Sergio Peçanha is what the Washington Post calls a “visual columnist,” meaning that he puts together charts and graphs to make his point. Whether you’re a charts and graphs kinda person or not, these can often be very persuasive devices to visualize a problem that the mind dismisses. As with any device, visual or rhetorical, it works for those for whom it works and is just another way to make a point.

But while the emphasis is on the visuals, it can also cause people to miss the fact that the point itself is fundamentally nonsensical or wrong. When that happens, focus on the graphs can help to clarify the significance of a point that goes without scrutiny, a point like this one:

What will it take to achieve gender equality in American politics?

The problem isn’t with his math, charts, graphs or statistical analysis. The problem is with his underlying point, because it’s absurdly false in every conceivable respect. We could “achieve” (which itself is a wholly inapplicable word) gender equality in politics tomorrow. All we would need to do is elect more women, as if elections were based not on choosing a person whose political views we prefer, but on physical characteristics. The notion is dumb and doesn’t become less dumb with charts and graphs.

How does an op-ed of such a vacuous nature find its way onto WaPo real estate seems the better question. Is there no one there saying, “well sure, women shouldn’t be discriminated against because of their gender and not elected to public office, but even if there was no discrimination against women at all, that still wouldn’t mean gender equality is a goal.” Electing good people who reflect our political views is a goal. Electing people by gender is discriminatory, whether it’s men or women.

Over the past decade, the resort to characteristics has played well with a certain cohort of people who fail to distinguish the wrongfulness of discrimination against someone based on a factor such as gender with discrimination for someone for the same reason. Part of that overly educated and indoctrinated group refuses to consider the distinction, seeing any question of their sacred beliefs as conclusive proof of the alternative, that if you aren’t mindlessly supportive of women, then you’re prejudiced against them.

This has given rise to another bit of facile nonsense, that if women ran the country, they would fix everything. We would live in a more empathetic world, hold hands and all thrive under their benevolent matriarchy. There’s no room in the mix of thought for the fact that there are women in politics, some of whom do a great job and some of whom aren’t very good at it. And some are pretty dumb and awful, and their only “virtue” is their genitalia.

It’s not just the wacky children spewing this silliness, but the Pelosis and Clintons pandering to their own crowd of believers, playing on what they almost certainly know to be a facile lie. Women can be smart, as well as dumb. These are smart women, so when they spew nonsense, it’s fair to believe that they know better. But these smart women are also politicians, so they do what they have to do to gather the stupid of their gender, and the stupid of allies to the ideology, for their own benefit. As politicians, this is the game, so it’s hard to be critical of them for playing their tribe of fools.

The problem here is that the Washington Post gives up real estate to this silliness, and it’s hardly presumptive to say that they not only don’t know better, but they believe the nonsense, they believe that gender and racial outcomes in politics is itself a goal without regard to how voting works, whom people support and whether it’s more important to elect a person based on gender than based on their policy views.

Putting aside that quirk of political denialism that Elizabeth Dole ran for the Republican nomination while Hillary Clinton was still packing up her prom dresses from her First Lady days, Joe Biden has gilded the lily with Kamala Harris, a cop black woman. Throw a bone to the people obsessed with race and gender by “making history,” even if nobody wanted Harris to be president when she ran.

And that’s the point, the opportunity, and the answer. There were women running for the Democratic nomination for president. Nothing prevented Democrats from voting for them in the primaries. But in the quiet of the voting booth, they chose to vote for the person they thought would be the best president. It wasn’t Harris. Or Warren. Or even Marianne Williamson. That’s how elections go, there are winners and losers, and sometimes the losers are going to be women.

But was it because they were women? If so, it’s just as wrong to not vote for someone because of their gender as it is to vote for them because of it. But the tacit thrust of this morass of charts and graphs belies its true assumption, that in a non-discriminatory nation, the percentage of women in office would match the percentage of women in the population, and the failure to align, the disparate outcome, proves that it’s discrimination that has prevented women from “achieving” gender equality. Hence its conclusion.

The idea of possibly waiting another half-century is disheartening. But concerted effort by both parties and some unpredictable factors could change that perspective. For example, Trump’s election motivated scores of Democratic women to run for office in 2018. This year, again, women are seeking office in record numbers, with Republicans also part of the push. As a result, a record number of women are running for House seats, with nearly 300 women securing their party’s nomination, including more than 200 Democrats and nearly 90 Republicans.

That’s progress, for sure. But it’s not enough — not even close. In fact, it is appalling that after a century we remain so far from equality, especially on the Republican side. It should not take another 60 years to fix that.

It’s great that more people are entering the mix of running for office, broadening the universe from which to choose and, theoretically at least, giving the voters better options. But progress is voting for the best candidate, not the candidate who checks the diversity boxes. Progress is not discriminating against anyone. Progress is not discriminating for them, no matter what the charts and graphs say.