(FORTUNE Magazine) – By way of elaborating the headline, we begin obliquely with the saga of Kateri Tekakwitha. A Mohawk Indian maiden born in 1656, Kateri was exposed to Christian doctrine by Jesuit missionaries and baptized at 20. She was persecuted by other Mohawks, fled to Canada, died of natural causes at 24, and was buried near Montreal in what is now a major pilgrimage site for Native American Catholics. She was beatified in 1980 and is expected to be canonized soon as a saint. Her beatification was mildly controversial since, previously, it had been an ironclad requirement that candidates be credited with one or more miracles. Kateri had none. Determined to have an American Indian saint -- at present, there are none -- Pope John Paul II has waived the requirement in her case. The whole point of affirmative action is to lower standards. In the secular realm, this exercise is ordinarily justified on grounds of equity, with as little as possible said about efficiency. But in a period when the country is statedly obsessed with competitiveness -- we now actually have a ''competitiveness caucus'' in Congress -- it seems amazing that Americans, not to mention Congress, continue to put up with affirmative action's systematic debasement of standards. Even more amazing is the ability of activists promoting lower standards to go right on finding new causes. Three current examples of the war against standards: (1) The exercise in the California legislature, now sidling up to a cluster of bills that would add a whole new dimension to affirmative action in education. Under the old dimension, minorities are of course given preference in admissions to the state's elite colleges. The new deal is to require that minorities graduate at the same rate as whites. (National graduation rates for blacks and Hispanics are now approximately half those for whites.) A bill introduced by Speaker Willie Brown would require ''substantial parity'' in graduation rates by 2000. Adding points to a fellow's blood pressure, the proposal is being justified by the need for America to ''compete effectively.'' (2) A just-published report, funded by the Ford Foundation, that broadly attacks the use of ability testing in schools, employment, the armed forces, you name it. Lumpily titled From Gatekeeper to Gateway: Transforming Testing in America, the report complains about various multiple-choice objective tests, said to be biased against minorities. It tendentiously quotes the National Research Council as worrying that ''some degree of cultural bias . . . artificially lowers the tested performance of ((blacks)) relative to ((whites)).'' It does not mention the bottom-line NRC finding that the major forms of ability testing -- IQ tests, scholastic aptitude tests, the Armed Forces Qualifications Test -- predict academic and occupational performance about equally well for blacks and whites (and in fact slightly overpredict the performance of blacks). Gatekeeper calls for more regulation of ability testing. (3) The Civil Rights Act of 1990, now tortuously moving through Congress (and possibly to be signed by President Bush), would make it far more difficult for employers to set high standards if these had a ''disparate impact'' on the job prospects of minorities. The new rules would require employers to relate their standards to ''effective job performance.'' That phrase is less innocuous than it sounds. In a letter to Teddy Kennedy (chief Senate sponsor of the bill), the executive director of the American Psychological Society (10,000 members) explained the threat posed by the phrase: ''The term 'effective' . . . assumes that job performance can be divided into absolute categories of 'effective' and 'ineffective.' However, for every job there is a continuing scale of effectiveness.'' The society's main concern: ''In a progressively more competitive environment,'' the new standards could ''compel the hiring of those who are minimally effective.'' The association of affirmative action with lower standards seems increasingly to be getting to the presumed beneficiaries -- mainly American blacks. In a recent eloquent statement in the New York Times Magazine, a black intellectual named Shelby Steele complained of the ''implied inferiority'' that comes with racial preferences, and added, ''The lowering of normal standards to increase black representation . . . puts blacks at war with an expanded realm of debilitating doubt.'' Steele is certainly not the first writer to worry about these perverse effects on minorities, but his statement seemed to have had more resonance than most, possibly because of his success in graphically rendering the human dilemmas created by affirmative action. It would be nice (but hard) to believe that the congressional black caucus is listening to him, or even the competitiveness caucus.