Quote:
Originally Posted by ganstaman
I was just tonight arguing with a friend about the definition of a sandwich. It came down to me saying that it's not something precise, with some fuzziness around the edges, and he was saying that it was precisely defined. I expected us to debate about edge cases, not about whether the edge cases were debatable.
Anyway, he was obviously wrong in his approach. As are some of you.
When the meaning of a word has legal effects, it has to be defined as precisely as possible, and that needs to be very precise. If it can't, then the idea of linking legal considerations to very undefinable words is a big mistake and should be avoided at all costs.
That should be the take away re ethnicity (and many other things), to remove it from "protected classes" (in the law, and in forum moderation) unless the vast majority of adults can agree it obviously mean the same thing for all of them.
Or, you want the law to be this extremely uncertain set of rules determined by a clerical class to which you basically want to give the keys of the kingdom.
It's not a problem if me an al-jalfrezi disagree on the meaning of ethnicity. It becomes a problem when people want to "protect" ethnicity without having a clear, objective, transparent, shared definition of it.