The title’s a bit of an oversimplification, but hopefully it gets the point across.
Say you’re a hobbyist, and a member of a minority group that’s even more underrepresented among your fellow hobbyists. One of your fellow hobbyists decides to set up some special events to bring these minority hobbyists together and encourage more minorities to take up the hobby. Cool, right? Except, they take it to a level that’s actually illegal where you live, because the strict antidiscrimination laws prohibit events open only to certain people, or discounts to those people, if it’s on the basis of a protected class. So even though this is for the benefit of the margianalized, it’s prohibited by the same law designed to protect the marginalized.
As an attorney who has dabbled in this area, you know this is illegal, and you also know that the people doing these events probably have no idea. And you personally feel that what they are doing is good and should be allowed to continue. But you don’t want it to bite them in the ass.
Do you:
A) Pull them aside and warn them. Explain how there are people who basically make a living filing lawsuits over these things–pathetic dudes who search far and wide for the occasional bar ignorant enough to offer ladies night and then sue for the half-price Cosmo they were denied-- and how that can wreck a business.
B) Say nothing and hope none of those butthurt-for-hire folks stumbles upon your little slice of heaven.
C) Something else; I dunno, maybe you file a complaint against them yourself because you always play by the rules no matter what?
If you warn them, they might shut down, and then your little community loses something beautiful. If you don’t, they might get caught, and the specific individuals trying to do a good thing could be in a lot of trouble.
I’m being vague about the details on purpose because I’d like to see different angles on this, but also because I’m trying to keep an actual situation like this quiet. So feel free to speculate wildly and fill in the blanks!