I received the following email forwarded by an old friend today:

 

Subject: FW: Thanks for taking action! Will you forward this message?

Hi Family, Friends, and Activists,

 

Did you know that in 31 states it's perfectly legal to fire someone for being gay?  Or that in 39 states it's legal to fire someone for being transgender?  I found it pretty hard to believe.  Here we are in the 21st century, in a country that prides itself on equal opportunity, and millions of Americans can be denied a job or fired - not for poor performance, but for simply being themselves.

 

I just took action with the Human Rights Campaign to end this appalling injustice.  I hope you'll join me today, by sending a message to your lawmakers in Congress urging them to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which will make this kind of discrimination illegal once and for all.

 

It's easy.  To take action, go to:

<http://www.passENDAnow.org>

 

Here is my response to the list of recipients:

 

***,

 

My old friend! As much as I love you, I will not be forwarding this email.

 

Perhaps some of you might find this worthy of consideration.

 

Where does Liberty enter into this issue? It is apparently of little concern to those proposing this “solution” to the "problem", as stated. Is there a human being anywhere who does not see themselves as perfectly suited to the job they are seeking or doing? How then to explain rejection or firing? There must be some other reason. Prejudice! If all of us got to determine our conditions of employment, we’d all be making 7 figures and be immune to termination. Liberty guarantees me the right to seek any job I choose, not to secure it on my terms. This is the true nature of equal opportunity. What the petition refers to is equal outcomes, as determined by the employee. Liberty also gives my potential employer the right to hire and fire whom he chooses, including me. This is only the best solution, not perfect by any means. Perfection will have to await Divine Intervention.

 

What do you do if an employee of yours is gay or transgender, and incompetent? Apparently, we have 19 states that have decided to make it difficult for a business owner to do what’s best for the rest of his employees, his customers, and the survival of his business. Is there something inherently inferior in the character of the business owner that makes him less capable than a government bureaucrat in deciding his own staffing issues? Is there something inherently superior in the character of gays that they should enjoy immunity from the vicissitudes of the labor market? Is there some inherent quality of bureaucrats that endows them with faculties superior to those of the business owner, in determining what's best for all concerned? Or is it that business owners, by virtue of being business owners, don't deserve the protections of liberty? This "solution" may look OK from your house, but it will be pure hell on business owners.

 

It seems obvious to me that a business owner would be more inclined to ignore his personal prejudices and keep a productive gay employee on the payroll, while a bureaucrat who has no financial stake in the outcome would more likely force a business owner to keep an incompetent gay employee for political appearances, and less likely to permit him to fire him for blatant incompetence. Any business owner who would indulge his prejudices at the expense of his business would be all the more likely to suffer, in this instance, a well-deserved bankruptcy. By the same token, any bureaucrat who indulges his prejudice against the business owner (who, by the way, is a minority in any economy), and panders to gay political organizations, has everything to gain, and nothing to lose by his interference. His prejudices are given free reign. If the bureaucrat is wrong, he can just say, “Oops”, walk away from the damage he causes, and move on to the next target. Incompetent gay employees become political appointees at the expense of the business owner, his customers, and employees. That benefits no one.

 

A private citizen should not have to seek permission from some bureaucrat to conduct his private business as he sees fit. If his judgment is faulty, the market place will punish him in perfect proportion to his offense. No sane business owner, regardless of his prejudice, is inclined to leave money on the table by firing an employee who is a net contributor to his bottom line. Assume, for the sake of argument, that Alex Rodriguez were gay and Steinbrenner were prejudiced against gays. Given these assumptions, do you believe that Steinbrenner would fire A-Rod and risk seeing him in a Red Sox uniform in the post-season? I think not. I think Steinbrenner would find a way to suppress his prejudices and keep him on the payroll, don’t you?

 

Let’s not forget, we’re all human beings here. None of us is “without sin” with regard to prejudice. The problem with all prejudice is that “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. If your prejudice leads you to believe a substantial percentage of business owners are inclined to indulge their prejudices regardless of the consequences to their businesses, you will see it everywhere. I’ve been on enough jobs with enough gay people to know that that is clearly not the case. In addition to the chilling effect on the rest of your staff; if you fire competent people to satisfy your prejudice, your competition will hire them and beat you with them. The more astute of the remaining employees would be likely to see this one coming, and seek more secure employment elsewhere, hastening the outcome. This is a far more likely circumstance than a world populated by wise beneficent bureaucrats, tort lawyers, and D.A.’s on white horses, righting wrongs (Mike Nifong, anyone?). Business owners have an existential stake in their hiring practices. Politicians and bureaucrats have an existential stake in justifying their existence by finding politically unpopular targets, and currying favor with gullible voters. This “solution” will do far more to keep incompetent gays on the payroll, for fear of lawsuits, than it will to prevent a relative handful of clearly prejudicial firings, where those unduly fired employees can likely find work elsewhere, if they are truly competent, and the business owner will suffer very real consequences.

 

I’ve never come across a human being who was entirely free of prejudice. Likewise, I’ve never come across a human being who was capable of mind-reading, sufficient to determine whether someone else was acting purely out of prejudice. I am reasonably certain that gathering a number of such super-humans sufficient to populate a bureaucracy created for this purpose will be beyond the capacity of the legislature, impressive as they may be. The balance, the overwhelming majority of such bureaucrats, will be fit, in the course of justifying their paycheck, to cause a lot of damage to business owners and, consequently, the general public.

 

MYOB has always been some of mom’s best advice. It’s no less so today. The less government does, regardless of how wonderful it all looks on paper, the better off we all will be, gays included. It may be legal in 31 states to fire someone for being gay, but it’s pretty damn stupid always and everywhere to do so. The marketplace will more than adequately punish such stupidity. Conversely, stupid legislation will punish all of us, diminishing our Liberty, granting new powers to the government, and once on the books it’s practically immortal.

 

The fact that there are 50 different experiments going on in this arena is a good thing, and precisely the intent of the Founders of our federal republic. Time will tell who has it right. There is no place for federal legislation in this matter, according to our Constitution.

 

Don’t just make a difference. Make a positive and substantial difference. Preserve Liberty.

 

For further reading:

 

http://www.fee.org/library/books/critique.asp

 

Sincerely,

 

Bill Reed

 

I received the following response from my friend's daughter:

Hi Bill-

I don't know you.  I am *******'s daughter.  I think you miss the point of ENDA.  A business owner can fire a gay person if the gay person is incompetent.  The PROBLEM occurs when the business owner fires or chooses not to hire this person for the sole reason that he or she is GAY. 


I do not have the time to go into a detailed response to what you have said here.  I wish I did.  Just so there is full disclosure here, I am a lesbian.  Maybe you didn't know that **** had a gay kid when you sent that email, but now you do know.  Maybe you have never experienced prejudice so you do not know what it is like to be discriminated against.  I hope you never have to.

*****

 

 

******,

Here's my response to her:

 

I’m an old friend of your dad’s from High School.

The problem you refer to will be small potatoes compared to the problems that will ensue from your solution. Determining whether or not the “sole reason” is that they are gay is going to be a little less straightforward than you seem to imagine.

To begin with, there isn’t a human being walking the face of the earth that hasn’t experienced the sting of prejudice. The suggestion that my disagreement with your argument betrays a lack of sensitivity to the sting of prejudice is a condescending insult. I know you did not intend it to be (because I have some idea of how you were raised ;-) ), but it is. It is also a conversation stopper. It is little more than a suggestion that I butt out of an argument that has far-reaching negative repercussions for my children. It is an effort to silence opposition, rather than engage the substance of it. In friendship and affection, I hope that by my stating this, you will in the future limit yourself to addressing the substance of arguments, and leave the ad hominem stuff alone. The logic of my argument is not dependent upon who is reading it. I would not be surprised to find that you have silenced a great many opponents with such a tactic. Not that you intentionally do it with silencing in mind, only that it works and if you don't bother to examine it, you will be inclined to indulge in it. It's a bad habit and not conducive to self-education.

 

Secondly, who is the omniscient personage who will sit in judgment as to whether the employee in question is being fired for the reasons stated by the employer, or from blind prejudice as contended by the employee? I don’t think you will find many examples where a person is told, at least formally, that they are being fired for being gay now, and even less if such a law is put into place. That adjudicator will not only have to possess the Wisdom of Solomon, but the telepathic mind-reading abilities usually found only in science fiction and fantasy novels. I doubt that one such person could be found, never mind a sufficient quantity of them to adjudicate the deluge of cases the tort lawyers are salivating for. The incompetent gay person would not only have to be incompetent in the eyes of the employer, who stands to lose financially due to his incompetence, but in the eyes of the adjudicator, who has no such stake. If the adjudicator never finds a case where the charge of incompetence is unwarranted, how can he justify his lofty position as adjudicator? So, even if, in the most unlikely case, no such offense is ever truly proved, there is tremendous pressure on the adjudicator to nonetheless occasionally find in favor of the employee. Finding in favor of the employer offers no benefit to the adjudicator. Finding in favor of the employee constitutes job security. These adjudicators will be drawn from the same class of humans as the business owners. They will consequently be no less inclined to moral corruption than employers, employees, or anyone else. The out-of-court buy-offs by the corporations will do nothing to improve their profitability, with decreased payrolls a likely side effect.

 

A person’s private life is, and ought to be, of no concern to anyone but that person. That’s the essence of liberty. Your own private life has no relevance to me or my argument. You have no way of knowing whether or not I am gay. Neither do I assume you are, or should be, ashamed of being gay. If I thought there was anything insulting to gay people in my argument, I wouldn’t support it myself. The fact is, there is nothing in my argument that could possibly be taken as an offense, unless you were determined to interpret it that way as a strategy to avoid the substance of it. My argument was never intended to be whispered amongst heterosexuals only. The fact of your lesbianism is meaningless in this context.

 

You should not consider every disagreement with your goals as an attack on your chosen lifestyle. That makes civil discourse impossible. Any disagreement we might have lies in whether this is an area in which the coercive powers of government need to be brought to bear. I don’t think you will find anything in my remarks that could rationally be interpreted as prejudice against, or an insult to gay people. I know this, because that is not how I feel about people. There is no greater expression of love for humanity than a commitment to universal liberty. “The right to be wrong” is a serviceable definition of liberty. Your right to the lifestyle of your choice, like mine, should not be subject to the approval of anyone else, least of all some bureaucracy. That’s more in line with Bin Laden’s worldview than Thomas Paine’s.

 

Liberty for a few at the expense of others is license, not liberty. Several hundred years of common law, and our constitution, recognize that a business or corporation is on a more or less equal footing under the constitution with an individual. Consequently, the protections of liberty extend to corporations and businesses. Freedom of association is a fundamental liberty of all Americans and is ordinarily considered a natural right. It is the principle under which your gay relationships are protected. Abridging that right, in the case of businesses, has a greater potential for evil than for good, despite the best of intentions.

 

The crux of the issue here is whether an ordinary human bureaucrat or politician is going to be any better at ameliorating this particular “flavor” of stupidity/prejudice than an equally human business owner, and, if so, whether it’s worth giving up still more of our liberty. The argument I make is that they will do worse. At least a business owner’s potential prejudiced proclivities are significantly attenuated by his interest in profit (see the A-Rod reference in my email). There are no such brakes on the behavior of the government, and they have the guns to enforce the stupidity/prejudice of their officials

 

Always bear in mind that all government regulatory activities are not just coercive in a rhetorical sense, but backed up by incarceration and the force of arms. Additionally, every decision we cede to the government diminishes our liberty. It is tragic that our education system has obscured our history, and the arguments that were settled long ago (see: The Federalist Papers) and incorporated in the foundations of our country. There is nothing progressive about these “progressive” ideas. They will ultimately move us backward and put us on the road to totalitarianism; the “Tyranny of the Majority” that so concerned the Founding Fathers. Believe me, these people have not discovered some better method of running things than were codified in our Constitution.

 

I do not have a right to be employed by the employer of my choice, or at the rate of my choice, against his will, regardless of my feelings of alienation or victimization. Neither do I have the right to employ the person of my choice at the rate of my choice against his will. I think you will recognize that as slavery. If an employer doesn’t have the wit and imagination to value my contributions, he doesn’t deserve me. If I am right about my worth, I will have little difficulty finding employment elsewhere. The onus is on me to find that employer, without the interference of the government.

 

The best guarantee for all Americans, regardless of lifestyle, religion, politics, or any criteria you care to mention, is the guarantee of liberty, as prescribed by the Constitution. Despite the best of intentions, any and all abrogations of that liberty threaten all of us, including, perhaps especially, you.

 

Sincerely,

 

Bill Reed

 

How about bankrupting our enemies and attacking THEM for a change, instead of bankrupting ourselves and our criminal justice system, while attacking our own citizens?

As deeply misguided an exercise of liberty as personal recreational drug use may be, it does not rise to the level of a threat to me (or anyone else), until it is criminalized by government.

If the argument that I own myself and it's nobody's damn business what I choose to ingest doesn't impress you, how about - funding terrorism and corrupting entire nations, to say nothing of the corruption of our own institutions and sacrifice of entire neighborhoods to this insane god-like quest?

Any harebrained movement that doesn't have access to oil, it seems, uses our oppressive drug-prohibition lunacy to finance their aggression.

Here we have an unholy alliance between conservatives and libs that conspires to make the most despicable thugs on the planet fabulously wealthy, while simultaneously bankrupting our criminal justice system and violating fundamental, self-evident natural rights.

While the actual commodities, the drugs, are worth about as much per pound as soybeans, the risk of incarceration or death due to the criminalization of those drugs adds a tremendous overhead cost, multiplying the cost on the street a thousand-fold. Essentially a "service fee" to hedge the risk.

We could far more easily contain the various movements using this elicit source of funds (mostly communists, would-be dictators, Taliban and other Islamo-nazis - all enemies of America), empty perhaps a majority of our jail cells, unburden the courts of about half of their case load, and reduce the ill effects of drugs on our society by removing the stigma and cost to its victims, while reducing the financial incentive to pushers to enlist new addicts by eliminating most of their profit incentive.

While I harbor no illusions that these tremendous savings might be returned to the taxpayer, at least they might be expended in a manner that does not produce the devastation currently visited on humanity by American drug policy.

Drug abuse has tragically impacted my family directly. I am no advocate of recreational drug use. But these quixotic, destructive, futile efforts to use the coercive and corrupting power of govt to interfere in a private, admittedly self-destructive, exercise of personal liberty are causing 100 times the damage they are trying, but failing abysmally, to remedy.

Conservatives sound a lot like liberals on this issue. The spectacular failure of this celebrated "War on Drugs" to achieve any of its goals, while actually exacerbating the destructive power of drugs and their purveyors, seems to evaporate in the face of the "moral force" of the good intentions that inspired it. Do good intentions really trump the actual horrible, if unintended, consequences of a policy? Isn't that eerily similar to the libs "War on Poverty" rhetoric? At least we found the moral backbone to reverse some of the welfare state. Our grandparents found the moral backbone to repeal a CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT! to undo the exact same damage caused by alcohol prohibition.

Yet, here we find ourselves in 21st century America, ignoring the natural rights of man, to wage a mindlessly stupid, demonstrably futile crusade against human nature, while blithely ignoring the laws of supply and demand, as well as our own recent history with regard to the 1920's Prohibition debacle. It's absolutely stunning!

Mr. Novak, with all due (and considerable) respect, you are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Could we please, finally, steer ourselves clear of the iceberg to which we are plotting our course at 40 knots? All it would require would be a renewed embrace of liberty.