Take note of this, because I doubt strongly that you’ll ever see me write this again: I agree with George W. Bush.

No, not on Iraq, not on the economy, not on proper grammar, but on a case preparing to go to the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policy in which minority applicants get an automatic bonus toward admission.

The plaintiffs charge that this bonus –given to all minority applicants, regardless of merit — violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection and treatment, and the president, agreeing, has decided to weigh in on the issue as well.

The case and Bush’s pronouncement have caused something of an uproar among some civil rights leaders. The ever-loudmouthed Rev. Jesse Jackson recently referred to the president as “anti-civil rights,” the kind of sadly frequent overreaction that incites cringes from those of us who typically support the civil rights movement and laughs from those who don’t.

Political grandstanding aside, this is a difficult issue to deal with, one in which compassion clashes with common sense. Compassion wants to let us help out the disadvantaged in any way possible, but common sense says that everyone needs to be treated equally. Unfortunately members of the civil rights movement forget that equal treatment means equal treatment all of the time, leaving no room for special treatment.

All individuals need to be evaluated based on their merit as human beings, which has everything to do with integrity, character, and intelligence, and nothing to do with race, gender or anything else beyond one’s control.

Unfortunately, giving a blanket special treatment to a group — no matter what the reason — ends up creating exactly what the civil rights movement tried to end in the first place: state-sanctioned inequality. As much as we may be tempted, correcting one injustice with another is not the solution.