Fair Is Fair,|or Perhaps Not

I'm all for equal opportunity, but what does that mean?

I've been thinking about this ever since noticing this sentence in a lawsuit filed recently in Los Angeles:

"In 2010, Commerce Casino terminated all of its older Asian card dealers, including (plaintiff), and replaced them with attractive young women."

Discrimination, right?

Perhaps.

But what if the casino's business radically increases if the dealers are hot babes?

Doesn't hot babehood become an important qualification for the job?

Put this in a more obvious context: Is it a violation of equal protection for a strip club to refuse to hire old men as dancers?

Yes, seeing a 90-year-old guy attempt to take his pants off while grooving to "Hot for Teacher" is extremely entertaining, but in the long run, that's probably bad for strip club business.

When you think about it, hiring for almost any job can be discriminatory and yet justified. The stupid and incompetent are a distinct class. Where are their equal-protection class actions?

Yes, most government agencies and private company customer service departments provide affirmative action for the slow and uncaring, but does that make up for the abuse they suffer in so many job situations?

Fairness is a difficult topic and you have to wonder about it in light of last week's hot litigation topic - National Federation of Independent Business v. Sibelius, the U. S. Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Health Care Act.

Is it fair to force 30 million people to be covered by health insurance?

What if they'd rather spend their money on ice cream and Jack Daniels and then die in a gutter?

Is it fair to make the healthy (who of course will be healthy forever) pay for the sick?

Next thing you know, the government will be making people who live in non-burning houses pay for fire departments and people who walk pay for roads.

No, wait ...

OK, fairness is gone. But that isn't what I look for in a landmark Supreme Court ruling. What I always want to know is how the justices on the right are going to channel the Founding Fathers.

For those of you who haven't read the entire opinion, I'm happy to report that the dissenting justices didn't disappoint.

A very brief excerpt: "It should be the responsibility of the Court ... to remind people that the Framers considered structural protections of freedom the most important ones. ... The fragmentation of power produced by the structure of our Government is central to liberty, and when we destroy it, we place liberty at peril."

Yikes!

We've traded liberty for health insurance!

What were we thinking? Of course: Thomas Jefferson and John Adams didn't have health insurance. So we're not meant to have it.

Give me liberty from insurance or give me death!

Actually, those choices aren't mutually exclusive. There's something wrong here.

How about ... Give me liberty from insurance or give me health!

No, that can't be right.

Oh the heck with it - let's just call the whole thing a tax.

Semantics is a wonderful thing.

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