The human right to be told you're beautiful

Of course, she wasn't fired for being too old. She was fired for looking too old. If the 44-year-old stripper looked 24, it's pretty obvious the owners and patrons of the New Locomotion wouldn't care what her real age was.

That's an important point, because it goes to what human rights lawyers call a "bona fide occupation requirement" -- a legal exemption that allows employers to discriminate on otherwise prohibited grounds when the trait being discriminated against is central to the job.

For example, an airline could discriminate against a blind applicant for a pilot's job; or a Jewish school could discriminate against a non-Jewish applicant for a religious teaching position.

That Ouwroulis is taking her absurd case to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (the Ontario Human Rights Commission has been reorganized) is no longer shocking, considering the other insane cases heard by that tribunal. She'll probably win, too.

But her case reminded me, more than most HRC cases, of Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron", which you can read here. It's a quick read, and I recommend it highly. Here's the first paragraph:

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

The fact that the case here is an ageing stripper fighting with a strip club makes it stranger and sillier than usual. But it actually reveals, more than most other cases, the essential flaw of human rights laws and other attempts to make everyone in the world equal: we're simply not.

Ms. Ouwroulis might not like to hear it, and I'm sure the HRTO would rule that I'm sexist and ageist for saying so, but she's surely not as pretty as she once was -- her obvious plastic surgery notwithstanding.

She is asking the government to simply "declare" otherwise -- and to fine the strip club (which will pass on the cost to its patrons) for daring to think otherwise.

She may not be beautiful in the eyes of those from whom she seeks money. But, dammit, she'll get the government to declare otherwise -- and slap those cruel men with a fine for disagreeing.

I don't care about strip clubs, of course. I care about the principle that this case illustrates: for the government to enforce true equality means that it must destroy our liberty -- and it must destroy our individualism.

As the story Harrison Bergeron tells us so powerfully, there will always be someone smarter, prettier, more talented than us. We can live with it -- and ignore it, or be angered by it, or inspired by it. Or we do what Ouwroulis is doing: we can demand that the government become the great leveler, in this case, forcing strip club patrons to look at a woman they don't want to look at, in the name of equality.

Needless to say, in a future where it is illegal to treat ugly people and beautiful people differently, or smart people and dumb people differently, is a future where we are no longer allowed to be ourselves, and no longer allowed to think for ourselves about others.

This case is surely right up Barbara Hall's alley. According to the Ontario Human Rights Commission's annual reports, the number of human rights complaints in Ontario has been steadily falling over recent years. That's incredible, when you think about it -- Ontario's population is booming, and it's more multicultural than ever. There are some electoral ridings in the Greater Toronto Area, for example, where the population is more than 80% visible minority. Yet racial and religious harmony is greater every year.

The story is the same in Alberta -- booming, multicultural population, and yet human rights complaints are down 15% over last year.

If Barbara Hall's little fiefdom is going to continue getting its handsome budget each year -- a sick waste of money at the best of times, but a truly bizarre expenditure for a province that's in a recession -- it has to drum up a lot more junk lawsuits like Ouwroulis's.

Imagine what the great civil rights leaders of the 1960s would say if they were around today, to look at Barbara Hall's monstrosity of a "human rights" commission in 2008. Imagine what Martin Luther King Jr. would say about the Canadian heirs to his civil rights movement. What an embarrassment.