The New Prejudice
Yesterday was an interesting news day. There was a proposal in Massachusetts to add height and weight to the list of things a person cannot be discriminated against in housing, employment, etc…
If this goes through, we’d be only the second state in the country to include those items along with the more traditional race, gender, religion, or disability (Massachusetts also has sexual orientation protections, which most states don’t).
My initial reaction to this was that the Daily Show will have a field day with this news and that this was just political correctness gone amok. But the article further interviewed two people. One was a woman of short stature (4′-8″) who said that she would routinely get picked up at work because it was ‘so cute” how small she was. That would annoy the piss out of me if I was her so I could understand where she was coming from. That’s definitely inappropriate behavior.
The other woman was a woman of wide stature who said that she’d been denied jobs/promotions as a result of her weight. Ok, the skeptic in me came out and wondered how she could know for sure that weight was the reason for not getting the job unless the employer said “you’re not getting hired because you’re fat” (which I doubt happened). That said, she then went on to discuss how she’ tried dieting all her life and had always been large. In fact, the unhealthy on-again/off-again dieting caused her to gain more weight in the long run. Then I thought that, like being gay, perhaps it isn’t something you can necessarily “change” (barring risky gastric bypass surgery, I suppose).
So then I realized that perhaps it makes sense to add those things. Though, to be honest, I find it silly that we need laws in the first place that say that you can’t discriminate based on physical/mental traits. I mean, shouldn’t laws just read “you can not discriminate?” Period. Any example of discrimination should be wrong, no? Otherwise, these anti-discrimination laws are going to have endless lists of things ANYTHING/ANYBODY could be discriminated for: red hair, albinos, freckles, eye color, shoe size, breast size, dwarves, bald people, penis size, body hair, corrective lenses….the list could go on and on.
Oh, in unrelated news (and don’t discriminate against me because of my techno-stupidity) but I’m having another iPod problem. For some reason, certain artists are appearing multiple times on my iPod (but not on my iTunes screen). It appears to be artists who have multiple albums. Instead of showing the artist once (and then clicking on the artist to see list of albums), it lists the artists multiple times. And with artists with whom I have 6 or 7 albums, the artist appears 6 or 7 times on my iPod. Oddly enough, each artist entry is identical (each one shows all albums) so there is no point in it appearing 6 or 7 times.
It’s bad enough that I have to scroll for 12 years to get to the artists beginning with the letter “T”…but all of these repetetive entries are just making it tale that much longer to get there. How do I stop this?
Don’t judge me.
