Burning your bridges and salting the earth


Why anti-discrimination lawsuits may make things worse
I love it when someone else "gets it." Dale Carpenter looks at why anti-discrimination is not always a good idea. Emphasis added.

Modern antidiscrimination law is expanding in two ways that are very unhelpful. First, it is being applied in ways that infringe important liberties outside the commercial context. The Boy Scouts case decided by the Supreme Court in 2000, involving the exclusion of an openly gay scoutmaster, was an example of this. While the harm and indignity done to the gay scoutmaster, who'd been an Eagle Scout, was not trivial, requiring that the Boy Scouts let him lead troops violated the Scouts' associational and speech interests in very important ways.

Second, antidiscrimination law is increasingly being applied to trivial and/or fairly harmless discrimination that goes well beyond core concerns about things like employment and housing. The exclusion of Catholic Charities from offering adoptions in Massachusetts last year was unjustified because it was difficult to show how the group's anti-gay policy actually hurt gay couples seeking to adopt.

The eHarmony lawsuit is an example of the trivialization of antidiscrimination law. It doesn't involve a core concern like employment or housing or even a traditional public accommodation, like discrimination in a restaurant or hospital. It's also very hard to see how any gay person is really harmed by the policy. Gays aren't lacking for match-making sites, either general ones or those tailored just to same-sex pairs. And personally, I wouldn't give my money to eHarmony regardless of what policy they adopt at this point.

The suit allows some opponents of antidiscrimination law to point, with some justification, to excesses as evidence that the underlying idea is bad. It also allows anti-gay activists to belittle claims that gays are subject to serious and ongoing discrimination that should be remedied in law.

As bad as discrimination is, I don't see the brute force approach as all that effective. In fact, in most cases today, I think such lawsuits destroy their own premise. Without demonstrable harm, the only possible result is to channel massive amounts of cash to the lawyers.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Tue - June 12, 2007 at 05:10 AM  Tag


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