In the spring, at a Student Senate meeting, a letter from a student was read by a senator, which asked a good question: Why, if we believe that all people should be free from discrimination based on personal characteristics, should we list out those characteristics in our non-discrimination policies? Continuing, they asked why it wouldn’t make more sense to seek a policy which simply banned all discrimination.
My first response was that while many of us might like to think of our society as a great fellowship of people who live without prejudices or innately discriminatory behaviors, I don’t see that being illustrated in everyday life or in the social institutions that we create and sustain. For example, dominant religious organizations, through the forces of government, bring about discrimination against same-sex couples.
Recently, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts ruled that denying same-sex couples civil marriages was illegal because of a state law that prohibits sexual orientation discrimination. A society must make decisions about who it wants to protect from various forms of discrimination and why. In Massachusetts, the state legislature decided to protect people from sexual orientation discrimination and this ruling is a result.
We, as a society, must decide which ways of discriminating are and are not acceptable and call those out. If we were to ban all discriminatory practices (including those based on bona fide qualification standard) then colleges and universities would be unable to discriminate on the basis of academic merit or aptitude when making their admissions decisions.
Should we make a few exceptions and still allow for overt and conscious discrimination based on a bona fide qualification and then ban all other discrimination, such a law would still yield much less than ideal results. An inherent need in banning discrimination broadly is the notion that “the people” already have egalitarian ideals, but I reject the claim that our society is free from dangerous forms of widely-held prejudicial ideals and subsequently accepted discriminatory practices.
Black men are executed in greater proportion than white men even when accounting for disproportionate conviction rates. In the months to come we may see the FDA impose a ban on the anonymous donation of sperm from gay men at US sperm banks (eugenics anyone?). And, even now, the blood of a monogamous gay man is seen as more of a danger than that of a promiscuous straight man who have sex with IV drug-users. We, as a people, cannot be trusted, in large, to promote the sort of egalitarianism that would be necessary in a society where the law simply banned discrimination against all people.
by Addy Free, Columnist
printed in The Cornellian vol. 124, issue 7
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