Employment Discrimination

On today's episode of "Wallbuilders Live" the topic of discussion was whether churches ought to be allowed to discriminate in their hiring practices.  Not surprisingly, David Barton argued that they should and, as is his tendency, explained that there is nothing wrong with discrimination because even Jesus says the government is not supposed to be involved in this issue anyway:

Now discrimination today is always a bad word a hundred percent of the time, but it simply means making a choice between or making a difference between. And discrimination means I am going to discriminate and say I can tell a difference between a Christian and a non-Christian and therefore I only want Christians working on my church staff. I can tell the difference between someone who says they're homosexual and someone who says they're straight. A secular organization has a tough time discriminating, but a church needs to have the right to discriminate.

This is a biblical issue because Jesus has an entire parable in Matthew 20: 1-15 where he talks about a landowner who had a vineyard who went out to hire folks to work in his vineyard. And as he hired them he make a contract with them that said you'll work for this much or whatever and throughout the day he hired people and he made individual contracts with them and at the end of the day when he is paying them all off, the guy who got hired first said "wait a minute, that's not fair" and [the landowner] said "time out, we had a contract, didn't we? You agreed to work for a certain wage ... you should have gone down the street and found somebody else to work for that would have paid you different, but you agreed to work for that wage." And Jesus makes a great statement in Matthew 20: 15 where he says "don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money?"

Now that's a great statement and that's a statement Jesus teaches to show the inviolability of contracts between employers and employees. That's why the government is not supposed to get involved in this stuff anyway. Government shouldn't be involved in employment contracts period.

As we have noted several times before, Barton frequently cites this passage in the Book of Matthew to justify right-wing economic policies like the elimination of the minimum wage even though it is actually a parable about the Kingdom of Heaven in which Jesus is explaining that no matter how late in one's life one comes to Christ, the heavenly reward will be the same.

But Barton is using it to justify blatant discrimination in hiring process even among secular businesses. 

As we noted when Jay Richards made this same argument in his book "Money, Greed and God," by this logic it is entirely biblical for a business owner to refuse to hire women or to pay his white males employees more than all other employees or to engage in any other sort of employment discrimination because Jesus teaches that they have a right to do what they please with their money and the government has no right to interfere with the process in any manner whatsoever.

One of the points we made repeatedly in the posts we wrote on the Religious Right's militant opposition to expanding hate crimes legislation to include "sexual orientation" was that the Right never once complained during the decade when "religion" and "race" received federal protections.  It wasn't until protections for sexual orientation were added that they started screaming about supposed "special rights" and claiming that the legislation amounted to an unconstitutional threat to their religious liberty that would lead to pastors being tossed into jail. 

Of course, it has now been more than five months since this legislation was signed into a law and not a single pastor or religious leader has seen their religious freedom impacted in any way. 

Everything the Right said about expanding hate crimes protections was false and designed to scare people into opposing it ... and now groups like the Family Research Council are putting the same strategy to work in generating opposition to the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and raise money:

Do you think it's right for liberals running the government to ... 

• Force a Christian bookstore to hire a man . . . who dresses in women's clothing?
• Force your child's religious school to hire homosexual instructors?
• Force your employer to fire or censure you for what they call "anti-gay harassment" . . . for simply keeping a Bible on your desk?

That's the nightmare you could face if the Obama/Pelosi/Reid Congress passes the so-called Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA).

And that's why it must be exposed.  

... 

You are standing in the way of the Left's immoral vision for America. And laws like ENDA are intended for one thing-to silence your "obsolete" Christian morality and tear down all boundaries to unhealthy sexual behavior.

By sustaining your prayers and generous support of FRC, you're not only investing in the long-term health of faith, family, and freedom in America . . .

You're also strengthening the leading social conservative organization in Washington, D.C. Our respected team has decades of experience developing and blocking legislation, voicing the truth in and through the media, and mobilizing Americans.

Please join with other loyal FRC supporters in our campaign to expose ENDA by sending a generous, tax-deductible donation. 

 Of course, just as with hate crimes, the Right's claims are totally false:

What ENDA Does

• Extends federal employment discrimination protections currently provided based on race, religion, sex, national origin, age and disability to sexual orientation and gender identity
• Prohibits public and private employers, employment agencies and labor unions from using an individual's sexual orientation or gender identity as the basis for employment decisions, such as hiring, firing, promotion or compensation
• Provides for the same procedures, and similar, but somewhat more limited, remedies as are permitted under Title VII and the Americans with Disabilities Act
• Applies to Congress and the federal government, as well as employees of state and local governments

What ENDA Does Not Do

• Cover businesses with fewer than 15 employees
• Apply to religious organizations
• Apply to the uniformed members of the armed forces (the bill doesn't affect the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy)
• Allow for quotas or preferential treatment based on sexual orientation or gender identity
• Allow a "disparate impact" claim similar to the one available under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Therefore, an employer is not required to justify a neutral practice that may have a statistically disparate impact on individuals because of their sexual orientation or gender identity
• Allow the imposition of affirmative action for a violation of ENDA
• Allow the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to collect statistics on sexual orientation or gender identity or compel employers to collect such statistics.
• Apply retroactively

ENDA does not "force" anyone to hire or fire anyone, it simply extends anti-discrimination protections in the workplace to cover sexual orientation and gender identity. 

Just as with hate crimes, anti-discrimination protections for things like religion have existed for decades and the Religious Right never once complained about the fact that Christians were receiving "special rights" ... but now that there are efforts to ensure that sexual orientation receives similar protections, it is proof that liberals are out to silence Christians.

It was just last week that the Employment Non-Discrimination Act was introduced in the Senate, so the Religious Right campaign of screaming their heads off is just getting off the ground. 

But Robert Knight of Coral Ridge Ministries gives us a nice preview of the sort of hyperbolic nonsense we can expect to see:

On Aug. 5, the GOP's Maine kleptocrats, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, joined Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley and longtime sponsor Ted Kennedy in reintroducing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which we'll call the "gay quota bill" for short. ENDA is profoundly dangerous. It turns private sin into a public right and brings the force of government against morality itself. Any such law is a violation of our unalienable rights as proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. To put it more simply, a statute that directly contradicts God's moral law is illegitimate. Laws embody and reflect morality, or they are not laws. They are tyranny. That's why so-called same-sex "marriage" laws are absurd and treacherous. Forcing citizens to accept a counterfeit as the real thing is an act of despotism.

ENDA adds not only "sexual orientation" but "gender identity" to federal workplace anti-discrimination law. Thus, it takes an ax to the idea that sexual behavior has a natural normalcy or any relation to morality. It falsely equates a changeable condition (sexual desire) with race and ethnicity. Worse, it turns traditional values into a form of bigotry punishable under the law.

First of all, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act already has a short-hand name: ENDA.  So we don't need your suggestion that it should be called the "gay quota bill" because a) that's false and b) it's longer than the one we already have.

And secondly, it looks like efforts to pass this legislation are going to run into the same sort of Religious Right lies that plagued the hate crimes legislation, with right-wing activists claiming that it will grant "special rights" to those in the LGBT community. 

Of course, that will raise the exact same problems as their efforts to make that claim about hate crimes legislation, considering that there are already a number of federal laws on the books that outlaw employment discrimination based on things like race, religion, gender, and disability: 

• Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII), which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin;

• the Equal Pay Act of 1963 (EPA), which protects men and women who perform substantially equal work in the same establishment from sex-based wage discrimination;

• the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA), which protects individuals who are 40 years of age or older;

• Title I and Title V of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), which prohibit employment discrimination against qualified individuals with disabilities in the private sector, and in state and local governments;

• Sections 501 and 505 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibit discrimination against qualified individuals with disabilities who work in the federal government

So, once again the Right will have to explain why gays shouldn't receive similar protections as say, Christians. 

And once again, they'll fail to do that because they have no reason other than claims that God hates gays and therefore it should be okay to discriminate against them, leading to pieces like Knight's where the Right is reduced to bellowing that any "statute that directly contradicts God's moral law is illegitimate."

I have to admit that when I saw this post on the Box Turtle Bulletin about David Hill being fired from his job simply for being gay, my first thought was "this can't possibly be legal":

A man said he was fired from his hotel job for his sexual orientation and claims the owner who let him go dared him to sue.

David Hill is looking for a new job after he said he was fired Tuesday from a former Brentwood Holiday Inn, which now goes by the name Artee Hotel.

"They literally said to me because of my orientation and my alternative lifestyle, that I was not a fit for the hotel," said Hill.

Hill said he used to be the human resources director and is shocked at the owner's decision to dismiss him because of his sexual preference.

"The owner (Tarun Surti) said, 'I don't give a damn. They can sue me. I will not have any of the gays in leadership roles in my hotel.' And that's a quote," said Hill. 

Embarrassingly, it took a co-worker to point out that, in fact, this is entirely legal thanks to the consistent failure to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act:

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) offers Congress the opportunity to ensure workplace equality by protecting LGBT workers from employment discrimination. ENDA is pending federal legislation that would ban employment discrimination based on an individual's sexual orientation. The bill protects workers from discriminatory hiring, firing, promotion or compensation practices, as well as retaliation for reporting such practices.

Considering that I work at People For the American Way and have actually mentioned ENDA numerous times in my writings, it's extra shameful that I never realized this ... but I didn't.  

And since I am probably not the only one who has never made this connection, I offer up this post exposing my own ignorance in an effort to point out that this sort of thing can and does happen and hopefully debunk the Right's claims that ENDA is little more than a nefarious effort to grant "special rights" to gays in the workplace:

A U.S. House vote is just around the corner on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) — a bill that gives homosexuals special rights in the workplace. ENDA would add "sexual orientation" to a list of federally protected classes that includes race and religion.

“My race is being compromised, in that gays are saying that they need protected status just like someone who’s of a race that they can’t change," said Bishop Harry Jackson, president of the High Impact Leadership Coalition.

“This is not a Democrat or Republican issue, this is a moral values issue, and it’s an issue of the integrity of the civil rights movement.”