Thanks to Jottings By An Employer’s Lawyer for this post, discussing the pending Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2007 (HR 2015 - note the link in Employer’s Lawyer post is broken - use this PDF link to the GPO site). I’ll take a deeper look at this act over the weekend and blog about it more next week, but I did want to respond to one thing Michael states in his blog post:

As one who represents employers, there is always concern when yet another group is empowered by legislation to sue. Personally, it is hard to make any other general argument. More specifically, anytime legislation contains the word “perceived” I know that we are heading down an even slippier, potentially more litigious slope.

Ah, there it is … the favorite “old faithful” of the employer’s lobby and lawyers: the dreaded “slippery slope” argument. If you’re not familiar with it, you didn’t go to law school most probably, because law students are inundated with this faux policy argument against taking bold action in just about every class. “Well, of course we’d love to help you out, Oppressed and Discriminated-Against Subset Without Any Legal Protection (NB:ODASWALP?), but we just can’t - I mean, if we help you, who else will we have to help? It’s a slippery slope!”

It helps if you imagine it being said by a woman clutching pearls at her throat. Or your elementary school principal.

It’s a faux argument because it’s nothing but a diversionary tactic. It has nothing to do with the merits of the case at hand but speaks merely to our fears as a society - our fears, specifically, of hard work. Yes, I know, we’re the cultural heirs, at least, to the Puritans and as such are supposedly imbued with this amazing work ethic. But at heart, we’re all a little leery of wrestling with complex issues because - well, they’re hard. They require the very best thinking we can muster, and frankly, we’re a bit lazy, we humans. We’d prefer to get by.

But we need to do better than get by. If we rely on getting by, we’re doing ourselves a great disservice. Yes, it might be the gay and transgendered workers now at issue and maybe that has no meaning for you individually. But who is going to be next time? What’s the next section of society to become disfavored and downtrodden? And what if that turns out to be a section you belong to? What are you going to say then, and what do you have a right to expect from your fellow humans?

Talk about your slippery slopes.

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