not a betting man, but I’ll bet you a quarter that if you tell friends that they’re biased, you’ll get a response from each that’ll range anywhere from a mild disagreement to an angry, hostile denial.

You see, I don’t think anyone wants to be perceived as biased. Perhaps that’s because many people think of bias only in racial terms.

But all that bias means is an inclination of temperament or outlook. It’s a manifestation of what Carl Rogers called the symbolic-self, the personality or character, that each mind is willing to recognize as its own.

Which means that the mind is constantly changing as it continuously struggles to feel good about itself by making the right "I like it" or "I don’t like it" choices.

It can’t be helped. To be human is to be biased.

So no one is objective — not judges, journalists, arbitrators, educators, clergymen, physicians, college professors, or mathematicians. Not anyone.

It’s just not possible. Therefore, one is liberal, conservative, bigoted, or broad-minded first, and a consultant, statistician, scientist, lawyer, rabbi second.

It’s a pity that people generally don’t understand this. It would make dealing with what happens a lot easier for them.

For example, some years ago, a judge in Texas sentenced a murderer to thirty years, after which he let it be known that the sentence would have been life had the victim not been homosexual.

The foolish magistrate was immediately denounced by many people who demanded his ouster from the bench. One of them told a reporter that we cannot allow any jurist to dispense justice from a personal bias.

Good idea, I thought, when I read about it.

However, what the person who spoke to the reporter didn’t seem to understand is that to accomplish that, we would have to remove all justices from the bench, not just the blabbermouths.

Think about it.