House of Eratosthenes

“Republicans just want to shove their morals down everybody’s throats.” How many times have you heard that? How many times have you heard “Republicans are just pandering to the Religious Right, and the Religious Right wants to shove their morals down everybody’s throats”?

And yet…here we are on June 28, 2006. We drive to work, we have lunch wherever we want, we buy booze, we go home, we surf the “innernets” looking for “pr0n,” we have sex with our women. What, exactly, could we do without having someone else’s morals shoved down our throats, that we can’t do?

Hang on, the Republican-bashers tell us. It’s coming.

Well, Jon Stossel is kind enough to remind us of something that has come and gone, and a decade ago was not only coming, but was hovering perilously. Perilously and non-sensically. And the nonsense didn’t make quite as much of an impression back then, as it would have now. Remember, it was Bill Clinton’s America. Faux-Europe America. Everything anybody did, was everybody else’s business.

So it just made sense, only ten months after the Gingrich Revolution when the tempering effects of Bill Clinton’s Big Spanking had not quite set in, that a nanny-state government agency started telling Hooters to hire male waitresses.

The firm now employs more than 30,000 people. Some would consider this a success story, but our government didn’t. Not because Hooters is using sex to sell — but because its waitresses are — get ready — women!

“Discrimination!” cried the federal government’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

The business of Hooters is food, said the government, and “no physical trait unique to women is required to serve food.” EEOC lawyers demanded Hooters produce all its hiring data, and then grilled Hooters for four years. Mike McNeil, Hooters’ vice president of marketing, told “20/20” the EEOC bureaucrats demanded to look at reams of paperwork. “Employee manuals, training manuals, marketing manuals — virtually everything that’s involved in how we run our business…”

The EEOC then issued a set of demands. First, it defined a class of disappointed males who had not been hired by the company. The EEOC said, according to McNeil: “We want you to establish a $22-million fund for this mythical ‘class’ of dissuaded male applicants. We want you to conduct sensitivity training studies to teach all of your employees to be more sensitive to the needs of men.”

I have something smarmy and pithy I could staple on to the end of this thing, but Stossel’s article lapses perilously close to “Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself” territory; for he neatly covers exactly the thing I would have said, had it been left up to me to make the comments.

I suspect Hooters’ customers are mostly men who think the firm is quite sensitive to their needs, thank you — and that there would indeed be a class of disappointed males if the government insisted men do the jobs of Hooters girls.

Indeed. Some things are just obvious.

So on to the next sub-topic: Between the dreaded Religious Right, and the fanatical anti-discrimination zealot lawyers, just who is it, chomping at the bit to “shove their morals down my throat”?

I grew up in the eighties. I’ve spent twenty years waiting for the Religious Right to come along and get a law passed that will stop me from doing something I want to do. I’ve been told, pretty much the entire time, not to worry and that it will happen Real Soon Now. I’m still waiting.

Where would we be, I’d like to know, if Hooters had not chosen to fight back during the Clinton regime? Well of course, it would be a liberal’s quasi-Europe wet-dream: Everything everybody does, is everybody else’s business. To start a restaurant featuring good-looking women parading around in skimpy shorts, you would have to hire an equal number of men to parade around in equally skimpy shorts. Ewww…

…what do you say to a guy who wants a job like that? How about “people wonder if you’re crazy, but now I can plainly see your nuts.”

If that doesn’t seem like a matter of serious concern, one must wonder how many other facets of life would be open to this kind of regulation. Not rule-making, I hasten to add. The making of rules, implies universal compliance with those rules, a kind of rule-adhering absolutism. Regulation is not that. All regulation really does, is put the bureaucrats in the driver’s seat. It gives them the power to say “you are in violation of Public Law Number blah-blah-blah…now I can make this thing go away, if you will do X.”

So with that critical distinction made, now ponder all the other entirely legitimate things in our society that are equally discriminatory, if not moreso, compared to hiring good-looking women to be good-looking woman waitresses. Good heavens. Like Hooters says themselves, in the commentary on their official website: “Claims that Hooters exploits attractive women are as ridiculous as saying the NFL exploits men who are big and fast.” Mmmkay, so there’s one example. Big fast men in the NFL. Where are the petite, slow, brittle women? It’s discrimination! Now, think of some more. Not hard.

Republicans, if you’re concerned about winning the midterms, maybe this would be a good thing to talk about. In America, when you start your own business you’re supposed to be left alone, so long as you pay your creditors, pay your employees, pay your taxes, deliver what you promised to your customers, and don’t kick dogs or babies. That makes America a great place to get a business started, and this…nobody with a brain, or a reputation worth defending, disagrees…is why we have come to kick international ass, economically.

Not the nanny-state rules. Not government-mandated parades of hairy chests beneath white tank tops, and nutsacks in orange spandex. If that’s what it took to kick ass, Europe would be kicking our ass. Well, guess what; they’re not. They’re bellyaching about how rich and powerful we are, and what a big bully we are. Or at least, that’s what some of them say.

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Morals In My Throat?Wednesday, June 28th, 2006

Morals In My Throat?
Wednesday, June 28th, 2006