Most enlightened people agree that discrimination is bad. The thing they can’t agree on is who should be on the protected list. The general rule is that you shouldn’t discriminate against people for things they can’t control, such as gender, ethnicity or disability. But there are some interesting exceptions to the rule.
For example, it’s totally legal for an employer to reject a stupid person even though stupid people can’t control being stupid. As far as I can tell, the only reason you can still discriminate against the stupid is – and this will come as no surprise – they aren’t well organized. If they tried to hold a rally, everyone would wander off in a different direction. And lord only knows what the signs would say.
Another part of the problem is that stupid people have trouble knowing whether they belong in the stupid people group or not. If you’re physically disabled, you probably know it. But if you’re stupid, chances are that you think there’s something wrong with everyone else. And you probably don’t have much time to think about it anyway, given all the hours you spend expressing your wrongteous indignation on the Internet.
If stupid people ever tried to raise money for their cause, all they would get is blank stares and “Why are you asking ME?” And no politician wants to be known as the candidate who accepted the most campaign funding from “The Assoshiashun of Stoopid Peeple.”
You might argue that it is in society’s overwhelming best interest to discriminate against stupid people because otherwise the economy would crumble. But I would argue that if idiots couldn’t get jobs for which they are unqualified, your workplace would be empty right now. And that wouldn’t be good for the economy either. So apparently it’s good for the economy to discriminate against stupid people as long as employers are not very effective at doing it.
Most enlightened people also agree that it’s okay to discriminate against people for the CHOICES they make. For example, if a job applicant shows up with an obscenity tattooed on his forehead, you can reject him without any legal ramifications. If someone does drugs, or drinks on the job, you can discriminate against him for those choices too. When it comes to discrimination against people’s choices, the only exception is a person’s choice of religion. You can’t discriminate because someone picked the wrong religion. And here I’m only talking about the big name religions. You can still pick on the little religions.
If a guy shows up for a job interview and tells you his religion requires him to wear a stuffed rhino penis as a hat, you can show him the door. But if he says his prophet walked on water, or rode to heaven on a flying horse, you slap a name tag on his cubicle and hope for the best. If he thinks he might have reincarnated from a caterpillar, sign him up. If he says he’s wearing special underpants to ward off evil, put him on the fast track.
In all fairness, I don’t think there’s any correlation between religion and job performance, so it wouldn’t make sense to allow religious discrimination. I just want to feel safe when I walk down the street in my rhino penis hat.
[Note: If you can’t resist leaving a snarky comment about free will, it proves you don’t have any.]