Reply #56: Your last line is exactly why I don't support Clinton.

[noamnety]

Affirmative action, however, does not mean putting an unqualified person into place. It means giving priority to evening out the scales where one class of people has had less power than another class of people. So where women hold 16% of the congressional seats, we can look at that and say that's the result of bigoted policies and attitudes in our country, and given two comparable candidates, it makes sense to weight gender as a factor.

Given two working class people, one male, one female, (instead of comparing apples to oranges, a working class male to a millionaire woman as you did above), give the edge to the woman if it's a job that women have been excluded from. The effect goes beyond just the individual who gets the job, it affects the attitude of all other people exposed to the idea that gender equality in that job is a reality, not just a hypothetical.

Giving the edge to a member of an oppressed class as affirmative action, to undo a historical advantage given to men (or white people, or straight people) is not bigoted, whereas giving the edge to a member of the privileged class because they are in the privileged class is.