Mollie Hemingway cited this column at Vox as the dumbest response to the non-story that Vice President Pence takes modest, prudent steps to guard his marriage.

I made a joke late last night that today’s Pence fidelity stories would be even stupider. I wish I’d been wrong. pic.twitter.com/ilE6oVWy3I

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) March 31, 2017

Joanna L. Grossman, an attorney who specializes in employment law, asserts:

[T]he practice described by Pence in that 2002 interview is clearly illegal when practiced by a boss in an employment setting, and deeply damaging to women’s employment opportunities.

Title VII, which governs workplace discrimination, does not allow employers to treat people differently on the basis of certain protected characteristics, one of which is sex. This means that an employer cannot set the terms and conditions of employment differently for one gender than for the other. This includes any aspect of the relationship between employer and employees — extending to benefits like equal access to the employer.

It might be the dumbest hot take on the Pences. But it’s also deeply revealing.

The Left Wants to Police Every Aspect of Life

I’m not a lawyer. I can’t comment on how well Grossman has parsed the relevant statutes. But it’s clear what she has in mind. There is no aspect of life, however private, that the left doesn’t want to police.

Every decision, however personal, stands beneath the prying eyes of prosecutors and tort lawyers.

A man cannot decide whom to eat with. He cannot take basic steps to guard the sanctity of his marriage. His every decision, however personal, stands beneath the prying eyes of prosecutors and tort lawyers. (Just so, his teenage daughter must endure the prying eyes of boys in her locker room in the name of “transgender” rights, but that’s another article.)

Why? Because his decisions might, just might alter the career prospects of an employee. That wouldn’t matter if the employee were a straight white male — and hence not a member of one of discrimination law’s “protected classes.”

But a member of almost any other group, if fired or chided or slighted, can call in napalm strikes from federal, state, and local regulators with very deep pockets. You need not even prove the intent to discriminate. An accidental “disparate impact” is enough to win a fat legal judgment.

White Males Need Not Apply

When I got my Ph.D. in English lit, I didn’t even bother to apply for a teaching job. Every single job posting I saw explicitly said that it was especially looking for nonwhites and women. They might as well have read, “No Irish Need Apply.” But that was all perfectly legal.

Let’s leave the workplace and look at colleges. Aren’t fraternities the constant focus of attacks by school administrators and muckraking journalists? Harvard is trying to quash the last few all-male clubs on campus. Most of the all-male colleges in America have been made co-ed under pressure. All-female schools still survive because they claim to serve a feminist goal: forging female leaders, without the “suppressive” presence of men.

Freedom of Association: A Basic Human Right

Freedom of association, a crucial liberty, has been eaten away by laws aimed at forcing equal outcomes. Isn’t it chilling that discrimination attorneys want to force Vice President Pence to renounce the pact he made with his wife to honor their marriage? That EEOC bureaucrats could dictate with whom he socializes in his off-hours?

(Don’t miss, by the way, this eloquent piece by a woman who once worked for Pence describing what a dreamboat, fair-minded boss he was.)

Yet feminists like Grossman have no problem at all intruding into the intimate details of a marriage. Not if it serves the higher purpose of promoting equality, by bashing once-dominant groups.

Freedom of association is a basic human right. Like the right to own firearms, it can be abused. But that’s no excuse for the state wiping it out entirely.

It’s really galling to pick out just one group of citizens and say that this group, unlike every other, won’t have this right. Once Jim Crow states used gun control laws to disarm ex-slaves. Now leftists use anti-discrimination laws to make white males into second-class citizens.

Just Let Them Die of Despair?

Yes, we want to stop real workplace bias. But how can we justify stripping just one group of people (men, or whites, or especially white men) of a basic human right? Perhaps it’s no accident that the least-privileged members of this group are now suffering an epidemic of “deaths of despair,” while leftists shrug or snicker.

Freedom of association is a basic human right. Like the right to own firearms.

Social justice warriors don’t care about human rights for individual humans — just evening the score for past sins committed by the long-dead. As Christians, we don’t want to see angry, race-based groups like the Alt-Right advance in America. To prevent that pushback, we all need the state to back down and stop intruding on every human interaction — from college boys playing foosball to the Pences protecting their vows.