[locofocos]

Precisely. I'm trying to understand the resistance in good faith, but the article didn't explain their position very clearly.

"It's already prohibited" - so why the fierce opposition?

"Passing a law against discrimination of X will stigmatize X" - Imagine someone was making this argument for an existing federally protected class.

[tekla]

People do not want to import this shit into the US.

They left these systems behind, and making a law codifies the system into law, which is kinda fucked up.

I myself have seen discrimination in non obvious ways (not Indian but exact same idea where your birth dictates certain societal ideas about you) , and would be absolutely pissed if anyone made a law that protects against that because discrimination is already protected against.

I REALLY do not want the Govt to literally categorize me into a bucket I do not give a shit about, and now everyone wants to codify a system that I would rather just fade away into time.

[catlover76]

This makes so little sense I can't really tell whether or not this is in good faith.

> People do not want to import this shit into the US.

You realize people discriminating on this basis are the ones "importing this shit into the US", right?

> I REALLY do not want the Govt to literally categorize me into a bucket I do not give a shit about

You realize that this law wouldn't involve the government compiling a list of the caste background of every Hindu in America from ahead of time right?

> now everyone wants to codify a system that I would rather just fade away into time.

How does it "codify" the caste system to allow people who are being discriminated on its basis to have a better shot at obtaining legal redress for the wrong being done to them?

[tpmoney]

>This makes so little sense I can't really tell whether or not this is in good faith.

It makes a degree of sense. Pick some other non standard "trait" for dividing people and imagine that we need laws for all of them for anti discrimination.

Anti-discrimination laws for your astrological sign, for the color of your chi, for the phrenological map of your skull, maybe ones for your INTJ profile, your New Thought energy types, the amount of toxins in your blood, your blood type, the balance of your humors, your aura, your chakras, your graphology.

I'm not sure I would really want a law codifying astrological signs and banning discrimination based on them. Not because I think you should be discriminating based on astrological signs, but because I don't think our government should be giving any serious legal weight or discussion to the concept of astrology at all. If it's a serious enough problem, I'd rather we work on crafting a law that more specifically codifies the few things we do allow discrimination on, than the innumerable things we won't.

[cataphract]

Regardless of the merits of this law, your take is very simplistic. All laws are trade-offs and they achieve their purposes imperfectly and with side effects. Not to mention the administration of the law (the justice system) is far from perfect.

Just to give a perhaps contrived example based on what the GP said. We can imagine that companies start worrying about the caste of their employees (or just if they're indians) when they otherwise wouldn't, and constrain their actions lest they be exposed to higher legal jeopardy down the line.

[catlover76]

How is my take simplistic? I wasn't even really arguing in favor of the law, nor was I opining on the concern you raise about the chilling effect on companies in terms of hiring Hindu employees (I think your point is reasonable).

I was merely pointing out several inane things about the post to which I was replying. That post raised no reasonable arguments for its position, and showed a lot of ignorance about what the law would actually do.

[ribosometronome]

>absolutely pissed if anyone made a law that protects against that because discrimination is already protected against

Why would this piss you off? It's a little redundant, I suppose, but that hardly seems particularly upsetting. Specifically, this bill looks like it updated CA's definition to clarify that ancestry based descrimination include caste, where caste was defined as:

>(aa) “Caste” means an individual’s perceived position in a system of social stratification on the basis of inherited status. “A system of social stratification on the basis of inherited status” may be characterized by factors that may include, but are not limited to, inability or restricted ability to alter inherited status; socially enforced restrictions on marriage, private and public segregation, and discrimination; and social exclusion on the basis of perceived status.

I'm not really seeing where the government is codifying you into a group you don't want to be in. The idea seems to be based on the discrimanator's perception of what groups you are in. Without this clarification, though, I'm not sure how Newsom (or anyone) can be confident of judicial interpretation of law, especially given that he notably was complaining recently about a judge's interpretation of the law.

>I would rather just fade away into time.

Would you say that most of the progress on dismantling caste-related issues has been by way of the government actively ignoring its existence?

I'm pretty American and thus largely ignorant about most things but especially India's history and how this issue has been addressed and changed over time, but American history doesn't have many examples of places where the things people discriminated on simply faded away. Most have required active efforts to get to where they are today and obviously where it's at is still not a great place.

[idopmstuff]

> because discrimination is already protected against

Some discrimination is protected against, but this statement is far too broad to be accurate. I can discriminate against you because of who you vote for or what car you drive or which NFL team you root for.

[riku_iki]

I think companies have very well established term for this: "culture fit".

[olliej]

What are you talking about?

The whole point of caste based discrimination is that people are putting you, as you say, in a bucket and then discriminating on that basis. By having such discrimination be legal you ensure that such discrimination is (a) legal, and (b) gets to be entrenched in the US.

[huytersd]

It’s impossible for it to get entrenched because people from India can’t even tell a persons caste unless they are from the same cluster of towns and villages. This is Indian “county specific” knowledge that cannot survive a cosmopolitan society.

[olliej]

Uh, no it’s not?

You can [and people do] use family names as an effective proxy for caste, and if you’re planning on discriminating on caste that’s more than enough. The Dalit's (in the case of Cisco) are not all the same "village" as the people they're claiming are discriminating against, and it's bizarre you would think that clusters of immigrants from a country of a billion people would magically already know each other.

I know of people who through marriage had their family name change from a lower caste to a higher one, and experience an immediate drop in questions of the “how could you get here?” Form.

More to the point: if it were already impossible to discriminate based on caste then this law would not impact anyone.

[dooraven]

Yeah maybe in North India.

South India it's pretty impossible, since it went through the self respect movements and basically got rid of surnames. Most south indians have surnames based on their fathers names.

But it is definitely common to use surnames as proxies in North Indian communities (unfortunately)

[huytersd]

You don’t have to “magically” know each other, you just have to know what the last name implies. What I’m saying is that knowledge is very locally specific.

[0thgen]

there is an interview with a person from India involved in a caste discrimination lawsuit that people should watch: https://youtu.be/XhGZUE1ABuo?si=r9DVUDAoexoS0-aB

they make similar arguments about why they feel the bill is a bad idea

[bsder]

> People do not want to import this shit into the US.

It already exists whether you wish to acknowledge it or not.

The question, at the end of the day, is whether or not existing law is sufficient. Presumably we are expecting that caste falls under "religion or creed" in terms of protected characteristics.

Has that actually been established?

[dataflow]

No idea what the actual reason is, but I could potentially understand the argument that passing such laws would suggest to courts that other categories that they might've thought were already intended to be protected perhaps actually weren't so.

Moreover, every new law carries a risk of having unintended consequences. So the argument may well be as simple as, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

(That said, I don't get the impression everyone who opposed it did so for the same reasons.)

[phpisthebest]

>>so why the fierce opposition?

Because anytime you pass unnecessary laws you open the future up to some judge somewhere, or some prosecutor some where twisting the words to mean something completely different

Happens all the time in society and the fact that people believe it is acceptable to simply duplicate laws is very dangerous

We need a massive curbing of the number of laws in society as it is, personally in think for every law that is passed they should be forced to repel one.

[ethanbond]

Would make sense if this wasn't being proposed specifically in response to specific real things happening in actual reality today which the law is failing to address.

[phpisthebest]

Well clearly many people disagree that is an actual reality to today, and if it is the problem would be a symptom of a much deeper issue not addressed by the bill at all, and in fact would probably make the root cause worse

That is today we seem to be moving away from the "melting pot" of multiculturalism were we are all one nation made of many, to a salad bowl of multiculturalism where we lose the "one nation" part, and communities are splintering / siloing themselves off from one another inside one geographic bloc

We need the melting pot to return... that is the only way multiculturalism actually works.

[huytersd]

Codifying into law a dying system only prolongs it. Unless you have people from hyper local regions working together, no one can even tell caste. People from different parts of the same state in India can’t even tell apart castes.

[catlover76]

The one good faith argument is that Hindus feel targeted by it because, de facto, this is about higher-caste Hindus discriminating against low-caste Hindus.

Whether or not that's particularly convincing or a reason not to pass it is debatable, but I think it's a valid reason that merits consideration.

Any reasoning beyond this ends up being gobbledygook.

[bradleyjg]

This is not a reasonable complaint unless there is no discrimination. If there is discrimination then it’s entirely reasonable to target it.

[olliej]

I mean there are plenty of caste based systems in many religions, perhaps of relevance to the US are Mormonism and Scientology which both have ranking systems that determine options for people in the religion (and who have tried to leave it).

It's also worth noting that if you are born in a specific caste, and convert from your religion, you will still be subjected to caste discrimination from the folk in the original religion.

Obviously under the rules of the current Supreme Court anyone can claim their bigotry is because "religion" and carry on doing it. Don't want to serve someone? claim doing so violates your religious beliefs. Renting a property? ditto. Employment? again.

[catlover76]

I don't think Mormonism/LDS has anything like the Hindu caste system (I neither know nor care about Scientology)

I'd be interested to know whether any other major religion has anything quite like the caste system.

[olliej]

Mormonism and scientology both have castes, albeit in varying forms of "ranking". A person of a lower rank is always subservient to the higher ranked version, which is castes.

There may be a degree of mobility between ranks, but mormonism at least makes it explicit that a black person for instance starts at a subservient rank, and can never reach the top rank, as that is reserved for white people.

Your position in a job, or the availability of that job, or housing, or in fact anything, should never be restricted simply due to some religious doctrine.

[huytersd]

It is though. It’s exactly that, a “ranking” passed from father to child that’s relatively influid.

[belltaco]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/30/anti-sharia-...

[bigstrat2003]

> "It's already prohibited" - so why the fierce opposition?

Because making something double illegal is a waste of time at best, and at worst would be actually harmful if there are unforeseen negative consequences.