Human Rights say that nobody should be favoured or disfavoured because of personal properties such as gender, skin colour, sexual orientation, religious or philosophical beliefs and so forth. Gender quotas do precisely that: selecting people because of their gender. Note that Human Rights are unconditional: they are not applicable “except if…”. Torture is illegal – period. Torture is not any more acceptable when it pursues a laudable goal (such as finding out where people are held hostage). Neither is geneder-based selection, even if its goal is gender balance.
Human Rights if I please is thus the attitude of those who support and implement gender quotas and other forms of positive discrimination: sure Human Rights are an important thing, they say, but unfortunately cannot always be respected because sometimes other things are more important.
The same people who go by this logic typically call for the unconditioned respect of Human Rights everywhere in the world and believe that authors of Human Right violations need to be severely punished. Take your favourite manslaughtering monsters in history or today: they will all agree that Human Rights are important, but sometimes other things are more important, you understand? Hence torture is a valid means to pursue an end if it is noble enough. “I would prefer not to bomb civilians, and not to rape women, but you see there is this exceptional circumstance that forces me to do that, since otherwise I can’t win the war. I will stop bombing and raping as soon as my enemies surrender.” When talking about quotas, you typically hear “yes quotas are not a nice thing to have, we’d be better off without them, they do discriminate against people, but you see in our current situation with a strong gender imbalance everywhere in society we need to have them. When we reach gender balance, we can dump them.”
The attempt to prevent gender-based discrimination by implementing gender-based discrimination may thus be called Gender Terrorism. This is when the tool for fighting discrimination is discrimination. Promoting gender equality without discriminating against anybody is possible: in the past 50 or 100 years, Western societies have seen an overwhelming progress implemented at high speed regarding the situation of women, but also of homosexuals or people with different skin colour. This was achieved using the tools of enlightenment and no others: argument, raising awareness, discussion and the political implementation thereof. This process has cleard law of discrimination (fairly recently in some cases, regarding homosexuals for example) and has deeply changed society in every-day life: compare the situation of women, coloured people or homosexuals today with what it was 20 or 50 years ago. This does not mean that all is perfect and no progress needs to be made, but it shows that regular enlightenment-based action produces good results in a very short time.
This state of affairs where law does not discriminate against anybody lived for a short while. Then positive discrimination entered the scence. Observing that the absence of discrimination in the law does not mean that there is no discrimiation in society, proponents of positive discrimination argue that the regular enlightening-based evolution is not fast enough and needs to be speeded up. This goal, goes the argument, is more important than anything else – anything else. Hence (in contrast to what children are told in school) the end justifies the means: it is ok to violate Human Rights in order to defend Human Rights.
This state of affairs where law does not discriminate against anybody lived for a short while. Then positive discrimination entered the scence. Observing that the absence of discrimination in the law does not mean that there is no discrimiation in society, proponents of positive discrimination argue that the regular enlightening-based evolution is not fast enough and needs to be speeded up. This goal, goes the argument, is more important than anything else – anything else. Hence (in contrast to what children are told in school) the end justifies the means: it is ok to violate Human Rights in order to defend Human Rights.
Positive discrimination comes in a number of guises, the most widespread being gender quotas, which in France are now hard-wired in election law. This and a number of related issues are further discussed here in the context of French (academia), and in French.