Wouldn't it be more effective for the law to say that any discrimination that doesn't affect a person's ability to perform the job is not allowed?
When you start itemizing specific traits it's a never-ending list. For example, the list quoted doesn't include eye color or hair color, or spoken language dialect, or ...
For anything that doesn't fall under these categories, it's fair game to discriminate. You don't like vegetarians or people who play tennis? You can discriminate. You're might be a f* moron for doing so, but we don't have laws against that.
Out of these you can't change only race and national origin. Sex can be changed, except on chromosome level.
And religion is just as malleable as any ideology. I don't think it's any easier to convert a vegan to a carnivore than e.g. a Christian to Muslim.
Are blue eyed people being discriminated against? If the answer is no then your hypothetical is irrelevant and you are optimizing for the wrong case.
These are protected classes to correct a real failing of our social system.
I also happen to hate people with purple hair and decide to ban them from my property and refuse to service to them. Now this is my store and property that I own, these are my goods that I sell. Why should the government be able to legally control what I choose to do with my property and my goods, if I want to pour them into a sewer, or set them on fire should I not be allowed to do that? So why should the government force me to sell them to people I do not want to?
So the reasoning behind carving out every specific protection revolves around the idea that there should be a good reason for the government to control what I do with my private property, as it extends to reducing my liberty to do with my property what I want, and now becomes a matter of balancing various parts of the implicit social contract.
Whether or not this is justified or which side is right is a different discussion but that is why each exception needs to be carved out as I understand it.
Here are some better examples:
1. A big and tall clothing store that discriminates against smaller customers.
2. A cafe that discriminates against people who are assholes (to the staff).
3. A retailer that does lots of business on the weekends that discriminates against hiring people who can't work weekends for non-religious reasons (e.g. because they have a sports league they do on Sundays).
4. A restaurant that discriminates against people with vegan/carnivore/keto/raw food/etc. diets by not having acceptable meals they can eat.
5. An airline that discriminates against obese people by making them pay for as many seats as they are actually using.
A lot of "discrimination" is reasonable. Anti-purple-hair prejudice is not.
1 and 4 don't actually ban those people, they simply don't provide any services that those groups of people would want. 3 is choosing not to hire people who don't actually fit the requirements of the job. 5 is paying for usage - obviously a reasonable concept, though specific policies may turn into discrimination. 2 is a reactive policy to something you have complete control over: your own behaviour. They don't care about any characteristic of you, except that you follow the rule of being polite to their staff. If the rule to follow becomes discriminatory then you'd have an argument - but that's not the example you brought up.
Also I'm not as optimistic as you are that some of these defenses would work.
Luckily, this is mostly the case today, and for the cases where it's not eventually a law gets passed, so there's theoretically no reason for a broader law assuming that we don't... assuming that the goal is eventual consistency, so to speak.
As a society we have decided that discriminating on some things is abhorrent (race, et al), and other things is not (hair and eye color).
The "not a protected class" counterargument is self-defeating because it suggests that discrimination was A-OK before that protected class was created by law. If illegality does not imply immorality, as is often said on HN, then conversely legality does not imply morality.
Because your property and your ability to sell goods is directly supported by the people you discriminate against.
How do people, customers and employees alike, get to your property? Roads? Helicopter overseen by the FAA? How do packages get delivered over the roads, semi, USPS, UPS/fedex. Who pays to protect your building from crime and fire, who pays for the energy infrastructure, who pays for the teachers teaching your workforce?
Your store isnt an isolated self sufficient entity, its part of a web of interconnected forces mutually benefiting each other. There is a social contract, that if you want to profit off the infrastructure of the United States, you wont discriminate.
Also, your right to private property is, itself, protected by the government. Without that protection, I could steal from your fruit stand with impunity (as long as I have the bigger gun).
Absolutely Ayn Randian stream of thought.
Could you may be think about how you were able to do the said fruit stand business in peace, take a currency as a payment and not worry about bartering, not worry about your business being stolen outright my guy with biggest muscles or how people are able to come to your fruit stand in the first place etc? Unless you are thinking of your business in a vacuum, then go ahead and fantasize.
If every business in town discriminates against purple-haired people, for example, the owners of the one business to break ranks leave themselves open to harassment up to and including being murdered. Even if no business wants to discriminate, being the first to make the move sets you apart, and open to retaliation from the consumer base. The government mandating hair-color-equality dissolves the problem very neatly.
When you run a store on your private property, you are inviting the general public onto your private property and it ceases to be as private as it was.
You can be indignant as you wish, make all the arguments that you wish, but this is how it has been for hundreds of years.
If opening a store to the public made it not private property, then well meaning rules like “no shirt, no shoes, no service” would have to be handled by local ordinance, which would be overly cumbersome.
EDIT: Here's a very recent one: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/supreme-court-justice-s-co...
Take constitutional challenge to Obamacare for example. I assume they had to point to someone specific and say "this law violates that person's rights", but they absolutely "considered" and "responded to" the hypothetical in that case.
More effective? No. You'd have endless lawsuits debating what traits do or do not affect a person's ability to perform.
Seems like we could refactor the law to just state this: You can only discriminate on bona fide qualifications.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/bona_fide_occupational_quali...
You are 100% free to post a job add saying that those with green eyes need not apply. You'll likely still be sued, and you might even lose, but it won't be due to Title VII.