Liberals, Conservatives, and Individual Rights

A recent subject of interest on this blog but I wanted to point something out from this article from the CATO Institute I found thru Instapundit...

And consider the issue of government use of racial classifications. Liberal justices have been willing to uphold virtually any use of race by the government--including quotas in higher education, set-asides for government contracts, and raced-based assignments of students to public schools--so long as the government claims benign motives. The conservatives, by contrast, argue that the government must treat people as individuals, not as members of a racial caste.

The question here is obvious. Should government treat people not as members of disparate groups whether or not they're black, white, hispanic, women, homosexual, etc? Should people be treated as individuals?

I could say yes however it should be noted that being a member of a group especially a group historically shut out is probably where some of this comes from. A court should have to rule on discrimination especially in the form of shutting individuals out of working or educations opportunities. I suppose we could talk about equality but depending on what should be considered equal it's very difficult to quantify.

There are so many places I can go with this subject.