A Major Bank Slipped Up And Showed Why Women Rarely File Sex Discrimination Cases

Of all the tactics companies use to silence women who speak up about sexual harassment, the way corporate lawyers question victims in depositions may be the most brutal.

In these taped confrontations, defense lawyers interrogate people on every aspect of their sexual histories, medical records and traumas from childhood.

Judge says businesses can discriminate so long as they write about it on Facebook

In what can charitably be described as an idiosyncratic reading of the First Amendment, a George W. Bush-appointed federal judge in western Michigan held that businesses can discriminate against LGBTQ customers so long as they explain why they did so on Facebook.

Prior to Judge Paul Maloney’s Friday opinion in Country Mill Farms v. City of East Lansing, it was well understood that the First Amendment does not protect business owners who post signs announcing “blacks need not apply” or “we don’t serve women here.” As the Supreme Court once explained in a related case, “discrimination in employment is not only commercial activity, it is illegal commercial activity,” and “we have no doubt that a newspaper constitutionally could be forbidden to publish a want ad proposing a sale of narcotics or soliciting prostitutes.”

Unequal treatment: First Nations woman denied medical coverage readily available to non-Aboriginals

A woman from Alberta has been denied coverage for dental implants to fill gaps in her mouth resulting from a cleft palate, a denial her doctor says is the result of her being Indigenous.

"I think everyone deserves the same treatment no matter what," said Summer Dawn White Eagle, who was born with a cleft lip and palate more than 20 years ago on the Siksika First Nation east of Calgary.

Federal government’s refusal to let widow into Canada 'out of line'

For 18 months, Christopher Campbell-Durufle has been trying to convince immigration officials that his mother-in-law in Colombia is a legitimate traveller with no intent to overstay her welcome in Canada.

Since 2015 the Toronto man has made three failed attempts to help Ofelia Chavez Ruiz obtain a visitor visa to see him and his wife but could not figure out the reasons for the rejections, which occurred despite documentation showing the 76-year-old woman’s strong ties — and desire to return — to her homeland.

RESP grants favour higher-income families, federal study confirms

A new federal study confirms what critics have said for years: Ottawa's centrepiece education savings program is helping higher-income families much more than needy families.

An internal evaluation of the Canada Education Savings Program, which pours more than $800 million in grants each year into the education-savings accounts of Canadian families, concludes that it is skewed toward the well-off.

Food Bank Society's Two-Tier Membership Shuns Clients, Critics Say

The Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society is facing criticism over a rule change made last year barring anyone who uses the service from full voting membership.

The membership rules undermine the dignity of people who use the service, said member Jim Spencley, who has used the food bank services intermittently over the last three years.

"We can get their charity but we can't contribute to the process," he said. "I find that offensive."

Christian Universities Increasingly Apply for Exemptions From Anti-Discrimination Rules

Six months after the US Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, Dr. Randall O'Brien, president of Carson-Newman University in Jefferson City, Tennessee, told the local CBS affiliate that "in a changing world, we want to reaffirm who we are, who we intend to be, and establish our identity as a religious school, a Christian school."

O'Brien was gleefully explaining that the 165-year-old college, established as Mossy Creek Missionary Baptist Seminary in 1851, had just been granted a US Department of Education (DOE) exemption from Title IX regulations, in effect allowing the university to continue to collect federal dollars for scholarships and sports programs despite banning unmarried, pregnant students; women who have had abortions; single mothers; and LGBTQ people from attending classes or working on campus.

Highlighting Western Victims While Ignoring Victims of Western Violence

FOR DAYS NOW, American cable news has broadcast non-stop coverage of the horrific attack in Brussels. Viewers repeatedly heard from witnesses and from the wounded. Video was shown in a loop of the terror and panic when the bombs exploded. Networks dispatched their TV stars to Brussels, where they remain. NPR profiled the lives of several of the airport victims. CNN showed a moving interview with a wounded, bandage-wrapped Mormon American teenager speaking from his Belgium hospital bed.

The South Carolina Senate Created a “Refugee Registry” That Is Exactly What It Sounds Like

The latest episode in the national freak-out over Syrian refugees is playing out in South Carolina, where the state senate has overwhelmingly passed a bill that would create state refugee registry and require state law enforcement agencies to investigate incoming refugees.

Should Employers Be Allowed to Use Their Faith to Discriminate Against Women?

When Congress passed the Women’s Health Amendment as part of the Affordable Care Act in 2009, it was seeking to combat discrimination against women in the U.S. healthcare system. The amendment was a long overdue step to make sure that women are not left without insurance for such basic services as mammograms or contraception.

In Hartley Bay, a Four-Decade Fight to Dump Diesel Continues

Cameron Hill will never forget the cold October night in 1975 when a diesel generating plant breakdown cut all power to Hartley Bay's homes and water treatment. Completely isolated 140 kilometres south of Prince Rupert on British Columbia's north coast, the village and home community of the Gitga'at First Nation (pronounced "Git-Gat") was completely on its own.

"Six weeks later, the power was still out," says Hill, 47, now the school principal and a 20-year Gitga'at band councillor. More than anything else, he remembers watching his family's winter supply of salmon, halibut, moose and berries defrost and spoil in their multiple freezers.

Discriminatory Tax Goes Beyond Women's Tampons

While the rally cries of 'don't tax my vagina' are confronting and provocative, there is far less understanding concerning the gendered implications of how governments tax income, savings and wealth, and redistributes this using the transfer system.

While women clearly face a wide variety of circumstances that may affect their savings balances, decision to seek work, and superannuation payouts -- no single issue appears to affect the female experience as directly as the marginal costs of tax, welfare and childcare. As a result, tax and transfer policies (i.e. the money the government taxes its citizens and uses to transfer to the public interest) are a far larger concern than the media tends to make out.

Georgia Bill Allows Open Discrimination Against Gay People

WASHINGTON -- Georgia is considering passing a law that would let any taxpayer-funded organization deny services to same-sex couples, or unmarried couples in general, by citing religious freedom.

The bill, HB 757, was originally intended to protect ministers from having to perform marriages that violate their religious beliefs. (Members of the clergy already have that right under the First Amendment, but sometimes lawmakers just like to pass bills to make a statement.) That version of the bill passed the House last month.

Trump’s Attorneys Are Trying To Silence The Staffer Accusing Him Of Discrimination

DAVENPORT, IOWA — Attorneys for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump are trying to stop Elizabeth Mae Davidson, the woman accusing the Trump campaign of gender discrimination, from speaking publicly about her allegations, Davidson’s attorney told ThinkProgress on Monday.

Davenport-based labor attorney Dorothy O’Brien said Trump’s attorneys contacted her client shortly after news broke on Sunday that Davidson was taking legal action against her former employer. Davidson was a field organizer for the Trump campaign in Iowa before she was fired on Jan. 14, one day after a New York Times article reported problems with the team Davidson worked for.

Sale of concert tickets a ‘fixed game,’ inquiry finds

ALBANY, N.Y. — Had a hard time getting a ticket to a concert or sporting event? New York’s attorney general says that’s probably because more than half of tickets to many events are held for industry insiders or otherwise unavailable to the general public.

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in a report released Thursday that his investigation of the industry was prompted by consumer complaints, which his office receives regularly.

Ottawa discriminated against kids on reserves, human rights panel says

OTTAWA—The federal government discriminated against children on reserves in its funding of child welfare services, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled Tuesday.

The quasi-judicial body was ruling on a 2007 complaint from the Assembly of First Nations and The First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, who had argued the federal government failed to provide First Nations children the same level of services that exist elsewhere.

9 Ways Police Have More Protections Than You Do When They're Arrested

The police reform advocates who have long argued that cops shouldn't be allowed to investigate themselves for wrongdoing now have some new data to back them up. Earlier this month, four activists affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement launched Check the Police, a database of police union contracts from departments in 50 cities. After scrutinizing the documents, the project's creators identified four key provisions by which the contracts shield officers from accountability, or receive rights and courtesies not available to most civilian suspects.

The Hidden and Deadly Bias of Class

White working-class voters have been a key building block of the Republican coalition since the rise of the Reagan Democrats 35 years ago. You would think that the party’s presidential candidates would want to respond to the heartbreaking crisis these Americans are facing.

Two Princeton economists, Angus Deaton and Anne Case, issued a study last week that should push what the writers Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb called the “hidden injuries of class” to the center of our political conversation. Deaton and Case found that the death rates for whites 45 to 54 who never attended college increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people between 1999 and 2014. They unearthed a startling rise in suicides as well as diseases related to alcohol and drugs.

Canada’s Justice System Is Totally Racist and Classist: Study Confirms the Obvious

The disproportionately high rate of visible minorities and poor people in Canada's prisons is rooted in the discriminatory decisions made by the politicians who run our cities, a recent study claims.

McGill professor Jason Carmichael analyzed the factors that determine the size of a city's police force and discovered it had little to do with crime rates. Rather, he found officials determined the number of officers on the ground based primarily on the size of the city's visible minority and lower-income populations, regardless of criminality.

PMO's Syrian refugee audit looked at religion, whether some groups benefitted

An audit of Syrian refugee files ordered by the Prime Minister’s Office in the spring was not limited to potential security concerns, but examined all aspects of the process – including whether Christians and other vulnerable groups were getting priority status.

The Syrian refugee crisis threatened to hijack the federal election campaign again on Thursday, after the Globe and Mail reported that Citizenship and Immigration Canada stopped processing Syrian refugee applications that it had received from the United Nations.