This is a perennial question for those working to improve living conditions for those on the outside -- those excluded based on some quality deemed inferior, insufficient, impure, inconvenient or otherwise undesirable. A major model employed with particular vigor in the US has been the human/civil model, which has its critics such as Andrew Sullivan (writing below about discrimination involving homosexuals):
Liberalism properly restricts itself to law - not culture - in addressing social problems; and by describing all homosexuals as a monolithic minority, it is able to avoid the complexities of the gay world as a whole, just as blanket civil rights legislation draws a veil over the varieties of black America by casting the question entirely in terms of non-black attitudes.
