Last week I talked to a 25-year-old who is passionate about gay rights. She was very pleased with the recent federal district court ruling that the U.S. Constitution’s anti-slavery amendments guarantee a right to gay marriage. Was she now satisfied with the legal status of homosexuals? “Absolutely not,” she replied. “Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people can be fired by their employers.” Apparently the next peak to scale for gay rights activists is a statutory right for fired workers to sue companies.
I asked her how it would work. “If I fire a helicopter instructor and he sues me, how is the jury going to sort out whether I fired him because he crashed a helicopter or because I saw him using an iPhone?” She didn’t have an answer. “What if my employer has been unhappy with my performance and I’m afraid of being fired. Though I have no girlfriend or boyfriend, I show up every day driving a Miata and carrying a MacBook. Can I sue the company for firing me because they thought I was gay?” Finally I asked how I was supposed to know if my workers were gay. After all, sexual activity is conventionally conducted in private. Was it okay for me to ask them with whom they were having sex and what specifically they did with those partners? “They might bring their partner to a company social event.” I explained that helicopter flight schools did not typically host lavish social functions.
Some work in Congress has been done on this (link), but not successfully so far. A fatal flaw in the campaign seems to be the fact that there will not be any quotas for gay employees or other specific requirements for employers to hire gay workers. In the absence of quotas, a company would be better off hiring straight workers (assuming it could identify them) because such workers, unless they invested in Miatas and Apple products, would not have a statistical chance of imposing this new litigation cost on the company. Typically where the government has added new legal rights for a particular class of worker it has also imposed hiring quotas on employers, at least government employers and government contractors (i.e., on nearly 50 percent of the economy).
Separately she noted that gay workers were underpaid compared to equally skilled and hardworking straight employees, part of a theory that “companies always exploit vulnerable workers”. Thus there is an opportunity for a company with an all-gay workforce to make supranormal profits due to its low labor costs. She herself will not be taking advantage of this no-risk approach to making millions as she intends to spend her life working for the government or in non-profit organizations.
You have like 19 things going on in this post. But the most shocking one of all is that your esteemed friend actually knows that research does indeed show that gay males earn less than straight males, contrary to rich-margarita-wielding-fairy-with-no-kids stereotype. She apparently does not know that the same studies show lesbians essentially never earning less than straight females, usually quite a bit more.
All this will be explained in due course.
Joe: Gay men earn less annually or less per working hour? Straight men would be more likely to have children to support and therefore more motivated to put in extra hours in exchange for extra income. Straight men also would be getting a tax deduction for each child and therefore would face a lower marginal tax rate (a lot of research has shown that people will work less when their tax rate is higher).
If any group claims their rights are being violated and are being discriminate against, that group is doing grave unjust to society especially to those who really need the protection such as handicaps and mentally ill.
Gays and other groups don’t fall in this protection category; they are abusing the system and are good at it because, naturally, they are an outspoken and strongly opinionist group. Note, I’m not targeting gays or have anything against them; thus my first sentence.
George: That’s an interesting perspective. Humans have limited attention and if we protect every group we will in effect protect none! My original question was prompted by a slightly different point of view, i.e., that there are some actions that may be immoral (e.g., firing someone after learning that he or she is gay) but are impractical to prevent and punish with the legal system.
Everyone: A friend looked at the comment above and said that my explanation of why married men work harder and earn more is wrong. “They are avoiding going home to their wives,” she noted (from experience).
A friend told me that there was no chance of advancement for the faculty and administration of the music department of a certain university near here for those who were not gay. Men and women were both well represented so there was no discrimination on the basis of male or female.
There was one faculty member in particular who was the most obvious of the obvious, with all the stereotypical mannerisms. Eventually this one became head of the department. Later I heard a rumor that this one had been faking it all along.
You just have to admire that kind of resolve.
Hmm, the Miata thing again… maybe I need to get out more, but I’ve never met a gay Miata owner. Then again, the Miata people I hang out with race them, so perhaps that’s a contra-indication….
Les: I loved the Miata when I drove it (right after it was introduced in the 1990s). Driving one in the Boston winter isn’t so practical, though, and there is no backseat for a dog. So perhaps my gay persona will have to include a Saab convertible instead.
The whole discrimination thing has become totally contorted. Outcome can replace behavior for one, meaning that if company A has too few of a certain class employed it can be found guilty of discrimination based on an inference of behavior (you discriminate against group X as “proven” by how few work for you). New rules put in place during the current administration extend this to say that even a lack of effort attributed to being inclusive can become grounds for canceling or not awarding federal contracts. So we are now at the point where if I never post openings in public I can be labeled a discriminatory employer (for certain federal purposes). I could be head of an Amish family farm and never be considered for a federal contract under these new rules. Hopefully I would never want that contract but if I did I think I just lost my own rights.
I’m surely sorry for how your “young 25 year old” feels but I really don’t understand how employment or salary become a “right”, by which I mean a liberty right became a claim right.