[Charles Rykken]

Hi Zachery,

I have been away from just about everything for about a month. By serendipity a cancer in my lower right lung was discovered. I had a lobectomy on August 29 and to make a long story short, the cancer was caught in the early stage one. There was no spread so the lobectomy removed all the cancer from my body. I have only recently, about five days ago, returned home from the hospital and today is my first foray onto the internet.

I wanted to say that what you said about equality mirrors my own view. In fact, it is virtually identical to my view. I graduated from high school in 1966 and was much involved in the so called culture wars. One of the issues at that time was a woman’s right to have a career outside of the home. I was intensely opposed to the idea that women should be expected to behave just the same as the male employees. In fact, I strongly advocated that onsite daycare should be a right like paid vacations. My friends told me I would justify the conservative’s view that if women were allowed into the workplace, they would bring along all their squalling brats and turn the workplace into a nursery. My response was, so what, there is absolutely nothing more important giving children a healthy nurturing environment. I was in a PhD program in mathematics(60 of 72 semester hours of class work, three of four qualifying exams and a faculty at Harvey Mudd College who offered to supervise my dissertation) where equal means equal by definition. In other words, the formalist school, dominant for over a hundred years says that mathematical objects are understood as literal constructs. This is the one of the main contributors to the origin of mechanistic materialism. I am opposed to the equal rights amendment. I think the word fair is better but in legal theory it is a very difficult idea to deal with in the law.

I also objected to the careless way the authors dismissed egalitarian defined by a negative. So egalitarian defined as the lack of domination of one group by another is not acceptable. The best solution is to banish the concept of equality completely from discussions of human relationships. I have been arguing this point since 1966 and seldom find a receptive ear.

So finally, I have found someone who shares my view that equality should never be used to describe human relationships. It probably also holds for most of life but that is another subject.