Justice Department Advertising Job For Retarded Lawyers

No, it’s not a joke. The Obama Justice Department wants lawyers with “targeted disabilities” including mental retardation (via The Volokh Conspiracy).

The Civil Rights Division encourages qualified applicants with targeted disabilities to apply. Targeted disabilities are deafness, blindness, missing extremities, partial or complete paralysis, convulsive disorder, mental retardation, mental illness, severe distortion of limbs and/or spine. Applicants who meet the qualification requirements and are able to perform the essential functions of the position with or without reasonable accommodation are encouraged to identify targeted disabilities in response to the questions in the Avue application system seeking that information.

Eugene Volokh explains:

I’m pretty sure I know what happened here: Boilerplate that was designed for a wide range of federal jobs — including the ones (probably a relatively small percentage of all federal jobs) for which one can be qualified even though one is mentally retarded — is just being copied here; and the limitation to “qualified applicants” who “are able to perform the essential functions of the position” ensures that no mentally retarded lawyers will indeed be hired.

So they just want to give the appearance of affirmative action hiring without, you know, hiring any retards.
Which sort of illustrates the absurdity of affirmative action policies in the first place. If the intent is always to hire “qualified applicants” who “are able to perform the essential functions of the position” (which the affirmative action apologists always assure us is the case) then there’s no need to “target” any disabilities (or races or genders, etc.) for specific hiring.
If you’re only hiring qualified people who can do the job, nothing else should matter. Pick the best applicants and move on.