Discrimination
May 31, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Larry Bacow, the president of Harvard, blasted this email to members of the Harvard Community: The last several months have been disorienting for all of us. COVID-19 has profoundly disrupted the lives of people worldwide. It has caused more than 365,000 deaths around the globe and more than 100,000 in the United States alone. Forty million Americans have lost their jobs, and countless others live in fear of both the
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May 6, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
The Office of Senate Fair Employment Practices was established in 1991 to investigate claims of discrimination, including sexual harassment, arising from the Senate. Some Senators opposed the creation of this office. The opposition was bipartisan. It included Republicans, led by Warren Rudman, as well as Democrats, including Joe Biden. Prior to the creation of this office, Congress was exempt from laws banning employment discrimination. Charles Grassley introduced an amendment to
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March 30, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
The Justice Department has filed a statement of interest in a case challenging a Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC) policy that enables biological males to compete against biological females. Attorney General Barr explained: In our pluralistic society we generally try to accommodate how individuals desire to live their lives up to the point where those desires impinge on the other people’s rights. Allowing biological males to compete in all-female sports
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February 20, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
I don’t know how much longer we’ll have Michael Bloomberg to “kick around” or, if he persists, whether he will remain worth writing about as a candidate. However, I want to say more about the attacks against him for his alleged behavior towards female employees. I don’t want to discuss this from a political perspective, except to say that the allegations are extremely damaging politically. I want to talk about
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December 6, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
One of my biggest grievances with Alex Acosta’s stewardship of the Department of Labor was his pursuit, based on indefensible statistical analyses, of compensation discrimination claims against Oracle and other high tech Silicon Valley companies. I discussed the flaws in the Labor Department’s analyses here. These actions were filed in January 2017, just as the Obama administration was coming to an end. The idea was to force the Trump Labor
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October 7, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in a case where the issue is whether the ban on discrimination because of sex contained in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 encompasses discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. George Will considers the matter in his latest column (the title of which, in the online edition, misstates his argument, I think). Will concludes that discriminating against someone
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April 11, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
The Obama Labor Department is now in its eleventh year. The first eight were under the direction of President Obama’s Labor Secretaries, most notably Tom Perez. The remainder are under the direction of Alex Acosta, President Trump’s choice for the job. The latest manifestation of the DOL’s left-liberalism under Acosta is its warning to law firms that they must become more diverse or else risk losing contracts with the federal
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April 8, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Last month, Democrats introduced the Equality Act of 2019. It would modify existing civil rights legislation to ban discrimination against LGBTQ people in employment, housing, public accommodations, jury service, education, federal programs, and credit. It sounds good. No one should favor discriminating in employment, housing, etc. based on sexual orientation, etc. But there are serious problems with the Equality Act of 2019, such that Republicans should prevent its passage in
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March 9, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
The 1996 Olympic Games were held in Atlanta, but some of the soccer matches took place at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. I took our family to see a doubleheader — a women’s match between Brazil and Norway and a men’s match between Ghana and South Korea. The two women’s teams were among the five best in the world at that time. The two men’s teams probably would have been
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February 9, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
The moral argument against employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is, I believe, compelling. Accordingly, there’s a plausible argument that such discrimination should be outlawed. However, there is no credible case that Congress has outlawed it. This hasn’t stopped liberal judges from finding that Congress did so in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Never mind that this Act was passed at a time when
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December 19, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
In response to the #MeToo movement, California has enacted several laws regarding sexual harassment claims. You can read about them in this report by the law firm of Mayer Brown LLP. Some provisions make sense, others not so much. What really caught my eye, though, was a new law not about sexual harassment, but about female representation on boards of directors. The bill is SB 826. Here is how Mayer
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August 8, 2018 — Scott Johnson
We continue our preview of the new (Summer) issue of the Claremont Review of Books hot off the press. It is in the mail to subscribers now. Buy an annual subscription including immediate online access here for the modest price of $19.95. It is an invaluable magazine for those of us who love trustworthy essays on, and reviews of books about, politics, history, literature and culture. I reviewed the new
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April 15, 2018 — John Hinderaker
I wrote recently that you can measure any two things, and in all likelihood they will be different. If you have an agenda, you can call this difference a “gap” or a “disparity” and demand remedial actions by government. Whether differences between demographic groups are deemed significant depends on politics, not logic. Thus, to take one of countless examples, no one protests the fact that Asian-Americans earn, on average, significantly
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March 12, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
I’ve written a series of posts about how the Department of Labor under Alex Acosta has barely lifted a finger to overturn the radical policies and practices of the Obama DOL. Acosta has left former president Obama’s Administrative Review Board, the DOL’s appellate court, in place. He has refused to disturb the pro-illegal immigrant polices of Obama and former DOL Secretary Tom Perez. Acosta changed the Obama administration’s interpretation of
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March 10, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has agreed with the EEOC that a funeral home engaged in unlawful discrimination when it fired a male funeral director who was “transitioning” to female and dressing as a woman at work. The case is EEOC v. Harris Funeral Homes. The opinion is by Karen Nelson Moore, a Clinton appointee and one of the most left-wing federal appeals court judges in
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March 7, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
The Maryland Democratic party is setting aside half of certain elected positions for women. Men will be unable to run against women for these posts. Similarly, women won’t be able to run against men for the other half of the slots. The jobs in question are on Democratic “central committees,” regarded as a stepping stone for more important and prestigious elected positions. In Maryland, and elsewhere, women lag behind men
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January 8, 2018 — Steven Hayward
The American Economic Association just wrapped up its annual meeting in Philadelphia, and one of the panels was devoted to the issue of the economic effects of teachers’ unions. Get a load of the abstract from this paper from two Cornell University economists presented at the panel: The Long-run Effects of Teacher Collective Bargaining Michael Lovenheim, Alexander Willen, Cornell University Abstract Teacher collective bargaining is a highly debated feature of
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