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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: j_b who wrote (5057)	9/23/1998 5:18:00 PM
From: dougjn	Respond to of 67261

<<I agree with you regarding extremes and harassment charges. The problem is in drawing the line. Harassment is real, and it's bad.>> Absolutely. I think what is needed is more pursuit of the really clear cases of harassment, including on behalf of those without ready means to do so, but also some tighter restrictions on what types of evidence can be pressed, and what presumptions should be made. There should be laws analogous to rape shield laws which prohibit investigations into consensual relationships a sexual harassment defendant may have had, just as defense lawyers can no longer try to prejudice a jury by presenting largely or entirely irrelevant evidence of a woman's prior consensual sexual background, in an effort to make her appear "loose". Prior instances of harassment are another matter. There should be no presumption that a relationship between two persons of different status in the same workplace involves some sort of harassment. (Outside of some extreme internal company rules there generally isn't, but one hears some pressing for it.) And harassment law should not adopt an "offends any woman" standard, regardless of how hyper-sensitive she may be. Rather there should be an offends a so called "reasonable woman" standard. The case where the Miller brewing exec successfully sued for damages after he was dismissed from work under an internal sexual harassment policy, for doing no more than repeating to a woman, in a limited rather exaggerated way, a scene from a Seinfeld episode, is and should be, illustrative. He won and should have. Surely what appears on broadcast TV is part of mainstream acceptable expression in the workplace between the sexes. Crude offensive expressions such as pinups in view are reasonably not to be allowed. But there also needs to be some accommodation of women in the workplace to men's sensibilities re: sexual banter and the like, and not wholly the other way around. Of course in the real world there very much is -- until someone sues. Then who knows? All bets are off. The law in this area is very much in flux, and almost entirely judge made, and inconsistently applied. Doug