Discrimination

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15490760

'There is a substantial and growing body of evidence to back up the claim that children born in certain months do better at school because they are the oldest in the year'

I have seen this before (famously in Malcolm Gladwell's bestselling book), and it is a very sad thing. Why can't people educate children according to maturity, not age? Surely a good educational system pushes children through lessons as they learn the subject, not according to an average schedule?
Things like this make me sorely tempted to support nuclear family life, simply because of the opportunity for home-schooling children, and therefore allowing children to proceed at their own pace.
I only started making it into sports teams at 15 or so, and never the firsts, and according to research on school years, that's an impressive enough achievement, given that I'm an August birthday.
It's shocking that a segment of the population can be systematically denied access to sporting achievement and training (training because only the best at a young age are selected for further sporting coaching, and their superiority then becomes self-fulfilling). If being born in August changed the colour of a person's skin, this would have been a cause of national outrage decades ago, but discrimination is never thought of as an abstract problem that people should avoid in any setting. It seems to be only specific to race, sex and perhaps class and religion.
Many people would laugh if I were to claim that I have suffered discrimination. As a white male from a (relatively: i.e enough to count as rich but not rich enough to get anything special in life) privileged background I am the evil oppressor. And yet as an August birthday cursed with shyness as a child and unusual opinions on religion, relationships and social conformity (this last one remaining an opinion, and mostly invisible), I have been liable to quite serious isolation and lack of equal treatment. I have not suffered as much as maybe even 70% of the population, but I nonetheless object to the idea that there is therefore no injustice to be corrected. All discrimination is the same.
It's difficult to legislate for social relationships, and so I don't think there's much room for a legal solution to the judgemental attitudes people have towards me, but that does not mean that someone who thinks I should lose my job because I don't necessarily believe marriage and female purity to be good things is not as wrong as someone who thinks another person should lose his job because he sings Allah's praises in his spare time.
Both opinions are repulsive, and for the same reason.

I do think that sexism, racism and these other discriminations do not deserve special treatment. That itself is unwarranted discrimination! Discrimination, in its illegal form, should be an abstract concept of using inappropriate characteristics to bias what ought to be a fair contest. Outside of the law, it remains a problem of judging people for characteristics that are not illegal or harmful. I know that I can slip into society in a way that a victim of racism cannot, because I can at least hide my opinions and desires (and even shyness, to an extent). That doesn't make me happy with the situation.

If I were to judge a banker on the sheer naked greed he displays, I might judge it not to be a virtue because of the negative effect I perceive it has on society through a variety of routes. I am open to being persuaded that it is a virtue, although I've had that argument (not with a banker) and am not convinced.
When I am judged for, say, thinking that the notion of female purity is an arbitrary and pointless imposition on people's sex lives, it is an absolute moral condemnation with no justification. In so far as there can be any, it is that the more people question such ridiculous cultural bulwarks, the less likely they are to be obeyed, and so anyone with a particular inclination that way, or who is somehow invested in the current cultural imposition, will feel less comfortable if my opinions are allowed.
But feeling comfortable when your opinions are widely shared is not an adequate basis for judging someone's worth. The whole purpose of an open and free society is that people can hold a diverse array of opinions, as long as those do not involve destroying the openness of society. And yet many westerners seem to think that actually the greatness of our society is not its openness, or its freedom of speech, but the fact that people tend to say what they've been trained to hear.

I wish people understood what tolerance and openness mean. I think that a central aspect of these is moral relativism (to which I often return when writing these posts), because without it of course one will judge others inappropriately. So much discrimination remains un-noticed precisely because it hasn't got a big name for itself such as sexism or homophobia. It happens in small ways when someone sees 'the wrong pair of shoes', judges a shy person as rude for being unengaging, or a girl for her choice of clothing. Most of our moral ideas have been passed into law, except for people's many and varied concepts of purity and arbitrary standards of behaviour (when they don't harm others). These standards are indeed arbitrary, and a basic understanding of moral relativism will prevent people from judging others on the basis of their own unjustifiable beliefs.
There is a world of difference between
"I wouldn't do that." and
"You shouldn't do that."

People can pay all the lip service they like to tolerance, freedom and 'meritocracy', but without the basic acknowledgement that purity is a chemical concept, not a moral one, and that moral relativism is unavoidable, lip service is all it is. The odd campaign might obtain a small break for one special behaviour that requires tolerance, such as homosexual activity, but until people actually incorporate moral relativity into their beliefs and education, all that our anti-discrimination worries will get us is discrimination against only those minorities who are too small even to campaign as a noticeable group.
There is an infinite range of activities and beliefs (near enough), and an impressive enough array of possible characteristics. We need to teach people about discrimination as an abstract concept, not as something that happens to blacks, gays and women.