Yes, but we were honing in very specifically on the debate between Mike The Bard and a couple other commenters, where we were trying to decide where the line is that decides if you are a business or just a professional with an assistant or two. Everyone was in agreement about the Hobby Lobby case. What comes into question is when the employees could hold more real or symbolic power over their employers and then how that affects the ethics and legality in question. In my bike shop example, the applicant doesn’t know the bike shop owner is a gender dissident-but the owner realizes the application emailed in from a craigslist post is from a practicing Mormon/Evangelical just back from missionary work. Is it legal/ethical to pass on the application out of fear of being discriminated against by your theoretical employee? Another, perhaps clearer, example: a lbgttqi couple of humble means finds it impossible to reconcile one partner’s messiness with the other’s tidiness. They decide to resolve this by scraping up enough cash to have someone come over and help clean once a week for a couple hours. Now, if the cleaner decided to come over wearing one of those “Marriage = 1 man + 1 woman; now and forever” tee shirts that tops it off with “the wages of sin is death” on the back; is it okay for the couple to ask the cleaner not to wear that shirt to their house? There’s no official uniform-it would be religious discrimination if virtually any other tee shirt were acceptable. This is about where Mike was hitting with his exploration of employer-employee dynamics and where I have trouble feeling confident I’m doing it right.
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