THE INCREDIBLE BIRTH OF “HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT”

THE INCREDIBLE BIRTH OF “HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT”

I should not fail to mention Vinson, the unfortunate Supreme Court decision that gave us the infamous "hostile environment" version of sexual harassment. The plaintiff had claimed that she had suffered all sorts of indignities at the hands of a supervisor in the bank where she worked, including being raped repeatedly in the bank’s restroom. Talk about a truly hostile environment! Of course, if her charges were true, the man had committed all manner of felonies and should be sent to jail. Had the criminal justice system failed her, she could have still sued the supervisor in civil court for the damages ensuing from his assaults. This is what the families of O.J. Simpson’s victims did. Vinson tried a new approach instead. The puzzle is, why did a rather conservative Court invent a new legal offense when traditional criminal and legal remedies were at hand?

The result is a legal and social nightmare in which large sections of the population are often deprived of their constitutional rights to free speech and due process, and in which companies all over the country settle obviously bogus cases for an average of about $65,000, because it is a lot cheaper than going to trial, and because they run the clear risk of a bizarre verdict whenever sexual harassment is involved.

It should be mentioned again that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 mentions absolutely nothing about sexual harassment. Such words are not used and nothing remotely approaching the description of it appears anywhere in the Act. This is an area of constitutional law invented by the courts under the influence of feminist political correctness.

Strictly speaking, sexual harassment law can be justified only by making a strong analogy between sexual harassment and racial discrimination. But the intended analogy turns out to be spurious, as we have seen earlier. Therefore the presumed justification is also spurious. Sexual harassment law, as a subset of discrimination law, is a very serious constitutional mistake.