Rights Veto Sends a Wrong Message : Why sail against so many Americans?

With his veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1990, President Bush has revived a divisive issue of social justice and forfeited, on this issue at least, an important share of his Administration’s moral credibility.

If the 101st Congress now becomes the first in the history of this Republic to sustain the President’s veto of a civil rights bill, the minority of senators and representatives responsible will share the blame for a needless and hurtful affront to women and members of racial, ethnic and religious minorities.

In his veto message, Bush repeated his charge that the bill “employs a maze of highly legalistic language to introduce the destructive force of quotas into our national employment system.” To strain his way to that conclusion, the President has been forced to assert that the civil rights act does not mean what it says when it states that:

“Nothing in the amendments made by this act shall be construed to require to encourage an employer to adopt hiring or promotional quotas on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.”

If that plain language constitutes a legalistic maze, fair-minded people may puzzle over how to describe the objections raised by Bush and his chief legal advisers.

They do not, after all, contend that the Civil Rights Act of 1990 requires quotas. Rather, they insist that it will lead employers to surreptitiously adopt them rather than bear the burden of legally defending discriminatory hiring and promotional practices on the basis of “business necessity.”

Monday, in a memo to Bush, Atty. General Dick Thornburgh attacked what he called the bill’s “unreasonably restrictive definition of business necessity,” because it would “force employers to defend any employment practice ‘involving selection’ by showing ‘a significant relationship to successful performance of the job.’ ”

In place of that standard, Thornburgh and Bush have urged Congress to adopt a bill that would allow employers to justify discrimination in employment or promotion on the basis of “legitimate business objectives.”

The difference implicit in these two tests is clear: Under the well-tested business necessity standard proposed by Congress, the owner of a factory would be free to impose a weight-lifting test on applicants for positions as boiler-makers, even though a disproportionate number of women would be excluded. However, the owner of a bakery hiring people to make cream-puffs would not be free to impose such a test.

But under the President’s novel “business objectives” standard, the owners of both concerns could refuse to hire or promote women or minorities simply because they believe their presence would disrupt the workplace or upset their customers.

Reasonable people will have little trouble in discerning which of these legal tests will result in discrimination. They will have greater difficulty in deciding why a President would choose to set his government’s face so firmly against the legitimate rights and aspirations of so large a number of Americans.