I posted an article yesterday about name-blind hiring processes, and it got me thinking of discrimination slightly differently.

I actually don't feel that we run into outright racial discrimination as much nowadays. Instead it's more subtle. It's not about technical merit, but about cultural fit. Often times, distilling down to one skill - English (both spoken and written).

It brings up questions such as:

• Can a candidate communicate verbally for the job? (Technical, though sometimes this may be judge harder than for a native English speaker that isn't always clear)
• Do they "get" jokes and other subtleties? (Cultural fit)
• Do they have an accent? How heavy is it?

I believe this is for a couple reasons:

• Candidate just can't display enough charm or charisma during the hiring process
• Raise doubts about a candidate's education/upbringing. This in itself is discriminatory (though location is not a protected class), but some regions are though to train their students in more blunt force manners than skills in problem solving

What do you all think?

Well, there comes a time in every community's existence where someone gets an idea for discussion from another thread he wishes were better framed. So buckle in. This discussion is intended to sit at an uncomfortable cultural crossroads.

In the EU, gay spouses are now able to have the same freedom of movement rights as straight spouses. The Supreme Court in the United States ruled that a baker was treated unfairly by a Colorado regulatory commission when they tried to suss out if he discriminated against a gay couple who wanted to purchase a wedding cake.

In Brazil (you thought I was going to let this one be), courts have explicitly allowed conversion therapy to continue.

In Chechnya (a part of Russia that I always seem to struggle to spell), you could be hunted down and tortured or killed if you were gay, with people turning their own family members over to the local government. The local government, in absurdity, claimed after the purge that there were "no gays" in Chechnya, so there could have been no purge.

The point I'm trying to make here is that LGBT+ discrimination is an issue that should touch just about everywhere.

Before we get too deep, a point on terms. Discrimination, strictly speaking, is separating one thing from another. It is not necessarily a hostile act. If I say "you can drive only if your vision is good enough to read signs while you drive," that is discrimination on the basis of your ability to see, but most people aren't likely to say it's unreasonable discrimination (there is a rather obvious safety implication, for starters). Similarly, if you tell women to go to the bathroom in one space, and men to go to the bathroom in another space, that is discrimination based on gender. Is it reasonable discrimination? That might depend on if you're trans, and what state you're in.

This topic has to be more limited than this set up implies it will be. We won't be able to narrow things well enough to have a meaningful discussion otherwise. Today, we're just going to touch on the simple (ha!) matter of whether baking a wedding cake is art, whether refusing a wedding cake to a gay couple is discrimination, and what a government should be expected to do about it. So, the questions:

• Is making a custom wedding cake for a wedding "art"?
• Is refusing a custom wedding cake to a couple because it would be for a cause you do not support discrimination on the basis of that couple's identity?
• How should a just government resolve a dispute between a couple who feel unreasonably discriminated against and an artist who feels compelled to use speech for a cause they do not support?

And a bonus question:

• What role should a judicial branch have in advancing various groups' rights? Does relying on this less democratic method for securing rights open a movement up to counter-reaction or is the counter-reaction simply an inevitable consequence of a movement's success?