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Jewish World Review July 27, 2005 / 20 Tammuz, 5765 Love-crushing law is striving to sterilize the workplace By John Stossel
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Work has always been a good place to find love. It's where Bogie
met Bacall. It's where I met my wife — she worked for "Good Morning
America." Since we spend so much time at work, we often get to know one
another better than we do in settings specially designed to help us find
romance.
But in an effort to prevent discomfort and discrimination,
America's rule makers are piling law upon love-crushing law, striving to
sterilize the workplace.
The latest headline is from California, where this month, the
state Supreme Court decided that if you have an affair with your boss, your
colleagues can sue.
The boss in the case, a state prison warden, bent rules and
played favorites outrageously to help a junior employee with whom he was
having an affair; he had affairs with three different subordinates and once
said he "should have chosen" one of the plaintiffs. Should he have been
fired? Probably.
But in letting workers who didn't have an affair with the warden
sue the state, the California Supreme Court held that favoring the person
you love can count as sexually harassing everyone else. Sexual harassment
law is no longer limited to protecting women from unwanted advances; in
California, it now protects women from having their colleagues respond to
wanted ones.
Taking its cue from a statement Clarence Thomas approved when he
led the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the court said: "widespread
sexual favoritism may create a hostile work environment . . . by sending the
demeaning message that managers view female employees as 'sexual
playthings'" or that "'the way for women to get ahead in the workplace is by
engaging in sexual conduct.'"
I see the logic, but consider where it leads. In sexual
harassment law, "messages" are not judged by the intent of the people
sending them — they're judged by how others respond. The
offended get to decide which speech is offensive.
"What is inappropriate really exists only through the eyes of
the person experiencing it," said Olivet Jones, a $2,000-per-day consultant
who conducted a workplace seminar on sexual harassment ABC News videotaped.
I found it frightening. "So the person who hears it gets to
determine if it's offensive?" I asked. "Even if your intention is good?"
"It doesn't matter, John. If I shoot you dead," she asked, "do
you care that I didn't mean to?"
Shooting equals speaking? There's a difference between bullets
and words.
"No," Jones says. "They have the same power."
That's a dangerous concept. In a free society, we are supposed
to be able to say whatever (or nearly whatever) we want.
But since the law says that words can create a harassing
"hostile environment," some employers are so afraid of being sued that they
keep their own rules even more restrictive than the law.
America is supposed to be a land of self-reliant, hardy
individualists who cherish their freedom. But sexual harassment law treats
women as so weak and vulnerable that not only can they not handle rude and
boorish insults, they can't even handle gallant compliments. At the
"harassment seminar," Jones told us we must make sure we do not engage in
even the most basic kinds of friendly, human interaction. "Don't touch a
co-worker on the shoulder. And be careful of compliments!"
"Are you becoming a bland person?" said Jones? "Yes, you are."
Everyone must become bland? I don't want to! I want to joke and
flirt. One seminar participant complained Jones' rules would make the
workplace "cold, unhealthy, less fun." I agree. Yet by seminar's end, Jones
had convinced most participants that workplace speech should be censored.
How easily we give up our freedoms.
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© 2005, by JFS Productions, Inc. Distributed by Creators Syndicate, Inc. |
Arnold Ahlert | ||||||||||||
