Accusations Busybodies: New Puritans Repent!

By John Elson

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 movement 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!

Ann Blackman/Washington and Sophfronia Scott Gregory/New York, with bureau reports