There is another board that I read sometimes. On it, a person was interested in finding a therapist to discuss some childhood trauma with. The poster believed that some of the trauma was related to his parents’ religion, which he (the poster) had eventually renounced or at least stopped believing in, and wanted, for this reason, to find a therapist who was not a follower of his parents’ religion.
I’m pretty sure that this is perfectly legal in the US, but I’m not sure of why. I’ve been told many times that you can’t discriminate when hiring - how is it different in this case?
Unless you’re putting out an ad, how would anyone even know you’re looking for help? And unless you’re putting out an ad announcing your preferences, how would anyone even know you’re discriminating?
That’s pretty much it. It’s illegal for a business to discriminate on the basis of religion. It’s not illegal for a consumer to discriminate on the basis of religion.
Exactly. The therapist is the business and his or her product is the therapy. It’s perfectly legal for a racist to not buy a hot dog from an Asian vendor.
Ah, but what if I get rich and decide to hire a maid, and decide that I’d rather be served by a maid of a certain race, or don’t want a maid that follows my parents’ religion, etc. Is this still OK because I am not a business? What if I become super-rich and hire a whole household staff of 100?
A bit of clarification, almost all discrimination is legal and even expected in the United States. For example, a hospital is free to discriminate against people without medical training when hiring a surgeon, a warehouse is free to discriminate against people who can’t lift heavy boxes when hiring a laborer, and so on. Laws have been passed to make discrimination on certain grounds illegal. These laws usually include race, religion, gender, etc.
I realize that in the common vernacular the term “discrimination” has come to be used almost exclusively in the sense of “illegal discrimination” but this usage tends to mask the fact that any given form of discrimination is not illegal unless there is a law that prohibits it.
The Federal Equal Employment Opportunity law currently defines an employer as “a person engaged in an industry affecting commerce who has fifteen or more employees for each working day in each of twenty or more calendar weeks in the current or preceding calendar year, and any agent of such a person…” (42USC2000e(b)). So, to address the original question, unless this person is engaging a therapist to work in his industry with fifteen or more employees, he or she has nothing to worry about. State and local laws may be more restrictive.
If the therapist is an independent professional, how does it not count as hiring someone to work for you? I understand that common sense says that they are different, but I’m more curious about how the difference is defined legally.
The therapist is not your employee. You are his client. But for argument sake, let’s say you are very wealthy and going to hire a therapist to work exclusively for you and as such you would be his only patient and he would be available to you 100% of the time. In that case you could not discriminate.
In your example of hiring a maid that cleaned your house everyday, in a sense that person is your employee. But let’s say you wanted to have your house cleaned one time before a big party and your friends were coming over and you wanted to impress them with the hot maid in the french maid outfit. In a sense you are hiring a service and not an employee. In that case you could be discriminating on the type of maid you hired.