I never realized New York was home to so many genocidal dictators (discounting, of course, the ones that merely visit from time to time) that it needed a Human Rights Commission. Appearantly, I was wrong.

Hear the phrase “human-rights violator” and one usually thinks of Slobodan Milosevic or some other thuggish despot. In New York City these days, though, the phrase might apply to an advertising executive whose firm hasn’t hired enough African-American managers or to the makers of an “insensitive” video game.

For this astonishing development, blame New York’s Commission on Human Rights, an agency that investigates and prosecutes violations of the city’s very liberal civil-rights laws. Such laws target not only racial and religious discrimination but bias against women, the elderly, the disabled, noncitizens, gays, ex-cons, the transgendered, victims of domestic violence, and other protected classes. And of course the commission interprets “discrimination” in the most extraordinary ways.

. . .It’s easier to find discrimination if you’ve got an expansive notion of it, of course, and the current commission has expanded its definition to the point of absurdity. Ask New York’s advertising firms. In early September, the commission trumpeted that it had reached agreements with several top agencies, forcing them to recruit and promote more blacks. The companies, seeking to avoid fines of up to $250,000 and litigation, will set numerical goals–quotas–for increasing black representation, establish “diversity boards” and submit to three years of monitoring.

Naturally, the commission offers zero evidence that racism is to blame for minority “underrepresentation” in advertising firms. An advertising executive quoted in the New York Times gives a far more plausible explanation: “Minorities are targeted broadly by everyone: Wall Street, Fortune 100 companies. Your top minority students have lots of opportunities outside advertising.” The notion that New York advertisers are bigots who won’t voluntarily hire and advance qualified blacks is preposterous in this day and age. It’s the commission’s retrograde racial-preference mandate that’s truly racist, since it likely will require the ad firms to hire certain job candidates–and reject others–simply because of their skin color.

The threat of a commission investigation a while back was sufficient to get Take-Two Interactive Software, makers of the video game Grand Theft Auto, to promise to remove an instruction–“Kill the Haitians”–from one version of the game. “I believe that this New York City-based company has gained a greater appreciation for the diversity which makes this city great,” Mr. Bloomberg announced. You don’t have to be a fan of Grand Theft Auto to find in such intimidation less protection of a human right than violation of the First Amendment.

In the perfect world for many there is no First Amendment. After all, freedom of speech so often leads to that horrible condition which a vocal few tend to find most intolerable, offense. Some people just refuse to go along with the thought police and dare to say things that other people don’t like.

Thankfully, we have Human Rights Commissions diligently on the lookout for such flagrant troublemakers, ready to ship them off to reeducation centers, also known as “sensitivity training” in newspeak, at a moments notice.