Also my own position is that all forms of hiring discrimination by private enterprise should be allowed since the market should self correct if the standards by which they discriminate are unfair.
Suppose it doesn't; that is, it turns out that on the long term arbitrarily excluding a certain minority of the populace from consideration isn't normally a big enough inefficiency to cause significant competitive disadvantage to prejudiced employers. Would that be enough to make you wish for some form of anti-discrimination measure?
(As a follow-up consideration - gur fgngrzrag vf dhvgr boivbhfyl gehr tvira n fhssvpvragyl fznyy zvabevgl.)
I would be in favor of anti-discrimination measures for relativley large groups for which it can be proven that the basis on which they are discriminated against is unfair or untrue.
Its seems plausible to me that both conditions are to a large extent met for most of the groups that are currently protected in this fashion for a certain value of antidiscrim_policy. However I have severe reservations with the current implementation of antidiscrimination policies.
Overall the exact border where "doing something" seems worth while is hard to quantify...
Let's say you are interviewing a candidate for a job. In casual conversation, the candidate mentions that he is a member of a rather old and prestigious country club. You've never heard the name of the club before.
You look up the country club afterwards, and are surprised by what you read. The club refuses membership to homosexuals. It revokes the membership of couples who use birth control. Leadership positions are reserved to unmarried males.
The candidate is otherwise competent. Under what conditions would you hire him? Would you want a law passed banning hiring discrimination based on country club membership?
(The country club is analogous to a nicer version of the Catholic church. I left out a couple bad things.)
Religious discrimination is illegal in many parts of the world, and I think that's probably a good thing. Still, keeping this at the object level (no meta-rules or veils of ignorance) it seems to me that discriminating against religious people is fine. I'm curious what other people think.