Okay, so now the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy is coming back into the public eye. Frankly, it has always annoyed me. Clinton had some good ideas, but this was not one of them. And I think that kind of policy is useless not only in the military, but also in all the other places it's put into practice.
There are various possible kinds of "don't ask, don't tell" policies... including the one that is commonly used for interviewing anyone for any job. Of course, depending on the company, this policy may or may not apply to sexual orientation, but it generally does apply to such things as ethnicity, religion, marital status and disability. Questions on such subjects are referred to as "illegal" questions, but interviewers are not technically prohibited from asking them; they are just prohibited from requiring the applicant to answer them.
On the one hand, I can see why the law tries to keep interviewers from finding out things that might cause them to discriminate against the applicant. If you want to prevent discrimination, it's not enough just to prohibit choosing applicants based on religion, ethnicity, disability, etc. For instance, if a company refuses to hire a certain applicant who is known to have a disability, there is absolutely no way to prove that they did it because of the disability. You can't prove why people did something, because that information exists only in those people's heads... and sometimes it's buried pretty deep in there. They may even have convinced themselves they're doing it for an acceptable reason. There is only one way to make sure people don't discriminate against you: Make sure they never find out that you have any traits they might discriminate against.
But sometimes that's impossible. If an applicant refuses to answer an "illegal" question, it will pretty much always be assumed that the answer is something the interviewer doesn't want to hear, and that will be taken into account when deciding whether to hire the applicant. Obviously, the system doesn't work.
One could make it a little stricter, so that interviewers could actually be punished for asking such questions-- but that still wouldn't be foolproof, because lots of applicants wouldn't even know that the questions were illegal, and if one of them did decide to charge the interviewer with asking an illegal question, it would be very difficult to prove him guilty. And, of course, if the interviewer broke the rule and asked the question, an applicant who replied "You aren't supposed to ask that" would still be assumed to be gay, disabled, of an unwanted religion, or whatever the question was about.
One could try to deal with this problem by penalizing both "asking" and "telling"... not only making it punishable for the interviewer to ask the question, but also making it punishable for the applicant to reply either yes or no. The only advantage of this: if the applicant refused to answer the question, it could be seen as an attempt to avoid committing a crime, instead of an admission that the answer would be unattractive to the interviewer.
But it would create a lot more problems. Applicants would have to be constantly on guard to avoid mentioning anything that could give the answer away, even if it were not an unattractive answer. For example, if such a policy were used in the military, a male applicant who happened to mention his wife or girlfriend at any point in the selection process would essentially be stating that he was not gay, thus violating the rule against "telling," and earning whatever punishment the law provided for that offense.
The only conclusion I can come to is that it's impossible for any kind of "don't ask, don't tell" policy to work worth crap. That's why so many people can't get hired for any job-- because there's no even remotely workable way to prevent discrimination. And it's especially impossible for it to work the way it's set up in the military, where the law requires discriminating against any applicant who gives the unwanted answer.
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