Olson makes a good point.

Anti-discrimination laws incentivize content-based suppression of speech by employers.

If an employer is charged with discrimination and an employee has argued for immigration restriction on his personal Facebook site, that Facebook content is going to be used against the employer.

The EEOC requires that we all participate in other people's delusions.

The EEOC has made an official statement that descrimination against "transgender" people violates federal law.

For those of us who can't keep up with the constantly shifting kaleidoscope of terms used by the GBTLQetc. activists, "transgender" denominates those people who are under the delusion that they are in the the "wrong" body. Sometimes this fixation can lead such people to mutilate their body through "gender reassignment surgery." This article by Paul McHugh, the former head of John Hopkins' sex change department ought to be read by anyone who thinks that these surgeries are a good idea. A few excerpts:

When the practice of sex-change surgery first emerged back in the early 1970s, I would often remind its advocating psychiatrists that with other patients, alcoholics in particular, they would quote the Serenity Prayer, "God, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." Where did they get the idea that our sexual identity ("gender" was the term they preferred) as men or women was in the category of things that could be changed?

Their regular response was to show me their patients. Men (and until recently they were all men) with whom I spoke before their surgery would tell me that their bodies and sexual identities were at variance. Those I met after surgery would tell me that the surgery and hormone treatments that had made them "women" had also made them happy and contented. None of these encounters were persuasive, however. The post-surgical subjects struck me as caricatures of women. They wore high heels, copious makeup, and flamboyant clothing; they spoke about how they found themselves able to give vent to their natural inclinations for peace, domesticity, and gentleness—but their large hands, prominent Adam's apples, and thick facial features were incongruous (and would become more so as they aged). Women psychiatrists whom I sent to talk with them would intuitively see through the disguise and the exaggerated postures. "Gals know gals," one said to me, "and that's a guy."

The subjects before the surgery struck me as even more strange, as they struggled to convince anyone who might influence the decision for their surgery. First, they spent an unusual amount of time thinking and talking about sex and their sexual experiences; their sexual hungers and adventures seemed to preoccupy them. Second, discussion of babies or children provoked little interest from them; indeed, they seemed indifferent to children. But third, and most remarkable, many of these men-who-claimed-to-be-women reported that they found women sexually attractive and that they saw themselves as "lesbians." When I noted to their champions that their psychological leanings seemed more like those of men than of women, I would get various replies, mostly to the effect that in making such judgments I was drawing on sexual stereotypes.

Interestingly, these observations correspond with what I observed in the evening I spent listening to a man extol his gender re-assignment surgery. He didn't want to become a women; he was aggressively insistent that he was not interested in men. But as a woman, he really fell short. I was sitting across from him, and let's just say that his inability to cross his legs in his dress made it an altogether uncomfortable evening. The point being that he simply didn't have the habits formed by growing up as a girl.

and:

The first issue was easier and required only that I encourage the ongoing research of a member of the faculty who was an accomplished student of human sexual behavior. The psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jon Meyer was already developing a means of following up with adults who received sex-change operations at Hopkins in order to see how much the surgery had helped them. He found that most of the patients he tracked down some years after their surgery were contented with what they had done and that only a few regretted it. But in every other respect, they were little changed in their psychological condition. They had much the same problems with relationships, work, and emotions as before. The hope that they would emerge now from their emotional difficulties to flourish psychologically had not been fulfilled.

We saw the results as demonstrating that just as these men enjoyed cross-dressing as women before the operation so they enjoyed cross-living after it. But they were no better in their psychological integration or any easier to live with. With these facts in hand I concluded that Hopkins was fundamentally cooperating with a mental illness. We psychiatrists, I thought, would do better to concentrate on trying to fix their minds and not their genitalia.

And:

Having looked at the Reiner and Meyer studies, we in the Johns Hopkins Psychiatry Department eventually concluded that human sexual identity is mostly built into our constitution by the genes we inherit and the embryogenesis we undergo. Male hormones sexualize the brain and the mind. Sexual dysphoria—a sense of disquiet in one's sexual role—naturally occurs amongst those rare males who are raised as females in an effort to correct an infantile genital structural problem. A seemingly similar disquiet can be socially induced in apparently constitutionally normal males, in association with (and presumably prompted by) serious behavioral aberrations, amongst which are conflicted homosexual orientations and the remarkable male deviation now called autogynephilia.

Quite clearly, then, we psychiatrists should work to discourage those adults who seek surgical sex reassignment. When Hopkins announced that it would stop doing these procedures in adults with sexual dysphoria, many other hospitals followed suit, but some medical centers still carry out this surgery. Thailand has several centers that do the surgery "no questions asked" for anyone with the money to pay for it and the means to travel to Thailand. I am disappointed but not surprised by this, given that some surgeons and medical centers can be persuaded to carry out almost any kind of surgery when pressed by patients with sexual deviations, especially if those patients find a psychiatrist to vouch for them. The most astonishing example is the surgeon in England who is prepared to amputate the legs of patients who claim to find sexual excitement in gazing at and exhibiting stumps of amputated legs. At any rate, we at Hopkins hold that official psychiatry has good evidence to argue against this kind of treatment and should begin to close down the practice everywhere.

Also, according to this site, suicide plagues even those who seem to have succesfully transitioned to their new gender.

I can well imagine that disability law may protect those who suffer from this psychological problem - and those for whom gender re-assignment is medically necessary on account of developmental issues, but that is a far cry from recognizing "transexuality" as a "sex."

If this is true, the attorney responsible should be suspended from practice.

Law firm accused of firing legal secretary for serving on jury.

The California Labor Commissioner is suing a prominent workplace-discrimination law firm in Los Angeles, alleging that it fired an employee after she told the firm that she had been called to serve on a jury.

Filed on Tuesday, the lawsuit alleges that Martin & Martin fired receptionist Marla Osorio on the day that she told the firm that she had been impaneled to serve on a state court jury. The suit alleges that the law firm violated state labor laws prohibiting unlawful retaliation.

Martin & Martin managing partner Areva Martin is a labor and employment plaintiffs' attorney, who has made numerous televison appearances on such shows as Anderson Cooper 360 and The Dr. Phil Show to discuss employment and disability discrimination issues. According to its website, the firm has eight attorneys.

Reached by phone on Thursday, Ms. Martin said that she had not seen the lawsuit and was unable to comment.

According to the complaint, Osorio was summoned for jury duty in April 2006 but was directed by the law firm's human resources manager to try and postpone it. The court rescheduled her service for June, when Osorio was selected as part of a panel and told to return in July. When Osorio explained to the law firm manager that she had to go back in July, she was fired, the commissioner asserts.

Unfortunately, some attorneys - and plaintiffs employment attorneys - think they are exempt from the laws they enforce.

Unfortunately for them, their employees usually know the law from working for them.

Why employment lawyers would starve in Russia.

Russian court rules that sexual harassment is not only not illegal, but may be mandatory.

Sexual harassment okay as it ensures humans breed, Russian judge rules


A Russian advertising executive who sued her boss for sexual harassment lost her case after a judge ruled that employers were obliged to make passes at female staff to ensure the survival of the human race.
 
The unnamed executive, a 22-year-old from St Petersburg, had been hoping to become only the third woman in Russia's history to bring a successful sexual harassment action against a male employer.


She alleged she had been locked out of her office after she refused to have intimate relations with her 47-year-old boss.

"He always demanded that female workers signalled to him with their eyes that they desperately wanted to be laid on the boardroom table as soon as he gave the word," she earlier told the court. "I didn't realise at first that he wasn't speaking metaphorically."

The judge said he threw out the case not through lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally.

"If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children," the judge ruled.

Since Soviet times, sexual harassment in Russia has become an accepted part of life in the office, work place and university lecture room.

According to a recent survey, 100 per cent of female professionals said they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses, 32 per cent said they had had intercourse with them at least once and another seven per cent claimed to have been raped.

Eighty per cent of those who participated in the survey said they did not believe it possible to win promotion without engaging in sexual relations with their male superiors.

Women also report that it is common to be browbeaten into sex during job interviews, while female students regularly complain that university professors trade high marks for sexual favours.

Only two women have won sexual harassment cases since the collapse of the Soviet Union, one in 1993 and the other in 1997.

Human rights activists say that Russian women remain second-class citizens and are subjected to some of the highest levels of domestic abuse in the world.

Freedom as a Zero-sum Game.

English philosopher Roger Scruton comments on a recent Englich decision that prohibits a Christian family from refusing to rent out a room on their house to unmarried couples.  This English decision is about a decade behind a similar decision in California.

Scruton initially notes the sea-change in convention:

A court in Britain has just awarded damages to a gay couple against the owners of a family hotel who had refused to allow them to share a bedroom. Until recently it was normal for hotels in Britain to demand proof of marriage, before allowing a man and a woman to lodge together. Even now it is permissible for a hotel to refuse a room to a couple if one is a prostitute and the other her client. But it seems that it is not possible, even for Christians running a family hotel, to withhold a room from a couple of homosexuals. How did we get to this point, and what should we make of it?

And concludes:

THIS, IT SEEMS TO ME, shows what is really at stake in these disputes. They are not about human rights, or about the perennial conflict between liberty and equality. "Non-discrimination" clauses are ways of smuggling in vast moral changes without real discussion. Their open-ended nature, and the vagueness of their application, renders them almost immune to reasoned rebuttal. There is no knowing, from one year to the next, which of our ways of discriminating between people will be ruled out in the next extension of the law. Sex, sexual orientation, and maybe soon sexual practices -- so that the hotel keeper will no longer be able to discriminate against the person who happens to live as a prostitute. By penalizing old-fashioned morality in this way you do not make toleration of the new morality more likely. On the contrary, you sow the seeds of resentment, by removing from ordinary people the freedom to follow their conscience in a matter that deeply troubles them.


Liberals do not usually notice this, for the reason that the new society, shaped by the ideology of non-discrimination, seems to be going their way. But it could easily start to go against them, as the Islamists use the non-discrimination clauses in order to protect the segregation of women, polygamy, incitements to violence, and all the other things that Islamists claim to be demanded by their faith, and which it would be "discrimination" to forbid. It will be clear, then, if it is not clear now, that vast changes in the moral standpoint of the law cannot be smuggled in by open-ended clauses, without creating a weapon that can be used as easily by your foes as by your friends.