TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081291/0812102.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 12.7 KB | 256 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 20

COVER STORIES

Busybodies: New Puritans


Repent! The hour of the meddlers is at hand! And they are putting
other Americans' views, behavior and even jobs at increasing
risk.

By JOHN ELSON -- Reported by Ann Blackman/Washington and
Sophfronia Scott Gregory/New York, with bureau reports


    Consider, for a moment, these twin signs of our scrambled
times:

    -- In Los Angeles, Jesse Mercado was dismissed from his
job as a security guard at the Times despite an excellent
performance record. The reason? Mercado was overweight.

    -- In Wabash, Ind., Janice Bone lost her job as an
assistant payroll clerk at the Ford Meter Box Co. The reason?
The firm, which will not let its employees smoke either on the
job or at home, insisted that she take a urine test, which
proved positive for nicotine.



    Welcome, readers, to the prying side of America in the
1990s. The U.S. may still be the land of the free, but
increasingly it is also the home of dedicated neo-Puritans,
humorlessly imposing on others arbitrary (meaning their own)
standards of behavior, health and thought. To a number of
concerned observers, the busybodies -- conformity seekers, legal
nitpickers and politically correct thought police -- seem to
have lost sight of a bedrock American virtue: tolerance,
allowing others, in the name of freedom, to do things one
disagrees with or does not like, provided they do no outright
harm to others.

    "There should be limits to what we are prepared to
tolerate," says president Stephen Balch of the National
Association of Scholars, based in Princeton, N.J., which is
dedicated to fighting lockstep leftism in academia. "But in a
free society where people are going to get along, those limits
have to be pretty wide." Balch is concerned that the very
definition of tolerance is changing: more and more people see
it as "requiring others to do the kinds of things that they
consider enlightened." On many campuses, the prevailing standard
these days would appear to be that of Marxist philosopher
Herbert Marcuse, a guru for many flower-power youths during the
rebellious '60s. In his dense treatise One-Dimensional Man,
Marcuse argued that tolerance for the expression of intolerant
attitudes, like racial discrimination, should be repressed for
society's good.

    One key battleground in the tolerance war is life-style.
These days, smoking, drinking or noshing on high-cholesterol
snacks isn't just a health risk. It can endanger your job as
well. Concerned about the ever rising (about 15% annually) cost
of health insurance, at least 6,000 U.S. companies, including
Atlanta-based Turner Broadcasting, refuse to hire smokers, and
in some cases fire those who don't beat the habit, even when it
is only practiced off the job. For similar insurance reasons,
corporate discrimination against the overweight is so widespread
that some of the obese have formed a lobbying group called the
National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance.

    Meanwhile, corporate busybodies are ingeniously finding
new things to ban -- all in the interest, naturally, of
slimming health-care costs. One company in Pennsylvania,
according to the American Civil Liberties Union, has barred its
managers from riding motorcycles: too risky. A Georgia firm has
warned its employees to stay away from such life-threatening
activities as cliff climbing and surfing.

    Civil libertarians concede that companies have a right,
not to mention a moral obligation to shareholders, to protect
themselves from ruinous medical bills. But some critics argue
that the punitive firings of Mercado and Bone represent a
throwback to the early 1900s, when spies from the Ford Motor
Co.'s notorious Sociological Department invaded autoworkers'
homes to search for forbidden booze or unmarried live-ins.
(Ford's Big Brother approach was intended partly to protect its
employees from Detroit's legions of prostitutes and grifters,
who preyed on the kind of ill-educated new immigrants who often
worked on the assembly lines.)

    A counterargument is that if society requires corporations
to pay for most of workers' health-care costs, society cannot
object if those companies intrude on employee life-styles. But
as Lewis Maltby of the A.C.L.U. notes, the question then
becomes, Where do you draw the line? It is generally legal for
a company to declare its workplace a smoke-free environment and
punish violaters. How, though, can a corporation or government
agency demand that employees like Bone refrain from lighting up
away from work, especially since smoking itself is not a crime?
High cholesterol levels can lead to heart disease and other
health problems. But what right does an employer have to demand
that a worker refrain from eating fried chicken or ice cream?

    "The only thing that should be considered is job
performance," says law professor Irwin Schmerinsky of the
University of Southern California. "If the courts allow firms
to make decisions on potential costs, it's hard to know where
the restrictions will end." Most Americans appear to endorse
that view. According to a poll by the National Consumers League,
81% of Americans believe an employer has no right to refuse to
hire an overweight person and 76% feel companies should not be
allowed to ban smoking off the job.

    The nation's lawmakers are beginning to listen: 19 states,
including New Jersey, Colorado and Oregon, have passed some form
of legislation that bars employers from discriminating against
workers because of their life-style. (Despite Indiana's new
smoker-protection law, Bone has not got her former job back, and
has filed a claim against the company. Overweight Mercado sued,
won and got a judgment of more than $500,000, plus a return to
his old post.)

    The corporate life-style police are at least motivated by
real financial concerns. All too often, other life-style
busybodies are motivated by sheer bloody-mindedness. A
persistent neo-Prohibitionist move ment has added to the woes
of the nation's wine industry by pressuring the Treasury's
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms into demanding ever more
prominent and explicit health-warning labels on bottles. (One
irate California publicist responded by labeling some Lake
County Cabernet Sauvignon "Chateau le Warning" and putting the
Surgeon General's injunctions right up front. The BATF was not
amused.)

    Then there are the animal-rights zealots, who sometimes
seem to have greater respect for fauna than for their fellow
humans. In some bastions of correct thinking, a woman wearing
an ermine coat stands more chance of being attacked by an
egg-throwing lover of stoats than by a mugger. (The fur-wearing
woman's offense would be compounded if she were eating a veal
sandwich or carrying a non-biodegradable Styrofoam container of
coffee.)

    More than anyone else except the French, Americans have
been infected by the delusion that strict laws are necessary to
protect people from themselves. The nation's statute books are
crammed with millions of useless and largely unenforceable
regulations, like the one in Seattle that bars flu sufferers
from going out in public. Most of the rules are ignored, but
their existence is a constant source of inspiration to the
puritanically minded.

    Yet perhaps out of frustration that serious crime seems to
be leaping out of control, some guardians of the law have taken
to enforcing these juridical minutiae with singular
determination. Consider Cobb County, Ga., where serious crimes
like robbery have increased since 1990. The Wall Street Journal
reported last week that Rebecca Anding of Marietta was arrested,
handcuffed and forced to spend six hours in jail on Easter
Sunday. Anding, who had no previous criminal record, was
apprehended picking tulips from an office park to place on her
grandmother's grave. Another Marietta resident, Linda Judson,
spent four hours in jail in May after she was apprehended for
failing to return two overdue rental tapes to a local video
store.

    Finally, of course, there are the academic enforcers of
political correctness, or "p.c.," whose efforts have received
widespread publicity but who remain, in many cases, undaunted.
In Vermont the distinguished essayist Edward Hoagland was
abruptly dismissed as a part-time lecturer at Bennington
College. The reason? Student activists convinced school
authorities that an article Hoagland had written for Esquire,
in which he argued that the spread of AIDS was owing partly to
a "gale of often icy promiscuity," was homophobic and therefore
deserved severe punishment. To be sure, Hoagland got his
teaching job at Bennington back after an investigation showed
that the college's literature department had "deviated from
proper recruitment procedures" in giving him the boot.
Nonetheless, there is a chilling effect. "Essayists have always
been unpopular because they think for themselves," Hoagland told
the Boston Globe. "I don't think the gravity of this issue has
sunk in. Nationwide and at Bennington, I don't think the
lesson's been learned."

    Hardly a week goes by without some new example of attempts
to enforce conformity on campus. At the California State
University at Northridge, an offer by the Carl's Jr fast-food
chain to install a branch in the newly expanded bookstore was
rejected last May. The reason was not the quality or price of
the chow but student and faculty objections to the conservative
views of the chain's owner, Carl Karcher, who financially
supports antiabortion groups such as the National Right to Life
Action League. To Stephen Balch, Northridge's decision was
outrageously intolerant. "You're not talking about Karcher doing
anything on campus," he says. "You're not even talking about
anything the fast-food chain did as a corporation. You're
talking about something its owner did, certainly something he
has a right to do, and something that a public institution
should certainly not penalize people for."

    The weary truth is that busybodyness is, as black radical
H. Rap Brown once said of violence, as American as cherry pie.
The Puritans, who began it all, had "a desperate and intolerant
wish to cleanse the world of its impurities," editor Lewis
Lapham of Harper's has written, and their ambition was to build
a New Jerusalem on earth despite all of life's uncertainties.
In both spiritual and secular guise, that has been a recurring
theme in U.S. history, from the Great Awakening of the early
frontier days to the noble experiment of Prohibition.

    To sociologist James Jasper of New York University,
today's would-be censors and neo-Puritans belong to two
disparate groups. One consists of those, frequently working
class in origin, who feel their status threatened by differing
life-styles -- hence their hostility to drugs and casual sex and
their sympathy for the goals of decency-obsessed media baiters
like the Rev. Donald Wildmon or Senator Jesse Helms. The other
group, Jasper says, consists of cause-oriented activists, such
as animal rightists and environmentalists, who are intent on
making people think about the consequences of letting endangered
species die out or contaminating the atmosphere with hair spray.

    Both groups have contributed to what sociologist Jack
Douglas of the University of California at San Diego calls "a
degree of self-centered moralism that is unprecedented in
American history." Douglas worries whether the pendulum will
ever swing back the other way. Among other things, he notes, the
new forms of personal intolerance occur at a time when the
common bonds of U.S. society -- our shared values, our political
understandings -- seem weaker than ever. "Maybe," he glooms,
"America is too large and diverse to be one country under
democracy any longer."

    Even those who reject Douglas' perspective might
reasonably conclude that the long war against the busybodies has
to be won -- if it is to be won -- a skirmish at a time, tiny
battles at the perimeter of individual privacy and choice. One
hero in this ongoing conflict is Teresa Fischette, 38, a ticket
agent for Continental Airlines at Boston's Logan International
Airport. Eager to establish a new image for its ground
personnel, the carrier last May decreed that its female ticket
agents must wear makeup. Fischette refused, was fired, but was
then offered a job where she would not be in contact with
customers. No way: Fischette filed suit. With the case gaining
national publicity, Continental gave Fischette her job back
(with back pay) and shaded back its new cosmetics code to a
guideline.

    No hard feelings, Continental. But we say, Hats off to her!