Anti-LGBT Hiring Bias is Alive and Well in Virginia

Every legislative session, Republicans in the Virginia General Assembly, particularly the House of Delegates. kill legislation that would provided non-discrimination protections to LGBT Virginians in the areas of employment, housing and public accommodations.  The excuses given - if given at all - is either (ii) that there is no such discrimination or(ii) that Christofascists and bigots should have the right to abuse and mistreat their fellow citizens due to "sincere religious belief."  The first excuse is a lie as shown by a new report by the Equal Rights Center (which can be found here), and the latter is due to Republican fear of crossing the religious extremists at The Family Foundation, Virginia's leading hate group, that disingenuously pretends to be a non-profit charity.  Having been forced from a law firm when a Virginia Beach law firm took over my firm, I can assure you that bigotry exists in the employment sphere.  My experience and that of many others was confirmed by the Equal Rights Center's study and underscores why non-discrimination protections are so badly needed, especially if Virginia is to be competitive in the national and global market place.  The Virginian Pilot looks at the study findings: 

It’s one thing for a company to say they don’t take sexual orientation into account when hiring, but what do they do when they don’t think anyone is watching?

That’s what the Equal Rights Center in Washington, D.C. wanted to see. The group conducted civil rights tests at 10 businesses in Virginia — though none in Hampton Roads — using pairs of seemingly identical applicants: two men in their early 40's, one gay and one heterosexual who both earned graduate degrees and were born in Peru, and two 24-year-old white women, one who identifies as pansexual (attracted to any gender and sexual orientation) and one heterosexual, who both earned bachelor’s degrees.

The center said the pairs’ profiles when applying for jobs, “were designed so that each tester appeared substantially equal to their matched pair in every respect except sexual orientation,” and testers were trained to respond to interview situations and questions similarly.

Both would mention a husband or wife at the beginning of the interview in casual conversation, so in half the cases, a spouse of the same gender.

The test doesn’t name the businesses but the center said they conducted the ten tests in Richmond, Mechanicsville, Ashland, Colonial Heights, Aldie, Sterling, Glenn Allen, Chantilly and Leesburg.

The good news? Seven out of ten of the companies appeared to see no difference with six offering jobs to both applicants and one making no offer to either. The bad news? Two offered the heterosexual applicant a job despite the two candidates being all but identical on paper and in person. One test resulted in other employees in an interview reacting in disbelief when a male applicant mentioned his husband.

“These findings illuminate ways in which covert discrimination may go unnoticed by LGBT job applicants who, in real life, do not usually have the opportunity to compare their job seeking experiences to those of similarly positioned straight job applicants,” according to the report.

The underlying cause of such bigotry?  Generally religion, one of the most pernicious forces in the world today be it Christianity or Islam.  Both market hate and division and, in some cases, violence against others.