How dare you discriminate against me because of my identity!

I recently learned that while “Facebook can tell you if a person is worth hiring,” taking into account a potential employee’s religious views may be problematic:

Employers can discriminate against potential employees who seem like bummers based on their Wall postings and interests, but will get into trouble if what the Facebook user has said about their religious views affects the hiring process.

It’s hard to imagine that any employer who wanted to discriminate on the basis of religion would admit to it (unless he was either a moron or wanted to set up a legal test case). If a hypothetical employer learned from Facebook that an applicant was, say an active promoter of the Church of Scientology, or the Church of Body Modification, or a church of prostitution, and didn’t like those religions, he would probably not hire, and either give another reason or not say anything at all.

From a legal standpoint, I wonder whether it is illegal to discriminate against atheists. Certainly, an atheist employer has no legal right to discriminate against an applicant who is a believer from whatever faith, but would it work the other way around? The issue of whether a religious opinion invests people with additional First Amendment rights which would not be held absent the religious opinion is of longstanding interest to me, but the law is fuzzy. Might a Muslim have a right to demand a pork-free workplace? What about an atheist-free or homosexual-free workplace? Suppose a female applicant’s Facebook page proudly links Planned Parenthood, abortion rights, and brags of having had an abortion? Is there a religious right to not hire her? Suppose her Facebook page also reveals she is Catholic. May a Catholic employer legally discriminate against her on the ground that she is a heretic, and that hiring her would violate his religious conscience? Or would she also have a right to claim religious discrimination? How would a court resolve a case involving mutual claims of religious discrimination? And what about the “hostile workplace” doctrine? Claims of religious-based discrimination to the EEOC have more than doubled since 1997, so the problem can be counted on to only get worse.

Factor in identity politics, and religion becomes political. If we look at history, a strong nexus between politics and religion may be inherent in our species. While in theory, the First Amendment protects both, in practice, it is permissible to discriminate on the basis of politics, but not on the basis of religion. Identity politics guarantees that the nexus will become more and more blurred.

On my Facebook page, under “Political Views,” I call myself “right of left” and under “Religious Views,” I call myself a “small-p pantheist.” I’m not applying for a job anywhere, but to save my life I cannot understand why an employer would be permitted to discriminate against me for being “right of left” but not for being a “small-p pantheist.” Hell, I wouldn’t want to work for anyone who didn’t want to hire me because of either, and I’m not sure the opinions of potential employers should properly be the subject of government policing.

At the rate things are going, disagreement will become discrimination.

I have already learned to avoid arguments with people who say that because they support a particular candidate, they are more “principled” than those do not. It is a lot easier and more acceptable to disagree with a candidate’s position on issues than with his religious issues, but the line is getting blurrier each day. Political disagreements have a way of being interpreted as religious disagreements, and I don’t think that is healthy — especially if religious discrimination is illegal. I think this unhealthy situation has been aided, abetted and compounded by the fact that criticism of the president is automatically seen as racism.

Identity politics is expansive. Eventually, everybody wants to get in on the act.