What’s Wrong with the World

From what I heard on NPR, it has no chance of even passing the Senate. Nonetheless, it looks like a symbolic move to energize the Democratic base as we move toward the Primaries.

That's probably a good read on the politics of the present situation as regards the legislation. However, the Republicans are scheduled for a shellacking come November 2008, and it is at least possible that the Democrats will not only solidify their control of the legislative branch, but acquire the capability of ramming this piece of offal through the Senate. Assuredly, the Democratic president will be willing to sign it, trumpeting it at once as a momentous and irreversible datum of progress towards the luminous mystery of universal liberation and a fulfillment of the promise of America.

At that point, the only question will concern the intended scope of the legislation: will it be as comprehensive as the left demands, including even churches in its swathe of destruction, or will it be a down payment. an earnest of future oppressions?

For the record, HSLDA had this up before the vote.

KW, correction accepted happily, and I shall post it as an update to the main post. I thought HSLDA would have something to say about the topic, and I was obviously being too hasty (my besetting sin as a blogger) when checking stuff out for my post. I got hit with a "survey" on the HSLDA site, started to fill it out, got fed up, exited, and then went back and checked out the site itself--which I'd been going to do before the survey popped up--only cursorily.

Maximos, the CNS News stories are saying that there is some sort of exemption for religious organizations. The way it looks to me so far, churches are definitely exempt (and the military), but it's very much a grey zone when it gets beyond that. E.g. Christian schools, maybe/probably, small Christian-owned businesses with the requisite number of employees to fall under the legislation, probably not.

The President has state that he will veto this bill, no matter which version emerges from the Senate.

First time commenter on this blog.

But, please explain what is wrong with adding sexual orientation to the list of things to make it a crime to discriminate against for employment purposes.

Gays shouldn't have equal access to financial means and employers should be able to fire someone for being gay?

Or,

Is this about the limiting a federal government and in fact, all such non-discrimination for employment laws should be stricken? (i.e., an employer can fire someone for being Christian, under federal law anyway).

or something else?

Yes, Royale, employers should be able to fire people whose behavior is, in the opinion of the employer, immoral. It doesn't matter whether the objection is even explicitly religious. It is ideological to tell the employer that his moral objection to the employee's behavior is itself a wrongful objection and that he mustn't take it into account. The whole "equal access to financial means" thing is invidious wording. I think employers should be able to fire somebody for living heterosexually and unmarried with his girlfriend, so I suppose you could say that in my opinion people living with their girlfriends without benefit of marriage shouldn't have "equal access to financial means." Boo hoo. Big deal. Doesn't bother me in the slightest.

But the federalism issue is a real one, too. The use of the commerce clause even in the 1964 civil rights act was highly constitutionally dubious.

So you can put me down for "all of the above."

Ah yes, you can't work, boo hoo...I think that's what Jesus said.

But also, it goes both ways.

Would you want employers to be able to fire people, for say being heterosexual and married? (I think that's happened with stewardesses on airlines).

Should Muslim business owners fire people for being Christian?

It seems to me the stronger argument is the federal one as the immorality one opens up a subjectivity that Christians would have to accept if used against them.

If I am working for an employer who would, but for the positive law, fire me for being a Christian, then I probably ought not be working for him.

I agree with Lydia that the notion that employees must not be fired on moral grounds is itself despicable. To my way of thinking that is a far more grave matter than the also important but prudential matter of federalism.

But also, it goes both ways.

Only if you ignore the fact that we are right and they are wrong. That is, only if you ignore the duty the public authority has to what is true.

"Only if you ignore the fact that we are right and they are wrong. That is, only if you ignore the duty the public authority has to what is true."

Is it that simple? If so, that precisely Muslim persecution of Christians in Muslim countries because in their view, they think they are right and you are wrong.

I'm willing to be quite libertarian on reasons for firing and to say that people should take their chances. I'm really no fan of any anti-discrimination laws, though I do insist that if we have them, we shouldn't have the disgusting double standard (particularly in the area of race) that presently obtains according to which discrimination in one direction is treated as positively laudable but discrimination in the other is practically a hanging offense. But I also agree with Zippy that there's nothing wrong with having a government that takes into account objective moral right and wrong in setting such laws, and certainly not penalizing employers for taking into account behavior that is objectively morally wrong.

...Muslim persecution of Christians in Muslim countries because in their view, they think they are right and you are wrong.

A moral condemnation is embedded within certain words. 'Persecution' is one of them. It is always wrong because it is unjust. A homosexual who is fired for offensive behavior cannot claim persecution. Unlike the Christian, he has been justly corrected.

It's interesting to watch Christians treating Truth -which they claim to believe in - as though it were a matter of what someone thinks.

...they think they are right and you are wrong.

The difference, though, is that I actually am right and they actually are wrong.

There's a huge difference between firing somebody and stoning him. I tell ya' what--I'll agree with laws outlawing what they actually do to homosexuals (and Christians) in Muslim countries--like hanging them, torturing them, stoning them, throwing them in prison to rot. Stuff like that.

Persecution, indeed.

If lawful "morality"/behavior clauses can be found in contracts, why is it so difficult to believe that, but for the presence of a piece of paper (a contract), those morality issues have no weight in a work environment?

I easily see how offensive homosexual behavior can be just as harmful to a work environment as heterosexual, aggressive, behavior is.

However, having an aversion to certain behaviors does not mean that you are fearful, i.e. homophobic. It merely means that you are being loyal to your own beliefs, which gives me hope that the right to free association still has meaning.

"The difference, though, is that I actually am right and they actually are wrong."

Nevertheless, this still is an intellectual justification for Christian persecution in Muslim countries because they will claim that they are treating Christians the same as Christians treat Muslims in the West. This raises a few things:

1. To claim "foul" would be nothing short of hypocrisy.
2. It just isn't smart (for trade, business, politics), as we all have to share this planet together.

"A homosexual who is fired for offensive behavior cannot claim persecution."

"I easily see how offensive homosexual behavior can be just as harmful to a work environment as heterosexual, aggressive, behavior is."

We're not talking behavior, we're talking firing someone for their status as a human being. There is a very big differece.

"This still is an intellectual justification for Christian persecution in Muslim countries..."

Nonsense, rubbish, and balderdash. A person who utters this either a) has *no idea* what "Christian persecution in Muslim countries" means or b) is so morally confused as to think that not giving somebody a job or even firing him is morally classifiable with the things that actually are done to Christians in Muslim countries.

And the practice of homosexual intercourse is not the same thing as one's "status as a human being." That's another confusion. An employer who considers acting on homosexual desires to be morally wrong and who discriminates on the basis of "orientation" in hiring is obviously doing so because he does not wish to subsidize financially the out-of-hours behavior he considers morally wrong, and he thinks it probable that the person in question will be engaging in such behavior. This is to my mind as reasonable as refusing to hire someone, or firing someone, who is living with his girlfriend, etc.

Nevertheless, this still is an intellectual justification for Christian persecution in Muslim countries because they will claim that they are treating Christians the same as Christians treat Muslims in the West.

I suppose that might seem to be the case for someone whose intellectual framework for justifications willfully rules out consideration of what is true and what isn't true. But I tend to think that there are problematic issues in talking to such a person which go beyond particular substantive questions, since on his own terms he is incapable of asserting any of his own claims to be, you know, true. So why should anyone listen to him?

Yes, that's the main point of difference, that matter of truth.

we're talking firing someone for their[sic] status as a human being

His status is human being. I doubt that's why he's being refused the job, or fired from it.

Lydia, isn't 'homosexual intercourse' sort of an oxymoron?

I easily see how offensive homosexual behavior can be just as harmful to a work environment as heterosexual, aggressive, behavior is.

I think, Dean, that the bill in question deals not necessarily with behavior that occurs in the work environment, during the work day, but with the behaviors of workers who are at home, or in their private lives.

But I also agree with Zippy that there's nothing wrong with having a government that takes into account objective moral right and wrong in setting such laws

But in order to take objective moral right and wrong into account, a government would first have to be in the business of determining said objective morals, and that seems like a recipe for corruption.

and that seems like a recipe for corruption

Another very odd claim. A government which repudiates the necessity of grounding its acts in what is true is less corruptible than a government which at least acknowledges in theory its own constraint by truths external to it?

That human government is in general corruptible is surely correct, but trivial. That explicitly, intentionally irrational government which repudiates truth is less corruptible because of that very feature is ... counterintuitive.

would first have to be in the business of determining said objective morals...

Or of simply acknowledging them.

That explicitly, intentionally irrational government which repudiates truth is less corruptible because of that very feature is ... counterintuitive.

Looking at the expanse of human history, would you care to make the claim that rationality is the most prevalent feature in human behavior?

In any case, there is no evidence to support that publicly discriminating against gays changes their private behavior. All it does is force the behavior underground, and this has many obvious consequences that are prone to corruption.

I think an employer can have an understandable and reasonable motive in refusing to hire an openly and actively homosexual person which motive is not to try to make the homosexual person stop his behavior.

Looking at the expanse of human history, would you care to make the claim that rationality is the most prevalent feature in human behavior?

Surely not. Though I don't know what that has to do with the question on the table, which, as I understand it, is whether abandoning rationality results in a less corruptible government than not abandoning rationality.

In any case, there is no evidence to support that publicly discriminating against gays changes their private behavior. All it does is force the behavior underground, and this has many obvious consequences that are prone to corruption.

It is the very nature of governance to change behaviors and, where it cannot change behaviors, to force some behaviors into a closet. The only real substantive question is which behaviors should be changed and/or closeted. I merely suggest that abandoning concern for what is, you know, true, doesn't eliminate this from the nature of governance; it merely expells sanity from the process.

I respect an argument which claims that homosexual behaviors are not immoral and therefore, because they are not immoral, they should not be treated as immoral; and that when they are treated as immoral this represents a form of persecution. I don't agree with it mind you, but I respect it as an argument. But the argument that what is true is irrelevant to what should be made legally normative under the positive law is self-refuting nonsense.

I am most concerned with the ability of employers to take morality into account in hiring and firing. I am not asking the government to do anything to anybody. I am asking the government to allow individuals to make the decision in this type of case based on their moral beliefs. In the same way, I ask the government to permit parents to educate their children in accordance with their moral beliefs and not to micromanage that. I also don't think (e.g.) the government should be telling me whom to invite to my house.

I will admit that it seems to me particularly perverse for the government to be asking employers to ignore what I think are true moral beliefs in this particular case. That is in my opinion going beyond busy-body-ness to a perverse attempt to force people to ignore or deny truth. But in any event, I am in this particular case advocating more freedom rather than less.

And so, compare Mr. Edwards view, as noted by Jacoby in the Boston Globe:

When the party's presidential candidates debated at Dartmouth College recently, they were asked about a controversial incident in Lexington, Mass., where a second-grade teacher, to the dismay of several parents, had read her young students a story celebrating same-sex marriage. Were the candidates "comfortable" with that?

"Yes, absolutely," former senator John Edwards promptly replied. "I want my children . . . to be exposed to all the information . . . even in second grade . . . because I don't want to impose my view. Nobody made me God. I don't get to decide on behalf of my family or my children. . . . I don't get to impose on them what it is that I believe is right." None of the other candidates disagreed,

Bill writes, It's interesting to watch Christians treating Truth -which they claim to believe in - as though it were a matter of what someone thinks.

I like that. Being right isn't the end of the story, because being right is not the Truth.

...whether abandoning rationality results in a less corruptible government than not abandoning rationality.

I would counter that wherever transparency and accountability overlap is the least prone to corrupt governance.

But the argument that what is true is irrelevant to what should be made legally normative under the positive law is self-refuting nonsense.

I think what is legally normative should reflect as much as possible the actual state of society. Since homosexuality has been a persistent part of human civilization for millennia, I merely suggest that truth is not narrowly defined.

"I think what is legally normative should reflect as much as possible the actual state of society."

That sounds like a bandwagon argument if I ever heard one. But for what it's worth, which isn't much as an indication of right and wrong, I think anti-discrimination laws for sexual orientation would definitely fail if put to a direct popular referendum.

But in any event, I am in this particular case advocating more freedom rather than less.

I don't think that's necessarily the case, although I can see where you would believe it to be true.

You're valuing the freedom of businesses over the freedom of individuals. On a certain level, these freedoms overlap; if I'm hiring a nanny to take care of my two children, I am both an employer and an individual. But as businesses get larger, they become quasi-governmental. If the majority of a small town's citizens are employed at a single factory, then that factory has a lot of economic clout. It seems to me to be a clear reduction in overall freedom to say that the benefit of the doubt, in determining moral issues that pertain to the home lives of employees, should lie with a single entity--the factory--instead of with the employees themselves.

The ability for individuals to find gainful employment is important both for those individuals and for society. The harm that could be done by an employer making an arbitrary decision about what its employees out to be doing in their private lives seems to far outweigh the harm that is done to an employer who is, after all, still able to fire an employee if they aren't doing their actual job up to the standard required.

Lydia,
In a democracy, bandwagons are par for the course.

The most recent polling data says 79% of Americans think openly gay men and women should be allowed to serve in the military. This may or may not determine how they would vote on it, but it indicates a lot more acceptance then you might think. The more conflicted opinion polls are on gay marriage and civil unions and the best resource I found on that is here:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_poll5.htm

Thank you, KW. I'll take that as a compliment. Nice to see you again.

"But as businesses get larger, they become quasi-governmental."

Phil, you will find me making "um" and "whoa" noises about those sorts of propositions even when they are uttered by my fellow conservatives, as they are surprisingly often, especially in the company I run with on the Internet. I have never felt that to be obvious and have always had trouble coming up with scenarios where I find it quite definitely true.

For what it's worth, I don't have time right now to re-look up the number of employees an employer would have that would make him subject to the legislation in question, but it wasn't large. It may have been fifty, but my recollection is that it was fifteen. With either of those numbers, we are taking a lot of small businesmen and entrepreneurs in the net. There is no question of an employer of even fifty employees being "quasi-governmental" nor anywhere near, even to those who say that business does become "quasi-governmental."

But as you know, I think this has two different aspects. The behavior in question is, I believe, _wrong_ to do in private. I also think--here differing from a lot of other people--that there is an additional problem, if not a wrong, then a discourtesy, in advertising to your employer that you are engaging in this behavior. This isn't _just_ because the employer may well think the behavior immoral. It is hard to explain all my reasons for thinking it rude to bring your same-sex significant other to the company picnic (for example), but one of them is that you probably know there are people, plausibly including your employer, who will feel like they are being pressed to show approval when they actually think the behavior wrong.

Now, in addition there is the fact that I have very serious questions about the wisdom and justice of government's micromanaging hiring and firing decisions. I would myself think it a probably wiser, saner, and healthier legal system if employers were permitted to fire (though not, of course, to beat up) Christians and also homosexuals, if teetotal employers could advertise, "No drinkers need apply," and vegan employers could advertise, "We are a vegan organization and do not employ meat-eaters," and so forth. This despite the fact that I think teetotalism--as a moral belief that it's wrong to consume any alcoholic beverages--incorrect and veganism not only incorrect but also silly and health-threatening.

What's interesting is that I think most people wouldn't actually mind too much if deep-dyed Baptist teetotallers were allowed to make things uncomfortable for or even outright fire those who drink. Somehow that seems quaint or no big deal. And probably the same for the "vegan business." But people get very upset when it's a matter of sexual behavior. I don't know all the reasons for this. Probably part of it is _precisely_ that people are afraid that more people will _want_ to discriminate on the basis of sexual morals than want to discriminate on the basis of wine-drinking. But in that case, what the activists are essentially saying is, "We know that lots of our fellow-countrymen would rather not subsidize our sexual lifestyle by employing us. That might make it difficult for us to get a job while advertising our sexual behavior, and hence we think they should be forced by government sanction to ignore that behavior, even if they think it morally wrong to employ us. Better they should be forced out of business than that they should be allowed to discriminate."

I should add that I've seen very nearly this attitude expressed regarding Catholic Charities in Boston and the placement of children with homosexual couples. The idea was that it was so evil of them to want to "discriminate" that it was _their_ fault they closed down and stopped their important service of placing children for adoption. This, to me, is crazy. To value sexual "non-discrimination" over the provision of valuable goods and services in society is ideology gone mad.

What's interesting is that I think most people wouldn't actually mind too much if deep-dyed Baptist teetotallers were allowed to make things uncomfortable for or even outright fire those who drink. Somehow that seems quaint or no big deal. And probably the same for the "vegan business."

You're saying that most people wouldn't have a problem if, say, a Baptist pizza parlor owner fired a thirty-year old waitress after he found out she enjoyed a glass of wine before bed?

I think you're wrong there. I think a reasonable person would find that action (the firing) to be a little creepy. The same would be true for the vegan owner of a bicycle shop who fired a young father after he was photographed at the county fair eating a hot dog. I'd wager that even if the establishments had _fourteen_ employees, the average adult would find those firings at least a little unpleasant.

But I used the phrase "were allowed to" pretty deliberately. Perhaps "quaint" was a poorly-chosen term, though. Do you think people would think that it shd. be *illegal* for the vegan to fire the guy caught eating a hot dog? How about advertising for non-meat-eaters in the first place, so that people wouldn't take the job unless they were prepared to do without meat? Don't you think most people would feel that isn't a big enough deal that we should have a law against "vegan only" job ads or "non-drinkers only" job ads? _I_ certainly think that is not something to outlaw, though I think vegans are, well, ridiculous and over-the-top.

There is also this strange presumption that (say) being vegan has no impact on how someone does the job of (say) bookkeeper in a particular business. It is a very strange presumption, one which bizarrely views organized groups of persons as positivist machines. I've built relatively small organizations from the ground up, producing very high returns for my investors, and I can tell you unequivocally that such shared-values issues have a huge impact on the culture and performance of an organization, even if we are measuring success only in aggregated quantitative economic terms, which are hardly the only pertinent ones.

Basically the modern liberal order wants us to pretend that certain true things don't exist. Even more, the modern liberal order wants us to act to nullify the existence of those things as anything other than completely private preferences adopted purely voluntarily. It isn't just wrongheaded, inefficient, etc -- it is insanity.

Don't you think most people would feel that isn't a big enough deal that we should have a law against "vegan only" job ads or "non-drinkers only" job ads?

I think if you single out minorities one at a time, such as vegans, then yes, it would be hard to get majority support for "employment protections" for them. (I use the term minority here in a literal sense: there are probably far more animal-byproduct-eaters in the country than there are vegans. I'm not equating veganism with race.) But if the question were about the abstract principle, such as, "Should the law allow businesses with more than fifteen employees to fire those workers based on the types of legal foods they eat on their own time when they're at home?"--I don't know that you'd find a huge amount of support for that.

The same would be true of employment protections based on religion: "Should the law allow employers of a certain size to fire employees based on those employee's chosen religion?" seems like it would get a different answer than "Should the law allow employers to fire employees who profess to be Wiccans or witches?"

Based on what you've written, though, I'm guessing that you and I differ not just on the specifics, but on the general question of whether the law should prevent employers of any size from firing employees for any reason. I think the state, and society, has a legitimate interest in doing so, although I must confess I haven't got a good argument about where the bright line should be drawn between a small business and a large business.

Setting aside the specifics of employment law, what do you think of this statement: "The state should provide the same protections to individuals based on 'choice of romantic partner(s)' that it does based on 'choice of religion'?"

There is also this strange presumption that (say) being vegan has no impact on how someone does the job of (say) bookkeeper in a particular business.

Perhaps you're right about that presumption. So, if we remove each "(say)" from that statement, what are the ways that being a vegan has an impact on how someone does the job of bookkeeper for a particular business? Say, a company that makes and sells photocopiers?

Setting aside the specifics of employment law, what do you think of this statement: "The state should provide the same protections to individuals based on 'choice of romantic partner(s)' that it does based on 'choice of religion'?"

I don't see the "ought" or "should" to be true there. I'll admit that I'm inclined to be pretty laissez faire about "protections" for either of those in the area of hiring and firing. But when I'm considering the reasonableness or unreasonableness of any specific act of discrimination, I'm very specifics oriented. For example, I'm no fan of Islam (as readers of this blog well know), but it seems to me more reasonable to refuse categorically to hire someone who lives in (say) a polyamorous situation with multiple romantic partners of multiple sexes than to refuse to hire a Muslim. I can imagine reasonable discrimination in hiring against either of these, but the former behavior is, to my mind, exceedingly outrageous and hire-blocking in itself, whereas I might well consider hiring a Muslim in certain contexts for certain jobs.

And so forth. I just don't see that you can make broad categories of private behavior (religion, sexual activity, etc.) and declare that these have to be protected--even protected against refusals of association by private individuals-- and that they must be protected equally with each other.

I agree, by the way, with Zippy about the often irrational watertight compartment mindset of liberals. There are more extreme examples, of course: Many liberals absolutely will not consider that the military culture might make for better fighting units if they are male-only. Even so basic a personal characteristic as being male or female is supposed to be completely irrelevant to things like rapport, working together in physically stressful situations, and fighting. Which is nuts. Similarly, many liberals defended Bill Clinton's sexual escapades as entirely irrelevant to his fitness for the presidency. This "sex is in its own separate category" idea about the presidency is absurd on its face. It doesn't take much imagination to think about issues such as the susceptibility of such a president to blackmail or espionage using female agents, the relevance of his inability to control himself and behave maturely, and so forth. But no: It was just supposed to be entirely separate from "how well he could do the job." And we were all supposed to accept and maintain that fiction.

I just don't see that you can make broad categories of private behavior (religion, sexual activity, etc.) and declare that these have to be protected--even protected against refusals of association by private individuals-- and that they must be protected equally with each other.

You seem to be saying two things here, and I think I'm confused because you lump religion and sexual activity together in the first part of the sentence. Obviously, if you believe that _no_ protections are warranted, then you agree with the statement: such treatment is the same.

As to why we might think they deserve the same or similar protection- American history shows that we value religious freedom, and the history of Western literature shows that we value romantic freedom. We might believe that others make mistakes, and yet I think most of us feel, at heart, that those mistakes should be others' to make; no one should be choosing their religion or their partner for them.

I think that's an important part of the American character, the "I disagree with you but I'll let you make your own fool choices." Muslim theocracies believe that the state should choose your religion for you, and Hindu culture believes that your parents should choose your partner.

I understand that part of your point is that if both get no protection, then they are protected "the same." But since one type of discrimination seems to me in fact and in concrete cases more unreasonable than the other, then I'm not inclined to make sweeping statements to the effect that both categories must always and in every conceivable situation receive "the same protection." For example, I might think it busy-body-ish for the state to say that you cannot discriminate on the basis of religion, but I think it's even _worse_ for the state to say you can't discriminate on the basis of "choice of romantic partner." So if the one type of government regulation is worse--more of an intrusion, more perverse, etc.--than the other, then I'm not going to commit to a statement that both categories of behaviors must always receive the same protection or lack thereof, as if there is some metaprinciple that they have to be sort of legally yoked at the neck--if one is protected more, the other must be, too, if one is protected less, the other must be, too, and so forth.

As for its being part of the American character to let people make their own "fool choices," two points: a) You're still "letting people make their own choices" if you refuse to hire them. This, to my mind, is as much true of hiring as it is of inviting people to a party. I say to someone, "If you want to live in a perpetual sexual orgy, I don't have to invite you to my Christmas party." He can go live in his orgy instead of coming to my Christmas party. And so forth. This idea that refusing to hire someone is "not letting them make their own choices" has always seemed silly to me. If my child were (God forbid) to start living with someone without benefit of marriage, I might refuse to have the child home for Thanksgiving, and I would _certainly_ refuse to have the unmarried couple over together for Thanksgiving. You made your bed, now lie in it. That isn't precluding the person's choice; it's making one's own choice, which means that the other person's choice has consequences. Welcome to the real world. It seems that one could only feel differently about employment if one had some sort of entitlement mindset towards employment, a mindset I deplore. b) In matters of religion and even "romantic partners," I think it's pretty obvious that even state non-intervention _must_ have limits. This is why we have laws against statutory rape, even for young people of ages (e.g. 17) old enough to be plausibly consenting. I'm not going to go on with graphic and unpleasant examples, but no, you can't just say, "This is my romantic partner decision, and no matter what it is, I must be allowed to make it."

The same applies to religion. Laws against cruelty to animals might preclude certain types of animal sacrifice. Direct incitement to blowing up infidels is plausibly the kind of thing that should be outlawed. Drug taking during religious ceremonies can be rightly outlawed. And so on and so forth. These things require prudential judgement, but not just any activity one does under the ambit of religion must be tolerated on those grounds.

...what are the ways that being a vegan has an impact on how someone does the job of bookkeeper for a particular business?

The impact of cultural factors and cohesiveness of the group on individual productivity and teamwork is enormous in virtually any human endeavor. This isn't true only in military combat, though in military combat the consequences are immediate and mortal in nature.

Everyone knows this. Everyone understands at some level that a vegan bookeeper working for a hunting outfitter is a recipe for trouble; most people at some level understand that cultural cohesion isn't merely a matter of coherence with the specific products or services provided by the group either. Particular companies develop cultures which are unrelated to product and industry: some places are ruthlessly individualistic, others are very family oriented, etc. These kinds of informal factors are every bit as important - in many ways far more important - than explicit policies or whatever. But the modern legal order with respect to employment requires them to be ignored, repressed, explicitly rejected as having any bearing on leadership. As I said before, it is plainly nuts even if the only thing we care about is material productivity -- and as human beings, when it comes to the institutions and organizations with which and within which we spend most of our lives, aggregate material productivity is merely the tip of the iceberg of legitimate concerns.

To be slightly more concrete:

So, if we remove each "(say)" from that statement, what are the ways that being a vegan has an impact on how someone does the job of bookkeeper for a particular business? Say, a company that makes and sells photocopiers?

If the culture of the photocopier business is presently dominated by meat-eating hunters, and the watercooler conversation often involves mutual rumination over the best and most delicious marinades, then the vegan bookeeper's productivity, job satisfaction, etc - and those of everyone else - will be impacted a certain way. If the photocopier company is composed largely of vegans with orange and blue hair and staples through their eyebrows and black lipstick - and this is just the guys - the impact is likely to be quite different. These things are real, tangible, unavoidable, and they affect everything about working at a particular place: productivity is, again, merely the tip of the iceberg.

Zippy,
I see your point, sort of, but if I'm reading you correctly, you're really making an argument that no employer should face any kind of restrictions or laws impacting hiring and firing practices, at all. Just as a photocopier company run by a meat-eating clique might find the camaraderie is stronger when it weeds out the vegans, so might a database company owner feel that her white executives will get a little uncomfortable if they have to share a watercooler with a black coworker, and a Christian owner of a baseball-card printing press might think that Jews will be a real downer around the office, etc.

I can see where you're coming from, in a free-market, libertarian sort of way, but the intangibility of the notion of "cultural cohesion" in the workplace really just means that anyone can be fired for anything, with no worker protections. A fundamentalist Muslim might read the account of a rape victim coming forwrad in the local paper and decide that his donut factory would be tainted by her continued presence, and so on. I can't help but feel that, on some level, workers deserve a little protection from the whims of powerful employers; the more powerful the employer, the more protection that is warranted. It seems somehow un-American to me to suggest that how well a person succeeds in the business world _ought_ to be based on their gender, their religion, their diet, their romantic partner, their race, etc. Of course these things _do_ play a part, but to suggest that it's a social good that they do seems dystopian.

However, it's refreshing to read someone who is willing to make open and unabashed pro-segregation arguments. That's a rarity in our PC culture.

...you're really making an argument that no employer should face any kind of restrictions or laws impacting hiring and firing practices, at all.

Well, that takes what I've actually said farther than anything I've argued. When it comes down to it I am very authoritarian, and libertarianism as an ideological thing, as opposed to just another way of expressing subsidiarity, gives me indigestion.

What I am arguing against in this thread is the notion that such things as whether an employee is homosexual or Baptist or vegan or whatever are not materially relevant to a business, that these things don't impact productivity and the work environment, etc. Despite the popularity of the notion in our advanced liberal society this is manifestly, head-in-the-sand false: willfully ignorant even.

How one incorporates recognition of that falsity into his understanding of how business should be regulated is a different matter. It doesn't mean that I would permit employers to do whatever they want to do, though as a prudential matter I think a good bit of lattitude is called for under subsidiarity, especially when dealing with small-scale employers. But any common cause with libertarianism is coincidental for a ruthless authoritarian racist sexist homophobe like myself: a byproduct of the fact that libertarianism tends to coincide with subsidiarity when dealing with things on the small and local scale.

I'm not nearly as instinctively anti-corporatist as some conservatives, but here's an interesting point: I suspect that large and powerful businesses are already disinclined to take lifestyle matters into account in hiring. They are already more faceless and generic, as well as more PC, than small businesses. So another anti-discrimination law more or less is going to make little difference. Does Kellogg want to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation? I doubt it.

In a sense putting in extra layers of requirements for ignoring cultural and lifestyle issues moves us towards a more corporatist and generic society. It is likely disproportionately to affect the small family business, the entrepreneur, the local business that tries to reflect local culture. This is a drawback, I think.

Nor do I mean to imply any sort of cultural relativism by this. I have little love for the idea of a Muslim business owner who wants his female employees to wear the hijab! But then again, if our country as a whole were willing to protect its own culture by discriminating against Muslims in immigration, we would have fewer worries about Muslim businessmen on American soil maintaining their creepy, anti-female culture in this fashion.

I wrote:

... though as a prudential matter I think a good bit of lattitude is called for under subsidiarity, especially when dealing with small-scale employers.

I'll point out that as things scale up, the "invisible hand" starts to work quite visibly here too, in a way very favorable to modern PC uniformity. That is, as a business scales up part of its value becomes tied to its liquidity, not just its capacity to produce profits for the present owner(s). A business with a very non-mainstream culture is going to be less liquid - that is, it will be more difficult for it to be acquired, transferred, or otherwise treated as a fungible asset. For businesses intended to grow over time toward a liquidity event (acquisition/sale or public listing on an exchange) there is (and I mean this literally) monetary value in a mostly mainstream culture with just enough distinctiveness and internal cohesion to provide competitive advantage. So even if we assume the liberal notion wherein everyone is a meaningless interchangeable unit of productivity in the giant machine as the ideal, the idea that regulation is required to force the issue as businesses scale runs counter to the self-interest of business itself. Business as it scales will tend toward uniformity with modern PC culture and treat employees as little interchangeable-in-the-business free and equal private-life-supermen because that adds value to the business in terms of liquidity. That modern PC culture of interchangeable little free-and-equal self-made supermen makes for miserable human beings is quite beside the point, from the standpoint of the bottom line. So my regulatory impulses, such as they are, would probably tend rather differently from those of most other people even as businesses scale upward in size.

I posted my last before seeing your latest comment Lydia, but I think it counts as a GMTA moment. A certain intensity of distinctiveness is a competitive advantage at the small scale, and it tends toward being a competitive disadvantage at the large scale, where diet-coke cultural distinctions can be advantageous but where intense cultural distinctions make the business illiquid.