Necessary Roughness

Update, April 25th, 6:42am: The bill is H.R. 2015 and will be available in THOMAS in a day or so.

Much noise is being made over the introduction of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), brought up once again after being defeated in 1996 and delayed in 2002.

Press releases indicate that it is sponsored by Reps. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) and Christopher Shays (R-Conn.). It essentially adds sexual orientation and gender identity to the list of categories that is forbidden to be discriminated against. You read that right. If you’re in New York, you can say you’re a pre-op sex change guy going to be a girl and you can work in activities where women would be required (Curves?), and the business cannot refuse to hire you on that basis.

But let’s forget the particulars of the bill and consider non-discrimination legislation (hereafter abbreviated as NDL) as a whole. We can learn from our experiences with race and sex NDL.

If I can provide a particular function as well as, or even slightly better than, someone else with, for example, a different amount of melanin in their skin, NDL gives employers incentive to choose that person over myself. The employer doesn’t want the legal expense or the bad publicity that they might be racist. The business suffers because they may not hire the best person for the job.

NDL gives “civil rights” organizations the opportunity to collect revenue by shaking down companies. Again, companies don’t want to get in trouble with the law, so they pay off organizations to prevent them from bringing civil suits.

More NDL means more organizations that will actually provoke an attitude of entitlement from the “oppressed” party, leading to more resentment and bigotry on both sides, rather than less. As other groups see the freeloading enjoyed by major groups, they will try to represent themselves as different, reversing the American melting pot and balkanizing all of us.

More NDL means more government expense in terms of longer court dockets. It will mean challenges all the way up to the Supreme Court arguing along the lines of religious liberty vs. discrimination. I would think the increasingly conservative Supreme Court would scare liberals away from this prospect.

NDL, like flag-burning and other anti-speech initiatives, drives thinking underground. It makes people lie. At least if you knew your boss were a sexist, that is something you can deal with. Prove him or her wrong.

The market has answers for racism, sexism, and other discrimination. It is called work. If your special diversity doesn’t get in the way of your job, then do your job as best as you can. If an employer won’t hire you because he or she has biases, you can make them pay by getting hired at a competing business, or go into business for yourself. If you can hire the best people and your competition can’t, you’ll succeed.

NDL is less freedom for each American, not more. It fosters resentment between the entitled parties and between entitled and non-entitled parties. It actually holds people back from valuing each other, when people believe a person only got hired because of a federal mandate.

Speaking of federal mandates, the press releases will say 17 states have already passed NDL against sexual orientation, and 8 against gender identity. I’ve got news for you: government worked. Those lucky states can now draw people in from the other states. If a federal NDL is in place, those states are no longer special. Back to “Please, businesses, come to Michigan” ads again. If a federal NDL is in place, those 17 and 8 states have now imposed their values on the other states. I thought liberals weren’t into imposition of values.

If we really want everyone to work together, we need less NDL, not more. At my company (which already has an anti-harassment corporate policy), I work with non-white, non-men, non-straight, non-Christian people. Amazingly, we get our jobs done. We don’t need another government rule.

In business, merit is the best tool against discrimination.