  We discuss here two of the questions posed at the beginning of the Bled 1998
workshop: Why is the weak charge dependent on handedness? Why do we have parity
violation in the Standard Model? It is argued that the quarks and leptons must
be protected from gaining a fundamental mass, very large compared to the
electroweak scale, by gauge invariance and hence that their gauge charges must
depend on handedness. Furthermore we argue that it is the conservation of
parity in the electromagnetic and strong interactions rather than parity
violation in the weak interactions that needs an explanation. We derive this
parity conservation and indeed the whole system of Weyl fermion representations
in the Standard Model from a few simple assumptions: Mass protection, small
representations, anomaly cancellation and the Standard Model gauge group
$S(U(2)\times U(3))$.
