gbaji wrote:
Belkira wrote:
I thought it had been explained a number of times that discrimination against felons, alcoholics, and drug addicts causes great risk to the financial viability of a company and are therefore considered justifiable discrimination, while discrimination against race, sex, creed, sexual orientation is not a risk towards the financial viability of a company and therefore is not justifiable discrimination.
And if those were the only ones I'd mentioned, you'd have a point. What about discrimination based on an applicants height, or hair color, or color of their shirt, or any of a number of factors which a potential employer might use to decide to hire person A instead of person B?
There's actually decent statistics showing that short people as a group suffer far more economic disadvantage relative to tall people than homosexuals compared to heterosexuals. So why not add height to the list of things we can't discriminate against when hiring? It's not just about whether hiring someone will hurt someone's business. The point is that we should allow the employer the freedom to spend his money (in the form of hiring people) in whatever way he wants and only place limits on what criteria he can use to make those choices to those which are absolutely necessary to prevent some gross harm to a whole group.
Ok. You asked someone to explain where they thought the line of demarcation is when deciding what is acceptable discrimination and what isn't. I (and many others) answered you.
gbaji wrote:
And there just isn't much evidence that homosexuals as a group are being harmed by the absence of special protections. Since this is the question at hand, that would seem to be relevant, right?
Doing a simple Google search, I find that this statement is false. Even if it were true, however, there are no protections currently in place to keep people from discriminating based on sexual preference or identity, and therefore that should be corrected.