Thought for the Day

[fred41]

Would his technical reasoning be that it's okay to not hire anyone attracted to men as long as both females and males are excluded? I'm not trying to be nitpicky but you can see that insisting on this disparate treatment paradigm is a little mechanical.

I’m a little lost here. It could be that we are interpreting his statements differently.I simply see using the female as explanatory reasoning. Theoretically you can still fire any sexual orientation as long as you can prove that it was for reasons other than sex. That’s why laws like this generally work better in a larger environment (such as a corporation) where, at the very least, it’s easier to prove a pattern...I believe.

[Stavros]

One step forward, two steps back?

How it is getting harder to vote if you are a Transgendered American, and William Consovoy, the 'rising star' who seems to be on a mission to remove voting rights, or is it 'cleanse the registers'??

Thus:
"For non-binary people, as well as the transgender community as a whole, barriers to getting an appropriate ID leave hundreds of thousands people vulnerable to disenfranchisement.
In a February 2020 report, the UCLA School of Law Williams Institute estimated that 965,350 transgender people will be eligible to vote in November’s presidential election. But of the 45 states that conduct elections in person, 42% of transgender people don’t have the correct identification. These numbers don’t account for the estimated 25% to 35% of transgender people who identify as non-binary, or those who are non-binary but not transgender – which a 2014 study in the UK estimated as about 0.4% of the population.
The 2015 US Trans Survey also found that a third of the people who showed ID which didn’t match their gender presentation faced negative results such as harassment or even assault – something that can discourage transgender and non-binary people from casting a ballot."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...ember-election

And
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/u...voy-trump.html

https://naacp.org/wp-content/uploads...ngTheBench.pdf

[broncofan]

I’m a little lost here. It could be that we are interpreting his statements differently.I simply see using the female as explanatory reasoning. Theoretically you can still fire any sexual orientation as long as you can prove that it was for reasons other than sex. That’s why laws like this generally work better in a larger environment (such as a corporation) where, at the very least, it’s easier to prove a pattern...I believe.

For years judges maintained that Title VII protected against biological sex discrimination but not against sexual orientation discrimination per se. Some cases would argue that sexual orientation discrimination could be sex discrimination if gay men were discriminated against but not gay women. I'm posting the reasoning quoted in the article which seems textbook for what Judges use to establish disparate treatment between the discriminated against group and the comparator group.

"It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating ... based on sex," the justice wrote. He gave the example of two employees attracted to men — one male, the other female. "If the employer fires the male employee for no reason other than the fact that he is attracted to men," but not the woman who is attracted to men, that is clearly a firing based on sex, he said.

This looks to me like he's saying that if you fire a man who is attracted to men but don't fire women who are attracted to men you are discriminating against men because the exact same attraction is not punished for women. That sounds like disparate treatment language to me rather than just saying that gender identity and sexual orientation are intimately related to "sex" as it's used in the statute. I would prefer this last interpretation, which would basically say that enforcing sex-based norms, about gender expression or who one is attracted to, is illegal.

The reason I interpreted it this way is because all of the old cases on the subject interpret sex to mean biological sex and then try to find ways that gender identity discrimination or sexual orientation discrimination could have disparate effects on men and women. He kind of seems to be doing that but then says that discriminating on these grounds is ALWAYS discrimination without considering all permutations. BTW, I'm not suggesting that he should, just that the disparate treatment paradigm between male and female is not that helpful in the case of sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination.

[broncofan]

I’m a little lost here. It could be that we are interpreting his statements differently.I simply see using the female as explanatory reasoning. Theoretically you can still fire any sexual orientation as long as you can prove that it was for reasons other than sex. That’s why laws like this generally work better in a larger environment (such as a corporation) where, at the very least, it’s easier to prove a pattern...I believe.

The reason he uses this example though is to show that discriminating based on sexual orientation ends up treating the two sexes differently. The example is intended to show that if you discriminate against gay men you are treating them differently than straight women. It is explanatory reasoning but it's intended to stick to the use of sex in the statute as biological sex and in my view kind of misses the point of why homophobia is wrong. It's not wrong because it might treat biological males differently than biological females. It's wrong because it attempts to fix who members of a particular sex are attracted to and thereby enforces norms that are irrelevant to a person's job performance.

Anyhow, I'll look at the case but I have a feeling he starts by citing McDonnell Douglas or some similar case to create a "disparate treatment" paradigm which he then sets out to prove.

[sukumvit boy]

US /Russian relations take a nose dive with the conviction ,in Moscow, of Paul Whelan on spy charges.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/w...py-guilty.html

[Stavros]

John Bolton's book will no doubt be an entertaining read, though many people feel cynical about him preferring to publish a book rather than appear at the Impeachment hearings in the US Congress. On the other hand, explosive though his testimony would have been, the Senate made it known in advance that whatever the House concluded, they were not interested, and no amount of facts were going to change their mind, just as this book will not enable Senator Lindsay to revert to the position he held in 2016 and withdraw his support from this President.

Two thoughts: the first, is that what Bolton's career and his book expose is the internal contradiction in the Repubican Party, which cannot decide if it is a Consertive Party when its Conservatism is now so poorly defined, or in the terms of the Constitution, decide if it is a Liberal or a Libertarian party. That the President is not a Republican but now defines the party in terms of his personal interests and a random set of policy preferences, is based on the view that this doesn't matter: Mitchell McConnell takes the view that as long as they get their tax cuts, and Federalist Society alumni into the Circuit and other Courts, the President can do and say whatever he likes, he is just a rubber stamp for their long term objectives.

The second is about ignorance- Finland actually was part of Russia owing to the Russian Empire's annexation of the territory in 1809 when Russia was at war with Sweden, but the point is that I would not be surprised if many/most (?) Americans have never heard of Finland.
But ignorance is not uniquely American, and the British are just as good at it, indeed, here, ignorance starts at the top, with Boris Johnson (Eton, Oxford) justifying the merger of the Department for International Development with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, saying it would put an end to the 'giant Cashpoint in the sky'. The Foreign Aid budget has been a source of intense criticism, mostly from those who actually don't know what the aid is spent on, but defiinitely know the word 'Foreign' makes it suspicious.

Thus we are not told what the buget is most often spent on, UN Agency commitments by WHO, UNICEF and UNESCO, or that the aid projects approved by the DfID are not payments from one government to another- no, these become a waste of tax-payers money that benefit rural lesbians in Uganda or farmers in search of water in India which spends billions on a space programme. Then there are the Africa dictators helping themselves to this Giant Cash machine courtesy of the British tax-payer as implied in this letter to today's Telegraph-

"Boris must get rid of the 0.7% minimum spend, stop funding African dictators' Swiss bank accounts and extortionate salaries for CEOs of large charities and direct any aid via our embassies to small charities working on the ground with all contracts to go to British companies or local contractors, not our foreign competitors. "

-the fact is, that the money spent on foreign aid projects is of no interest to 'Africa dictators', most of whom have made their money from a 5% (or more) rake off every commercial contract in the country, or from 'signature bonuses' in petroleum contracts, where these have made some people seriosuly rich in Angola and Gabon, to take two examples; and in most cases, the Foreign Aid budget does go to local charities, which is the purpose of Foreign Aid, even if some of these are not as effective as their might be. Why siphon off $100,00 when you can get your hands on $150 million?
And note that 'African dictators' is the Talisman of corruption, as if there were no corrupt dictators in the Middle East or Central and Southern America.

So ignorance can be found at the top, as well as lower down in society, though one does not in normal times expect to find it in the White House and Downing St, though Boris Johnson has a habit of saying things he knows to be untrue, to say what he thinks the voters want to hear. The end result is that people become tired of it all, and switch off. I don't know if this means the 2020 election will return the incumbent, and if Boris Johnson's poll ratings are poor because of his sloppy management of the Covid-19 crisis he appears to be secure in his job for a few years more, though a lot depends on Brexit, and a week is a long time in politics.

And as in law so in politics -ignorance is no excuse, though it seems a lot of people prefer it to to the moral responsibilty that is conferred by knowledge. Is this not one of the reasons why structural, long-term change seems to be so hard to achieve -or are we in a moment when 'the people' are demanding fundamental change -and who is going to deliver it?

[Stavros]

And now let me confess to my own ignorance -our Foreign Secretary has had to apologize for saying 'taking the knee' is demeaning and not acceptable to him. I admit I was not sure why 'taking the kneel' has become an act -of solidarity, of defiance- until I googled it to discover it is a tactic in American Football, defined by Wikipedia as

"In American football, a quarterback kneel, also called taking a knee, genuflect offense,^[1] kneel-down offense,^[1] or victory formation occurs when the quarterback immediately kneels to the ground, ending the play on contact, after receiving the snap. It is primarily used to run the clock down, either at the end of the first half or the game itself, to preserve a lead. Although it generally results in a loss of a yard and uses up a down, it minimizes the risk of a fumble, which would give the other team a chance at recovering the ball. "
-But is this the key part?

"The play is meant to keep the defense from seriously challenging for possession of the ball."

As in: who owns the National Anthem? I know next to nothing about American Football, rarely watch the highlights which are shown late at night on BBC TV so I don't really understand the Football context. But it does, I think, explain the way in which Colin Kaepernick used it, but do many people undersand its origins?

[filghy2]

And now let me confess to my own ignorance -our Foreign Secretary has had to apologize for saying 'taking the knee' is demeaning and not acceptable to him.

Why did he regard that form of 'taking the knee' as demeaning but not this for example?

[Stavros]

Because it is the Queen -he said he would only kneel for the Queen, and his wife, as he did when he asked her to marry him.

[trish]

I'm told that a true patriot would stand erect for the National Anthem. I for one, never found any flag to be all that arousing. Personally, I think standing erect for the flag is a disgusting fetish.