Feminist antidiscrimination and its consequences

The issue of working mothers provides an example of the mindlessness and inhumanity of “antidiscrimination” as a basis for human relations: Study: Women with children face blatant workplace bias . When and under what circumstances mothers, especially of young children, should work outside the home is an issue that touches all of us. It may not exactly “take a village” to raise a child, but we all have some sort of concern for how the next generation grows up. There’s a lot that could be said one way or another about how outside-the-home work for mothers should be handled individually, in social attitudes and customs, in organizational practice, and in the law. What antidiscrimination laws do though is make it illegal to think about it. After all, to think involves taking taking a view of things, and a view that suggests people differ in anything but the unpredictable choices they make is now a pathology that has to be rooted out. You’re treading on dangerous ground even to try to work out an accommodation between the demands of parenthood and employment. In the article’s prize example of the horrors of discrimination, one outrage (out of 5 the article listed that occurred over a 14-month period) was a suggestion that an employee with a child with frequent ear infections find a pediatrician with evening office hours. With something like that in the record it’s no wonder—today—that the woman got over $600,000 in damages and attorney’s fees.

Feminist and PC demands that obvious issues be ignored lead to contempt for truth and those who disagree. Here’s an example: Bush Is Already at War - Against Women. The Bush administration has been resisting inclusion of the phrase “reproductive health services” in UN human rights statements because the phrase is normally used to include abortion (just look at Google) and the Bush administration does not support proclamation of an internationally-enforceable human right to an abortion. The columnist’s response?

Perhaps the phrase “reproductive health services,” to your ears, means Pap smears or pre-natal care or AIDs prevention. To the conservative activists Bush appoints as official representives to international conferences, they mean abortion and, sometimes, birth control.

Hence the title of the article. Abortion is first a figment of the imagination of conservative activists and then a fig leaf for a mindless attack on women as women. Not much discussion is possible when these are the things published in mainstream outlets like Newsday. That may be the point though. After all, the purpose of international human rights comferences is to get basic issues of social organization decided by unrepresentative elites thousands of miles away from those who are to be subject to the decisions. That being so, “there aren’t any issues here and anyone who raises questions is a bad person” is probably the best line to take.
Posted by Jim Kalb at September 02, 2002 08:58 AM | Send