Nicholas Grossman
1 min readFeb 20, 2019

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You’re making a “separate but equal” argument, a concept that was rightfully discredited as inherently unequal decades ago. What’s missing from your story is power.

It takes a lot of people to play a real football game. The town in the article’s hypothetical doesn’t have enough Jews for them to have a separate but equal football game on Sunday mornings.

The lament, from Ben Sasse and others, is “why can’t the whole town get together and share a single activity on Friday nights or Sunday mornings?” And the answer is because most locations aren’t homogeneous.

Friday night football is a relatively unimportant example illustrating something much bigger: town-wide activities that create the sense of community Sasse desires are more convenient for some than others. Though he doesn’t intend it this way, his lament is effectively “why isn’t everyone a Christian football fan like me?”

It’s primarily inequality of opportunity, which then causes inequality of outcome. You and I agree that inequality of opportunity is a problem.

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Nicholas Grossman
Nicholas Grossman

Written by Nicholas Grossman

Senior Editor at Arc Digital. Poli Sci prof (IR) at U. Illinois. Author of “Drones and Terrorism.” Politics, national security, and occasional nerdery.

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