Here’s the latest in that story. Evanston is mentioned in that article and how the liquor license was denied because the establishment did not fit community standards.
Yup, you can make something like that work - as long as it’s applied equally (that’s the rub here and the restaurant lobby is going to fight back against anything too broad).
Of course, you have to give the restaurants the ability to comply. Hooters hires male ‘hosts’ now as part of their legal response to address sexual discrimination suits and my guess is that they’d keep going even if you made them hire more guys.
Local Departments of Water and Power could torture a business to death that way. You could say they got waterboarded.
The reason the government can get away with torture even though it’s illegal, but a town board couldn’t ban a specific company, probably has to do with how secret it can be kept. Interrogation by torture is typically done secretly, only becoming public knowledge long after the fact (e.g., waterboarding the Al Qaeda suspects), whereas a city council banning Hooters would be a matter of public record.
Municipalities are given a lot of leeway to scrutinize and reject applicants for liquor licenses. That’s very different from a zoning approval or business license.
Bit that would ban most construction companies, hospital nurses, barber shops, etc. – heck, even the city’s own street maintenance crews or police department probably couldn’t meet that requirement!
There’s a difference between discrimination by the employers and people of one gender just not applying for jobs, or generally being physically incapable of bona fide requirements of the job. To be a construction worker, you need to be able to lift heavy weights, and most women can’t. But if an extraordinary woman could lift the weights (and meet the other job requirements), a law-abiding company would have no problem with hiring her.
Well, that’s already been fought over ad infinitum in the legal courts and in the courts of public opinion ever since, like, for a long time now, with a grand muddle of results. (ETA: Chronos, the grand muddles today still being along the lines of what constitutes a bona fide job requirement (qualifying boobs for Hooters work?), or what females are really capable of anyway.)
Time was, when fire departments were all male (1970’s or so), some females fought for the right to become firefighters. The conventional argument was that females couldn’t ever be “man enough” (meaning, strong enough or something) for the job.
Counter-arguments (that is, favoring hiring female firefighters) were either:
– Then, whatever qualifications discriminated against females were unlawful and should cease to be required qualifications,
– Or, the qualifications were okay but any female who was “man enough” to meet those qualifications should be allowed to take the job, even if that meant only a few females here and there would become firefighters.
See this current relevant nearby thread.
On the other side, there was the argument Oh my God firefighters bunk down in their firehouses for a week or two at a time along with all the other firefighters and we can’t have female firefighters bunking down with all the guys like that and what will all those male firefighters’ wives think? Apparently, it took some real sea change in the socio-legal environment to get past that one.
i don’t think that is necessarily true – based on the many overweight, out-of-shape, crack-displaying plumbers & electricians I have seen. 
They’re only pretending to be plumbers and electricians, for appearances. They’re really making their money selling crack.
Not really. You exempt construction companies on the basis that construction is regulated separately from all other industries (all states do regulate it differently). You can exempt hospitals on the same basis too. Barber shops tend to employ very small numbers of people, so you exempt them on that basis - the ordinance/statute/whatever applies only to companies with X number of employees.
Anybody who’d buy the butt-crack these plumbers display is really freaky! I’d pay money NOT to see it.
OK, by “construction workers”, I was thinking the guys in hard hats who build the structural part of buildings. The typical woman certainly could be an electrician or plumber, if she so chose. But then, hiring discrimination is less relevant there, anyway, since so many plumbers and electricians are self-employed independent contractors. It’s hard to complain that nobody will hire you when you won’t hire you, either.
There wasn’t actually a law against Hooters in my town, but every time they applied for a license, the same members of the town board would vote them down.
Ironically, the place they let operate in nthe space Hooters wanted had to be sht down rrepeatedly because of bar fights and random violence. It changed hands several times, but stayed a trouble spot.
A couple of years later Hooters petitioned for space vacated bhy another restaurant, and this time got in. There have been no bar fights or violence, and it’s a successful business. And the same Boatrd members are trying to get it shut down. Unsuccessfully.
Certainly part of the fear was that this would make our stretch of the highway indistinguishable from the next town up, whivch has two stripper bars and an “adult toy and video” store. But Hooters isn’t a stripper bar. In fact, it seems awfully similar to the Buffalo Wild Wings that opened in town.
And none of those places has had a problem with violence, either.
I don’t mean to be snarky, but has there ever been a case of discrimination based upon attractiveness? I don’t even know how that would be presented objectively, and am curious about the legal meaning of good looking.
Who said anything about butt-crack? Not you! (Post #48 above.) You just wrote “crack-displaying”. So I took that to mean they’re selling a certain variety of illegal psychoactive substance, and displaying same to prospective customers. That’s where the money is!
[sub]Hey, of course I knew what you meant! I was just having some fun with you. Can’t I have some fun? Please? Please?[/sub]
Certainly, if that happened, there could well be arguments about the definition of good-looking. Or, much more likely, it would be disputed that being good-looking was a bona-fide job requirement.
And no, it’s not hypothetical at all. Wasn’t this a standard hiring consideration for airline stewardesses (never stewards) for a long long time? Even the allegedly good-looking females hired, even with years on the job, commonly complained of being terminated when they got older and allegedly not-so-good-looking any more. Am I remembering all that right? It wasn’t cut-and-dried in those days, since that was new legal territory that the protesting stewardesses were breaking.
And what about the similar argument, in more modern times, that TV stations and networks are hiring the best photogenic babes they can as on-screen reporters, and especially as anchors? Hasn’t that been an issue in recent years? Anyone have some current information on that?
How many females could, would, or actually DID a construction job like THIS? Did any construction companies ever hire females for jobs like this?
(Sheesh! They don’t even appear to be wearing hard hats in that photo. Maybe there are just some kinds of jobs sites where it really doesn’t matter!)
It was pretty risque when it opened. I remember older people raising hell about it. When I was 19, I told my grandmother I went there and she went ballistic. (I’m glad I didn’t tell her about other stuff. ) She lectured me about evils of the flesh and whatnot until one day about two years after that, she asked be if I had ever had a hamburger at some “Owl place”.
After many questions, I found out that my aunt had taken her to Hooters for lunch. She was dumbfounded and swore up and down that it wasn’t the place I was talking about.
But, back to my point, you didn’t see that much skin in restaurants in the late 80s/early 90s. I would dispute that you see that much skin in BWWW. Hooters is tame by today’s standards, but back then it was a shock to many people in the community.
OK, fine. Have all the fun you want, discussing fat plumber’s butt cracks. I guess that could be considered ‘fighting ignorance’ – but there are some things i’d rather be ignorant about!
See here. ** Warning – website NSFW or even for any human eyes!