Sexual Harassment and the Workplace

So I had to come in early to work today to sit through a two hour seminar on Sexual Harassment in the Workplace.

Oh my where do I begin.

To start with, this means that I sat and listened to a lawyer explain common sense to me….for two whole hours. And so as I sat there and listened to the thirty plus situations that we were walked through all I could think about was how broken our world really is, and how we place these complex legalistic systems over that brokenness that cover up the real issue at hand.

It was kinda depressing, tell the truth. A group of the most brilliant physicists, mathematicians, engineers, and programmers (honestly these guys have Phd’s) in the entire world were eagerly asking questions so basic, so fundamental to everything I’ve ever known that at times I wanted to laugh….as if they were joking.

It seemed that the entire time we were sitting in that room, we were basically being told what we can and cannot do when it comes to interacting with our coworkers. With an emphases on what we cannot do. And I was not as surprised as I should have been that almost every question coming from the audience involved how close to the line we could get without being deemed “in the RED” by a "Reasonable Observer".

So the company policy on harassment is 3 pages, single spaced, but it can basically be summed up with this sentence:

“An integral part of this policy is to provide equal employment opportunity to applicants and employees regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, gender, age, veteran status, or disability or any other status or people group protected by applicable federal, state or local law”

Look at that for a minute. It took the lawyer 10 minutes to unpack what ” any other status protected by applicable federal, state or local law” meant. Basically it means that governments have the power to determine how “any other status or people group” is defined. The lawyer explained that in Pennsylvania, homosexuals are not defined as a “people group” but how in Philadelphia county they are. In the same manner, in Michigan fat people and short people are considered “people groups” and in North Carolina this classification also applies to tobacco users. PA law also defines people over 40 to be in a people group generally referred to as “old”. Which means that if I offend anyone in any of those specific people groups in any of those specific jurisdictions I could be “terminated and/or sued” and I would almost certainly lose the case.

But doesn’t God call is higher? Aren’t we accountable to a higher court? Why does it matter if I call someone fat in Michigan instead of Ohio? The problem is that I don’t view them as a child of God. How messed up and off aim can our legal system get?

I was fascinated at how these brilliant minds tried to wrap their minds around how to “avoid the red” instead of how to pursue the green. Not once in the entire lecture were we told what we should be doing instead. Not once did I hear that instead of NOT ostracizing and degrading our coworkers for being a part of a specific ethnic group, or country, or age bracket that we should value and cherish what their background brings to the workplace, that instead of NOT pressuring our coworkers to sleep with us, or looking at pornography on company computers, or treating clients to strip clubs, or making “sexual jokes or use of sexually explicit or offensive language; gender or sex-based pranks” that we were to value, respect, and love the men and women in our lives, thanking God for the blessing of even meeting them, and to viewing sex as a divine gift that God has given to us in the holiness of marriage to paint a picture of heaven.

How did we get here? We're completly missing the point. In John 15, does Jesus say, “This is my command: Don’t Sin” NOOOO! He says, “Love each other”. And really if you think about it, my three page “Equal Employment Opportunity Policy” can really be summed up (and drastically improved) in those three words as well.