|
Re: Re: Re: Someone Should Sue the Catholic Church!
| quote: | Originally posted by St_Andrew
So you have no anti discrimination laws in the US of A  |
Of course there are. But they are almost exclusively applicable to the public spheres of the law, meaning the federal government and the states through the 14th amendment (equal protection of the law and due process). This is why public schools were desegregated by a Supreme Court decision, not ALL schools were (including private and religious schools).
To understand this better lets look at it from this simple example. The 1st amendment grants me freedom of speech, but only against the state. I don't have a fundamental right that grants me freedom of speech in Tranceaddict or in a movie theater or in a restaurant. These are private entities that can reserve their right to admit us as long as we follow their rules, which actually restrict speech.
Congress has legislated anti-discrimination laws that oblige the private sector such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but these are backed by a wide interpretation of the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution. This clause gives Congress the right to regulate commerce between the states. The Civil Rights Act takes into account that private employers/corporations across the US benefit from interstate commerce, and as a consequence Congress has a right to regulate how these private entities do business, including their hiring practices (ie. anti-discrimination laws that affected private employers were declared constitutional in the 1960s.)
Those were the holdings of the Supreme Court in the 1960s, which was way more liberal than the Rhenquist Court that lives on today. Nowadays the clause is construed more narrowly, and anti-discrimination laws are harder to get by in the private arena.
|
