are no consistent standards, and that the process by which certain discriminations become taboo (whether legally or socially) is largely arbitrary. You won’t find scientific precision here.

The most common justification is that discrimination is unjust whenever it elevates superfluous or irrelevant traits over directly relevant ones. But if this were the underlying framework, it would obviate the need for a discrete lists of protected classes. Instead of discrimination laws outlining specific verboten axes, it would be far simpler to legislate a blanket prohibition on any “irrelevant characteristics.”

Another popular justification targets immutable traits. While characteristics like race and sex are indeed immutable, this framework is demonstrably incomplete. Someone born without limbs faces immutable disadvantage, yet we don’t consider it unjust when employers require manual dexterity for certain jobs.1

There is also discrimination that targets both immutable and irrelevant traits, yet remains legally or socially tolerated. Someone could refuse to hire people born in even-numbered years, favoring only Odders over Eveners. And yet such a crystalline arbitrary decision would be too peculiar and niche to rouse popular outrage, despite checking off both the immutable and irrelevant2 checkboxes.

You can flip through the entire rolodex of principled justifications and won’t find a single honed protractor that tells you which specific axis of discrimination should be considered verboten. Rather, it’s ultimately an arbitrary designation, but one based on an identifiable pattern.

The answer for which forms of discrimination become taboo isn’t moral consistency. Rather, it’s about identifying combustible fault lines that threaten to tear society apart if left unmanaged. The arbitrariness reflects centuries of ad hoc responses to social crises rather than systematic moral reasoning.

Tolerance Through Exhaustion

To explain this, we have to travel to the year 1517 in the town of Wittenberg, located in what is now Germany. Martin Luther’s 95 Theses was the ur-viral blog post of the time, kicking off the Protestant Reformation movement which engulfed Europe in over a century of war. At least eight million souls (or roughly 20% of the continent’s population) were snuffed out, over something as dumb as an ecclesiastical split.

To be fair, if you’re a true believer in religion (as opposed to just donning it for aesthetics), few justifications are as imperative, as pressing, as existential as other humans impugning your Almighty Deity. Since the dawn of time, believing in Tangaroa rather than Marduk was unflinchingly accepted as the basis for justifiable cruelty of every kind without question. Of course we had to murder their men, rape their women, and enslave their children — they talked shit about Marduk!

But by the mid-1600s, this quotidian and very familiar cycle was wearing out its welcome. The printing press broadcast ecclesiastical disagreements across a much wider spectrum. Now people couldn’t be content knowing just whether their direct neighbors prayed to the right bronze deity, but the private thoughts and contemplations of strangers across mountains and oceans were suddenly relevant, enraging, and motivating.

Combine that with mankind’s relentless ingenuity in advancing slaughter’s technological edge, and you end up with the Reformation wars. Millions dead, cities burnt to the ground, torture meted out as currency — all because someone dared to believe in one fictional entity over another.

To its credit, mankind eventually was jolted from this destructive meat grinder fetish.

No side could eliminate the other, and the survivors agreed that no matter how important questions of religion are, everyone would pretend that it was OK for other people to be damnably wrong. They would not use threat of violence to root out evil beliefs. Western liberalism grew from these fields of corpses and the conviction that we cannot return there.

A historically unprecedented idea took shape, one of ecclesiastical tolerance. I want to again stress that from an earnest religionist perspective, tolerance is an absolutely insane concept to embrace. Your time on Earth is barely a mote compared to the infinite expanse of the divine eternity, which means anything and everything must prioritize the latter, no matter what. By definition, there is no bigger priority in mortal life.

But material practicality was prioritized. After enough carnage, it became easier to let everyone pray to “their” god in their own corner, facing their own particular delusional brand. Stop fighting and go to your rooms.

So the best explanation for why religious discrimination is seen as taboo isn’t moral consistency — it’s that religion represents a particularly cataclysmic societal fault line, one with devastating effects if allowed to fester. For the sake of peace, societal cohesion, and uninterrupted spice flows, we taboo religious intolerance. The arbitrariness emerged from exhausted historical necessity, not philosophical principle.

The Combustible Fault Line Principle

Humans have bottomless creativity for magnifying and reifying minute differences. Westphalia provided the blueprint that other fault lines would follow:

1. Identify a meaningless difference and reify it into an indelible institutional apparatus

2. Death, toil, bloodshed, and civilizations torn

3. Wake up from the hangover and figure out how to fill the geological fault line with aggregate materials

4. Repeat

This pattern repeated with racial segregation, gender discrimination, sexual orientation, and others. Thanks to Vietnam War veteran reception, Congress saw fit also to forbid veteran status bigotry. I’m not claiming all were equally combustible, but rather that they followed a remarkably similar pattern of being deemed too dangerous to leave unmanaged. The qualifying inquiry has nothing to do with assaying particular traits, but simply “Is this axis of discrimination too dangerous to allow unhampered?”

This is why discrimination on race is verboten while discrimination against Eveners is not, even though both involve immutable characteristics. These taboos necessarily follow demonstrable periods of strife — we don’t preemptively taboo discriminations unless they start resembling prior catastrophes. There's nothing magical about race qua race, or sexual orientation qua sexual orientation as the basis for taboo discrimination. We don’t distill this principle in a laboratory.

After all, there are groups whose maltreatment remains broadly acceptable. We’re generally OK literally putting people in cages for extended periods if they commit what we deem to be crimes, and sometimes even killing them. Besides police abolitionists, no one identifies basic bitch law enforcement as a combustible fault line.

By the same token, we could theoretically continue locking up and/or executing (officially or unofficially) men for being gay, as was and continues to be routinely done, but societal values shifted such that this became deemed unacceptable. So verboten in fact, that hate crime legislation emerged to signal that not only would gay conduct be decriminalized, but extrajudicial enforcement would be extra super punished.

This is combustible fault line management in action. Hate crime legislation serves as society’s way of saying: this group is included, treating them differently isn’t something we endorse, and we’ll prosecute you extra hard if you target them!

Whether or not it changes behavior, it definitely sends a message through the enforcement mechanism. When you’re a vulnerable minority wondering if you can adequately protect yourself, it’s like having a figurative hand reach down from the heavens. It’s chalking on the ground a brightline demarcation: step over this line and we will fuck you up. It provides crucial reassurance that prevents fault lines from widening into fiery chasms.

Slicing Transparently Thin Garlic

Now that we’ve established the origin story for tolerance and verboten axes of discrimination, there remains a serious demarcation dilemma.

Take homophobic hate crimes. The essential and primary characteristic of being gay, honed down to a needle point, is simply a male having the desire to have sex with other men. It’s an internal sentiment, not a behavior. A celibate man attracted to other men is still gay, while a straight man having situational gay sex isn’t necessarily considered gay.

But there are also secondary characteristics that heavily correlate with the primary one. Generally speaking, hate crime legislation takes an expansive approach to what it considers a sufficient “because of” nexus. If someone shot up a gay nightclub, their defense of “I don’t hate gay men per se, only people who attend gay night clubs” would be deemed an unacceptable salami slice.

Remember the scene in Goodfellas where they use a razor to slice garlic so thin that it just liquifies into oil? We can do the same here with the semantics by extending the logic with “Nothing against gay men, I just hate people who use Grindr” or “Nothing against gay men per se, I just hate people who watch RuPaul’s Drag Race”. We generally disapprove of Not Guilty By Reason of Semantics.

You can keep attenuating further and further, spreading the butter thinner and thinner, and realize that there is no clear brightline demarcation that marks the beginning and end of Homophobistan. Distilling protected characteristics to their bare essence is the wrong approach entirely.

Yet in the process of establishing how thorny it is to slice the “because of” salami, I obviated a much deeper question: why does identifying the specific slice even matter? There are ultimately only two answers.

1. Condemnation: Motive is relevant because it’s the necessary component for evaluating the validity of an action. Someone punching a gay man in the face because of their gayness is a very different act than if it was because of their terrible parking job.

I confess to making a big mistake, the worst kind of all, and that’s failing to heed my own advice. When I wrote the Sticker Shortcut Fallacy, I warned against grappling hooking onto labels as a way to level skip past much more contentious conversations. That’s essentially what emotionally-loaded labels like homophobic, antisemitic, and racist do. Consider the difference between a “violent assault” and a “violent racist assault”. Both victims suffer identical injuries and hospital bills, but the latter carries extra moral condemnation. That’s it. We can sidestep this semantic confusion entirely by asking the real question: not ‘Is this racist?’ but ‘Is this condemnable?’

2. Group apprehension: I used to be stridently against hate crime legislation. The concept seemed laughably incoherent — all violent crime is motivated by hatred of some kind, so why should one brand take precedence? As a free speech maximalist, the difference between assault with hate crime enhancement versus plain vanilla assault appeared to be criminalizing thought itself.

What I found convincing is that harm from crimes motivated by victims’ identifiable characteristics doesn’t stop at just the direct target, it also negatively impacts anyone else with the same characteristic who now reasonably experiences apprehension about being targeted next. The spread of terror within a particular community is often the perpetrator’s intentional raison d’être.

The Jewish Question Mark

This topic goes beyond just gay sex. Consider the Jews.

In 2018, eleven attendees were shot and killed at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Based on the location (Jewish place of worship) and the individuals (Shabbat services attendees) targeted, there was unanimous consensus that the perpetrator was specifically motivated by an animus against Jewish people per se.

But there’s more to the story, and a way to flip this. What the perpetrator specifically cited as motivation was his belief that the synagogue was complicit in the “Great Replacement Theory” via their affiliation with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS).

The people in the Pittsburgh synagogue were not targeted for being Jews but for being American Jews. HIAS is not an Israeli institution. The Pittsburgh shooter didn’t have a problem with Jews per se. He had a problem with Jews in the US because they vote Democrat and support mass migration into the US. There is no evidence he had any problem with Israeli Jews.

If this comes across as facile, that’s precisely the point, and yet there’s nothing technically inaccurate about it. You can slice this an infinite number of ways and you’ll run into the same absurd RuPaul logic as before. For example, only about 30% of Israeli Jewish men wear a kippah, with the numbers for diaspora Jews bound to be lower. Does this mean specifically targeting only kippah-wearers evade the “because of” being Jewish?

Or, more starkly, polling suggests that somewhere between 60-95% of Jews would be considered Zionists (as in, they support the existence of Israel, nothing further). Is that a sufficiently overlapping nexus? What consistent principle would allow anyone to say yes to a 30% nexus but no to double that?

There’s an easy answer if you begin with the animating principle behind these taboos, rather than robotically applying binary distinctions.

Remember the Sticker Shortcut Fallacy and just ask the directly pertinent question instead. The question isn’t whether someone targeted the platonic ideal of Jewishness (or gayness, or blackness, or wheelchairness) — it’s whether they’re exploiting a combustible fault line that threatens our fragile Westphalian peace treaty. This (kosher) salami-slicing problem and similar semantic games attempt to obscure the underlying social dynamics that discrimination taboos nominally exist to manage.

Rather than myopically extracting essences into lab flasks, we revisit what gave us our original commandments: Is this a condemnable discriminare that threatens to sunder our society?

Semantic Smokescreen

On May 21, 2025, two Israeli embassy staffers were shot and killed outside of the Capital Jewish Museum, with the gunman shouting “Free Palestine!” This sparked the familiar semantic debate: was this antisemitism3 or antizionism? Supposedly, the distinction is that antisemitism targets Jews qua Jews, while antizionism targets only those supporting the Israeli state apparatus.

I also fell into the Sticker Shortcut trap myself, reflexively labeling the attack as “antisemitic” based on the circumstances known at the time, and using the label as shorthand for “condemnable discrimination”. It was a mistake that missed the point entirely.

As established, the distinction can only matter if 1) one motive is less condemnable than the other, or 2) one motive causes different widespread apprehension than the other. Neither factor applies here, making it a distinction without a difference. Consider: if the Pittsburgh Tree of Life shooter claimed his homicidal rampage was actually motivated by antizionism, would anyone condemn his actions less or otherwise breathe a sigh of relief?4

Even if you accept the premises, the antizionism distinction has several related catastrophes at play. It’s horrendous attenuation multiplied by garbage targeting multiplied by deranged decision-making.

Let’s assume a homicidal gunman was genuinely motivated by affront against Israeli military actions rather than hatred of Jews qua Jews — how far does that nexus extend? The dead embassy staffers had no nexus to the IDF as far as anyone knows. Diplomatic staff does all sorts of mundane functions on behalf of their government, from processing visas to organizing cultural exchanges, so does this mean that anyone who draws shekels from the Israeli bourse is now a fair target? Are we comfortable gunning down Jerusalem postal workers or municipal water inspectors? What line are you proposing?

Even if we assume you have drawn a neon brightline, how confident are you that others will hew to it? The consequences of incompetent targeting became especially stark in the Boulder attack less than two weeks later, where a man threw Molotov cocktails at elderly women marching for hostage release. The arsonist deemed that grandmothers in Colorado were fair targets because they deigned to…support victims of war crimes?

The extremely poor targeting reticule is a disturbingly recurring pattern. “Free Palestine” has been explicitly cited during unprovoked assaults against random Jews at the San Francisco marina, while destroying hundreds of (non-Jewish) peony flowers at a Michigan arboretum, throwing a brick through the window of a kosher grocery store in Massachusetts, or vandalizing Holocaust memorials, Jewish restaurant, and synagogues in France.

Can anyone explain what any of this has to do with Palestinian wellbeing or how it advances it?

This catastrophically imprecise targeting is hardly surprising. When people are whipped into a frenzy, the first to act are often the least competent, most deranged, and least informed. Someone who decides to break civil society’s peace treaty isn’t likely to exercise calm, measured, or well-researched judgment about target selection. You simply can’t trust homicidal maniacs to be judicious about their latent bigotries.

It’s no consolation to say “Don’t worry, those upset about Gaza are not targeting Jews per se, only those who assist, are affiliated with, or otherwise plausibly related to Zionism!” That’s like giving a blind security guard a machine gun and reassuring everyone with “Don’t worry, he only shoots trespassers!”

I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that pollster David Shor documented a disturbing bipartisan rise of young people openly admitting unfavorable views of Jewish people. The question said nothing about Zionism.

Why random Jewish qua Jewish targets are pursued by those supposedly agitated by Palestine is certainly an interesting philosophical question.

How does something like this even happen?? I desperately wish to know — “Oh I meant to stop the latest IDF offensive, but I got confused and accidentally threw a brick through the window of a kosher grocery store instead. My bad.” Except it’s worse than that because we don’t even get a ‘my bad’ but its opposite! What the fuck?

If these people are so unhinged about target acquisition, it certainly calls into serious question whether they have the competency to hold the right moral intuitions in the first place. It’s patently unreasonable to simply assume good intentions.

Forgive the narcissism, but the ever-expanding and fuzzy reticle has expanded to such a degree that damn near anyone could be in its sights, including me.

I thought about the effects of indiscriminate violence after the Israeli staffers were killed. I’m neither Jewish nor Israeli, nor have any affiliation with any military or government whatsoever. Yet an avenue of empathy remains.

I’ve been attending events and have been warmly embraced by my local Jewish community. I recall one evening when we exited the venue and stepped out into the cool night air. I recall the lovely woman who embraces me tightly every time we meet, as she leaned out the passenger window waving goodbye. I recalled the Shabbat dinner at her house I had calendared for the following week.

I imagined this scene of serenity broken with tragedy. The joviality turned jagged as gunshots ring out and wails plead to the skies. I imagined the avalanche of dread sweeping all of us as we sprint to triage whose existence among us has ceased. All because someone deluded themselves that their flailing, frantic carnage is part of — if you squint hard enough and don’t ruminate too deeply — a righteous, valorized crusade.

Whether the motivation is “pure” antisemitism or “merely” antizionism is utterly irrelevant when the practical effect is identical: community-wide fear multiplied by blindfire shotgun-blast targeting.

When synagogues are vandalized and Jewish communities (along with anyone unfortunate to be adjacent) live in terror, parsing the attacker’s precise ideological motivations misses the point entirely. Do we want to look the other way so long as perpetrators say “Zionist” instead of “Jew”? Do we want to encourage an open season of violence so long as attackers invoke the right magic words? Do we want to go back to Westphalia?

I don’t.