Just curious what you guys think…Is it ever okay to discriminate against any group of people?
Hmmm, it all depends.
Discrimination is neccesary, but if it is not then obviously it is bad.
You could discriminate against those who are unable to do the job, those whose disability prevent them from doing the job (ie one armed firemen), those whose sex prevents them from doing the job (male in a female toilet 
)
Even on, say, race or sexual persuisain if it is called for. You aren’t going to have a black undercover officer to go in to a hispanic ghetto.
On the other hand if there is no real reason for such discrimination then it is wrong.
Well Mike I doubt you started this tread out of the blue…so what is your stance on it? Or what sparked this tread?
From the definition
To discriminate is to make a distinction. There are several meanings of the word, including statistical discrimination, or the actions of a circuit called a discriminator. This article addresses the most common colloquial sense of the word, invidious discrimination. That is, irrational social, racial, religious, sexual, ethnic and age-related discrimination of people.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination
So from the bold part I would have to say no its not okay. You can rewrite many ways but the word in the common usage has a negative connotation.
Now it happens all the time but I believe this is mainly due to lack of empathy or understanding. Im not going to say that ive never done it but I try my best not to do what is defined above. 
However in another way of reading it you could say that Austria discriminates against holocaust deniers. Its illegal to deny the holocaust there! So this one is a pretty good example of where I feel alot of people would agree with. Personally I dont coz I believe in the freedom of speech. I also think holocaust deniers are a bunch of nonobjective fact-twisting bastards. But just because I think they are stupid doesnt mean they shouldnt be allowed to speak.
Some good points here as well.
Dont know if I would have used i.e. there. e.g. would be better suited dont you think?
There is nothing wrong with discrimination, in the pejorative rather than literal sense, as long as you are the one doing it.
Discrimination, in the pejorative sense, is invariably outrageous when you are the one experiencing it.
This is why anti-discrimination laws and bodies exist.
To make sure that, for example, a bunch of spiky-haired, overalled, huge-arsed, lesbian separatist bureaucrats can impose their odd view of selective liberty on the rest of the allegedly narrow-minded, sexist, racist, homophobic population.
Such as pubs for poofters who hate being discriminated against but want to keep straights out of their pub (reverse is unacceptable as it is discriminatory); government-funded artificial insemination for lesbians who hate men but want to get up the duff (reverse unacceptable as no blokes are willing to plunge their plonker into plump pudenda, even with government funding, thus leading to record sales of turkey basters); and electric lifts for the disabled elevating them to viewing platforms at the top of thousand year old trees in the middle of the Tasmanian wilderness, where there isn’t any electricity, let alone lifts.
We’ve been pushed a little too far by some anti-discrimination and special interest bodies.
Such as the deaf parents who object to their children being taught sign language to communicate with the rest of us, or receiving Cochlear implants to enable them to hear, because it interferes with ‘deaf culture’. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/1998/06/02/sunday/main10794.shtml
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/lifestyle/cont28.shtml
Yet they demand special teachers for the deaf out of our taxes to preserve their ‘culture’.
On that basis, kids with Down Syndrome or cystic fibrosis or countless other congenital misfortunes should be treated as a ‘culture’ to be preserved.
This will save a huge amount of money as, no longer, will these children (who I thought were unlucky but apparently are proudly fortunate) need hugely expensive hospitals and other health services.
They can just enjoy their ‘culture’.
But I’m a bastard in the eyes of all these clowns, because I don’t like the idea of preserving special ‘cultures’ which demand special rights which could be avoided by integrating with the wider society, while making fewer compromises for them than they require of us.
I‘m just a real nasty bastard who supports anything that tries to ensure that everybody just learns to get on with everyone else and has EQUAL rights.
That is discrimination at its absolute worst!
I heard with disbelieve about hte “deaf culture”, I can’t beleive that people would wish to stay deaf, when something could be done about it.
RS, as I am disbled person, I completely concur with you self description of being a “B”. If you don’t know anything about deafness, and deaf culture or in fact the issues about disabled people and their (our) attempts at “integrating” into society, then don’t mouth off about. I’ve nearly 40 and have spent my whole life time to “integrate”. But the crap I’ve had to put up from narrow minded or ignorant people (of which there are many) means that it is often a one-sided attempt. THAT is why different disabled people try to get together and create their own groups and develop their own lttle cultural niches. Because the wider society has shat on them for most of their lives.
If you don’t believe me just google disability rights, disability research or the Social Model of Disability. There’s plenty of stuffout there to educate you (some of it written by me).
BTW, I also find your use of the term “poofter” highly offensive.
I always figured thta disabled people got together in groups because of something in common, rather than the rest of society “shitting” on them.
Personally I have never had any dramas with disabled people, and you would probably be surprised as to the level and amount of disabled people I have come in to contact with.
That said two things immediatly spring to mind.
One. “Deaf Culture”. I can not comprehend how someone would willingly stay deaf if they had the ability to right this disability. It is still their choice but I can’t understand it.
Two. PC rubbish. My friends wife worked at a firm which refused to purchase “human torpedoes” on the grounds that they were in some how demeaning. Basically, in the event of a fire the disabled person gets put in to something similar to a stretcher, but more padded, and gets carried out by their able bodied collegues.
Instead they decided it was less demeaning for them to be left by the staircases and would be carried out (in similar equipment) by firemen. Why? I feel pretty sure they wouldn’t feel demeaned and their collegues wouldn’t feel unmeaned or whatever the reverse is.
And even if they did, better than breathing in smoke surely.
At least we agree that I’m a bastard.
Is it because I’m a bastard or not deaf that I can’t express an opinion about deaf people wanting to stay deaf and breed deaf people?
What, then, entitles them to express any opinion about people who have hearing?
Or to demand that the rest of society accommodates them when they don’t want to accommodate the rest, and rather larger part, of society?
I’ve lived all my adolescent and adult life with a disability, but it’s never occurred to me to wish it on anyone else or to want to preserve it for the good of the species. I’d love to get rid of it. I don’t advertise it; wallow in it; or seek any special treatment because of it.
I am the parent of a child with a different but not sufficienty gross disability to fit into the narrow categories that entitled him to various benefits and educational assistance or special consideration in education in the state system. And he has suffered a lot because of it all his school days.
I have spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to get my child the education promised by private schools, which have delivered nothing except blaming the child for problems the provider refuses, despite overwhelming medical evidence to the contrary, to accept exist.
I have spent a reasonable part of my last thirty years as a lawyer running cases for disabled people.
I have also wasted part of my 57 years on the planet listening to whingeing bullshit from people who wouldn’t know real discrimination if it leapt up and bit them on the face.
BTW, I also find your use of the term “poofter” highly offensive.
Really?
Would you be in the same group that, for example, arrogates to yourself the right to tell me how to speak in gender neutral terms and how to form my own views?
Being the sort of people who, as poofters, use terms like ‘fish’, derived from their opinion of the smell of the female genitalia, to describe women? And who routinely call it out to any women unfortunate enough to stray into their pubs etc? Or who use anti-discrimination laws to exclude people who aren’t poofters from poofter pubs? http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,21804872-2,00.html Imagine what would happen if the reverse occurred.
Or are you in the group such as Aborigines running a metropolitan legal service who memorably defended a claim of discrimination in which a white employee complained successfully to an anti-discrimination tribunal of, among other things, being repeatedly called ‘a white c**t” on the ground that ‘that’s the way we talk about white people’? While if reversed it would have resulted in a flurry of discrimination claims?
Try being the only bloke working in a predominantly lesbian feminist separtist workplace for a few years at the height of the lesbian hi-jacking of feminism, as I had the misfortune to do, and then tell me about discrimination and how offensive it is to use words like poofter. And spare me the usual bullshit that I’m just experiencing what it’s like to be a poofter.
The people who in many cases were and are those most vigorous in using anti-discrimination laws were and are often the most bigoted and discriminatory people themselves.
And a lot of them were and are whingeing poofters. Of both genders.
Anti-discrimination laws, for all their good intent, have in some cases allowed the bigoted and active minority to ovewhelm the neutral and sleeping majority to no good purpose.
No real point in this thread a few law suits from women who couldn’t make it as firemen got me to thinking and a couple fire fighter assoc’s they have in my Department.
Rising Sun brings up a good point here, what if the reverse of this type discrimination occurred? At my work we have a African American Fire Fighters Association and we also have a Hispanic Fire Fighters Association, I don’t have a problem with those organizations but what do you think would happen if I wanted to start a Caucasian Fire Fighters Association? People would blow a gasket and think we are racist. Reverse discrimination is not a good thing.
I just wonder how they are going to know at that club if someone is heterosexual or not
Disrimination? In what context? It is as possible to discriminate in a positive sense, as it is in a negative sense - it depends - it’s really one of those questions that one can discuss forever, each act of discrimination has to be considered in its own particular circumstances.
What always intrigues me is that in various sections of communities which claim they are victims of discrimination, there can be far more virulent and ideologically driven discrimination against other members of the same community who don’t conform with the ideology of one group than anything coming from the rest of society. Apparently that isn’t discrimination.
My bold.
Radicalism in the Deaf culture
By Cathy Young | November 6, 2006SINCE LAST MAY, Gallaudet University, the world’s only university designed entirely for deaf and hard-of-hearing students, has been rocked by protests over the selection of a new president.
Jane K. Fernandes was scheduled to take over from I. King Jordan in January. On Oct. 29, after protesters shut down the Washington campus for more than two weeks, the board of trustees revoked Fernandes’s appointment. This fiasco is a striking example of identity politics gone mad.
In 1988, protesters rebelled against the appointment of a hearing president, Elisabeth Singer, and demanded a deaf president (something Gallaudet had never had since its founding in 1864). Singer resigned , and Jordan was appointed in her place.
Fernandes, the Gallaudet provost whom Jordan wanted to see as his replacement, is also deaf; but to some, “not deaf enough.” She grew up lip-reading and speaking and learned sign language only as a graduate student.
In recent weeks, anti-Fernandes students and professors have denied that their objections had anything to do with her not being deaf enough, and have accused her of raising the issue to pose as a victim of political correctness.
However, the Washington Post reports that the protesters backed off the “not deaf enough” complaint only when they realized that it wasn’t likely to garner sympathy from the outside world. They focused instead on Fernandes’s supposedly autocratic and intimidating leadership style and her alleged lack of interpersonal skills (one critic quoted by the Inside Higher Ed website even noted that she didn’t smile enough).
There were also vague charges that she is insufficiently committed to fighting racism. Yet none of these gripes seem sufficient to justify the passion that led to her ouster: the protests included hunger strikes and threats of violence.
Some of the criticisms publicly leveled at Fernandes are overtly rooted in identity politics.
In a letter to the Post , Gallaudet English professor Kathleen M. Wood excoriated both Fernandes and Jordan for taking the position that Gallaudet is for all deaf students. This misguided inclusiveness, Wood asserted , had attracted deaf students who were “not integrating into Deaf culture” and resisting the use of sign language. She ended her letter by stating, “The new Gallaudet will not be for everyone.”
“Deaf culture” – that’s Deaf with a capital D – has flourished at Gallaudet. It is a radical movement that views deafness not as a disability but as an oppressed minority status akin to race, and also as a unique linguistic culture. The movement holds that there is nothing wrong with being deaf, only with how society has treated deaf people.
Few would deny that, historically, deaf people and others with disabilities have endured stereotyping, bias, and unfairness. Much progress has been made toward seeing people with disabilities as whole individuals, toward focusing on what they can do, not on what they can’t . But it’s a leap from this understanding to the bizarre idea that the lack of hearing is no more a disability than being female or black. (Verbal communication aside, surely being unable to hear environmental sounds often places a person at a serious disadvantage.)
The majority of deaf people do not belong to Deaf culture. It is estimated that at most a quarter of profoundly deaf people in the United States use sign language. Yet at many schools for the deaf, signing has been dogmatically treated as the only acceptable communication; children with some hearing have received little training in auditory and speaking skills. Deaf schools that promote “oralism” have been targeted for protests.
[b]More harmful still, Deaf activists have railed against cochlear implants, which enable many deaf children to gain functional hearing; some deaf parents have denied implants to their children on ideological grounds. The activists also oppose research into cures for deafness through gene therapy and other means.
To them, attempts to “fix” deafness amounts to nothing short of genocide.[/b]
Fernandes herself embraces Deaf culture, but she does not want it to be isolated from the hearing world or exclude those who don’t meet purist standards of “Deafness.” She also believes that the deaf community must deal honestly with the challenges posed by advances in medicine.
When this sensible view is rejected under pressure from a handful of radicals, it is a testament to the madness that can prevail when oppressed-minority status becomes a weapon to silence critics.
http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2006/11/06/radicalism_in_the_deaf_culture/
Then of course we have the usual lesbian feminist man-haters expressing their [sarcasm on]tolerant and non-discriminatory [sarcasm off] views, which alarms even some of their sisters.
This article is a response to the increasing sense of disquiet I’ve been experiencing about some ideas and attitudes around the feminist ghetto. I am concerned about the implications of a whole series of things I’ve heard or seen written such as: ‘men are mutants’; ‘its know use putting energy into men’; ‘can heterosexual women be feminists’; ‘porn is violence against women’; ‘smash the sex shops’; ‘castrate all rapists’; ‘dead men don’t rape’; ‘kill them in their cots’; etc.
http://www.takver.com/history/womyn.htm
And this from 30 years ago, when they were just starting to pick up speed.
All who are not of good race in this world are chaff. --Hitler, Mein Kampf 1
It would be lunacy to try to estimate the value of man according to his race, thus declaring war on the Marxist idea that men are equal, unless we are determined to draw the ultimate consequences. And the ultimate consequence of recognizing the importance of blood–that is, of the racial foundation in general–is the transference of this estimation to the individual person. --Hitler, Mein Kampf 2
Hisses. Women shouting at me: slut, bisexual, she fucks men. And before I had spoken, I had been trembling, more afraid to speak than I had ever been. And, in a room of 200 sister lesbians, as angry as I have ever been. “Are you a bisexual?” some woman screamed over the pandemonium, the hisses and shouts merging into a raging noise. “I’m a Jew,” I answered; then, a pause, “and a lesbian, and a woman.” And a coward. Jew was enough. In that room, Jew was what mattered. In that room, to answer the question “Do you still fuck men?” with a No, as I did, was to betray my deepest convictions. All of my life, I have hated the proscribers, those who enforce sexual conformity. In answering, I had given in to the inquisitors, and I felt ashamed. It humiliated me to see myself then: one who resists the enforcers out there with militancy, but gives in without resistance to the enforcers among us.
The event was a panel on “Lesbianism as a Personal Politic” that took place in New York City, Lesbian Pride Week 1977. A self-proclaimed lesbian separatist had spoken. Amidst the generally accurate description of male crimes against women came this ideological rot, articulated of late with increasing frequency in feminist circles: women and men are distinct species or races (the words are used interchangeably); men are biologically inferior to women; male violence is a biological inevitability; to eliminate it, one must eliminate the species/race itself (means stated on this particular evening: developing parthenogenesis as a viable reproductive reality); in eliminating the biologically inferior species/race Man, the new Ubermensch Womon (prophetically foreshadowed by the lesbian separatist * herself) will have the earthly dominion that is her true biological destiny. We are left to infer that the society of her creation will be good because she is good, biologically good. In the interim, incipient SuperWomon will not do anything to “encourage” women to “collaborate” with men–no abortion clinics or battered woman sanctuaries will come from her. After all, she has to conserve her “energy” which must not be dissipated keeping “weaker” women alive through reform measures.
The audience applauded the passages on female superiority/male inferiority enthusiastically. This doctrine seemed to be music to their ears. Was there dissent, silent, buried in the applause? Was some of the response the spontaneous pleasure that we all know when, at last, the tables are turned, even for a minute, even in imagination? Or has powerlessness driven us mad, so that we dream secret dreams of a final solution perfect in its simplicity, absolute in its efficacy? And will a leader someday strike that secret chord, harness those dreams, our own nightmare turned upside down? Is there no haunting, restraining memory of the blood spilled, the bodies burned, the ovens filled, the peoples enslaved, by those who have assented throughout history to the very same demagogic logic?
Andrea Dworkin
http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WarZoneChaptIIID.html
Ain’t it beautiful when two deaf lesbians get together?
Oh, the joy of giving birth to a healthy deaf baby, and the second intentionally conceived as deaf, without the inconvenience of the yukky man part of the normal process of procreation. Or is it wrong to use ‘normal’ in this context? Or ever?
I’m so out of touch that I think these sheilas are dangerous idiots whose actions amount to an appalling form of child abuse that will last the child’s whole life, and an intentional and outrageous denial of the child’s human rights. It is as morally repugnant to me as Hitler’s eugenics and Aryan breeding programs.
But I’m a discriminatory bastard, so why would my opinion count as it denies these people their right to ensure that their children can experience the life-long joys of being unable to hear anything?
My bold.
Deaf like me?
By Cathy Young | April 15, 2002AS IF THERE weren’t already enough news stories to make one think that the world has gone mad, ponder this: A deaf lesbian couple in a Washington, D.C., suburb took steps to ensure that they had a deaf child, by selecting a sperm donor with an extensive family history of deafness. What’s more, Candy McCullough and Sharon Duchesneau, whose baby boy was born last November, went public about their decision, agreeing to be profiled in a cover story in The Washington Post magazine. The women already have an older daughter who is deaf by design.
Unfortunately, the only group to speak out forcefully against this outrage, the conservative Family Research Council, chose to make an issue of the women’s sexual orientation. Heterosexual parents can behave in equally appalling ways. The recent public television documentary, ‘‘Sound and Fury,’’ featured a deaf couple, Peter and Nita Artinian, who refused permission for their deaf daughter to get a cochlear implant - a surgically implanted device which would have enabled her to hear.It’s hard to imagine a starker example of parental selfishness than wanting your child to be disabled because you want her to be just like you. But these parents don’t see it that way. They subscribe to the credo of the ‘‘Deaf Pride’’ movement, which holds that deafness is not a disability but a culture to be valued - no different from being black or Chinese.
‘‘If somebody gave me a pill that would make me hearing, would I take it? No way,’’ Peter Artinian asserted in sign language in the documentary. ‘‘If the technology progresses, maybe it’s true deaf people will become extinct, and my heart will be broken.’’
To many Deaf Pride activists, attempts to ‘‘fix’’ deafness through cure or prevention amount to nothing less than cultural genocide. Somewhat less outrageously, they also invoke efforts to ‘‘cure’’ homosexuality as a parallel.
In fact, neither the gay nor the ethnic analogy holds up. Deafness, positive thinking notwithstanding, is defined by the absence of a basic faculty. One may define cultural deafness as the ability to use sign language, but hearing people can and do learn it too.
Gays, arguably, would not be disadvantaged if it weren’t for societal prejudice and discrimination. The same can hardly be said of the deaf. Sign language imposes unique, severe limitations on its users. If it’s dark, if your hands are busy, if you’re not facing the person to whom you are talking, you are effectively speechless. Surely, too, the inability to hear environmental sounds – an oncoming car, a falling object, or a baby’s cry – is a real impairment.
Deaf activists deplore the arrogance of the hearing, who cannot imagine that there could be anything positive about being deaf. But quite a few deaf people see these activists as an arrogant minority trying to impose its will on everyone else. Of the estimated 2 million profoundly deaf people in the United States, only about a quarter use sign language.
Nevertheless, the fringe ideas of Deaf Pride have had consequences. At many schools for the deaf, sign language has been dogmatically treated as the only acceptable form of communication, and children with some hearing have received little if any training in auditory and speaking skills. While cochlear implants have been growing in popularity, particularly for children under 3 who are in their primary speech-learning stage, deaf activists have compared the procedure to Nazi medical experiments. Tensions have run so high that some parents have allowed their children to be interviewed for positive stories on cochlear implants only on the condition of anonymity.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that some deaf people would try to come to terms with their condition by insisting that they love being deaf and would never want to be any other way. What’s shocking is such arguments are being taken seriously.
‘‘Sound and Fury’’ approached the controversy over cochlear implants and the preservation of ‘‘Deaf culture’’ as a debate in which each side merited equal time. Northeastern University psychologist Harlan Lane, a (hearing) champion of ‘‘deaf culture’’ who asserts that to define deaf people as hearing-impaired is like defining women as ‘‘non-men,’’ has received a MacArthur fellowship for his work.
Perhaps, in our multicultural age, the media and other institutions feel obliged to show deference toward anyone minority group that celebrates its identity and asserts its difference. But maybe the best way to learn something from the Deaf Pride movement is to see it as a reductio ad absurdum of modern identity politics.
And for the final instalment in the “Rising Sun thinks there’s a limit to everything and it’s long been passed in the area of anti-discrimination” series.
This should work well in trials where matters are in issue which require sight, such as the defendant’s identity; signatures on documents; and wound and body position pictures. Not to mention just the constant function of jurors to examine the demeanour of witnesses.
PEOPLE WHO ARE DEAF AND BLIND SHOULD BE ON JURIES
The NSW Law Reform Commission and the NSW Government have shirked their responsibility to recommend the inclusion of people who are blind or deaf on NSW juries, Human Rights Commissioner and Commissioner responsible for Disability Discrimination, Graeme Innes AM, said today.
Presenting the annual Sir Ninian Stephen Lecture at the University of Newcastle, Mr Innes told law students that despite the fact the Law Reform Commission was asked in 2002 to address the exclusion of people who are blind or deaf from serving on NSW juries, they have left this to gather dust.
“I call on both the NSW Government and the NSW Law Reform Commission, as I have on a number of previous occasions, to act on this issue and to recommend and make the changes needed to allow people who are blind or deaf to be on juries,” Mr Innes said.
“I know many people who are blind or deaf who feel that they can never be totally accepted into our society as equals until they can fully carry out their responsibilities as citizens.”
Mr Innes told the students the lack of progress regarding jury participation for people who are blind or deaf marred progress the NSW legal system had made in other areas such as accessibility for people with physical disabilities and hearing loops for people with hearing impairments.
To go out of your way to have a deaf child is terrible. I am sure the child could have had a full life, with hearing, and still been able to communicate and understand the parents.
Nutters like this need discrimination, or there insanity will affect others like their child.
WRT the gay bar in Melbourne, to be honest I can’t fault the call.
If straights and lezbians are causing unrest amongst the clientel, then they are within their rights to block such people.
ie the hen nights using the clients as “entertainment”. Let’s hope it is only termpory.
Personnally I have had a few good nights in gay bars. And i am straight.
Well, it has been tested.
But before going to the video link at the end of this post, to understand the second half of the video you’ll need to know that Tinky Wink, the purple TeleTubbie, has caused alarm in Poland.
Poland to probe if Teletubbies are gay
Mon May 28, 2007 1:20PM EDT(Reuters) - Poland’s conservative government took its drive to curb what it sees as homosexual propaganda to the small screen on Monday, taking aim at Tinky Winky and the other Teletubbies.
Ewa Sowinska, government-appointed children rights watchdog, told a local magazine published on Monday she was concerned the popular BBC children’s show promoted homosexuality.
She said she would ask psychologists to advise if this was the case.
In comments reminiscent of criticism by the late U.S. evangelist Jerry Falwell, she was quoted as saying: “I noticed (Tinky Winky) has a lady’s purse, but I didn’t realize he’s a boy.”
“At first I thought the purse would be a burden for this Teletubby … Later I learned that this may have a homosexual undertone.”
And now, the video test at the Peel Hotel which has been authorised under equal oppurtunity laws to keep straights out. Click on “Can Tinky Wink get into a gay pub?” http://www.tokillfor.com/
I don’t have a problem with it either, so far as excluding people who are troublesome to other patrons.
But the hotel didn’t need any exemption from equal opportunity laws for that. Every pub and nightclub has a legal right to eject people who are troublesome, and to refuse entry to people who don’t fit the desired clientele. The door staff at nightclubs and some pubs are doing it all the time.
Judging by public reaction here on talkback radio, letters to newspapers and general discussion, an awful lot of people see gays obtaining this right to exclude straights purely on the basis of sexuality as a form of hypocrisy by a segment of society which has been vigorous in using anti-discrimination laws for the past 30 odd years to stop exactly the sort of purely gender-based discrimination they are now engaging in. And I have the same concern.
Well the story was related to me that they had the right to refuse straight ppl. Ive had a few good nights at the gay bar myself and Im also straight.
Now if my 1st sentence is true then normally straight bars should have the right to refuse gay ppl. I could be totally wrong but sounds to me like reverse-discrimination.