Hooterless Hooters

It is no secret that I believe that lawsuits are out of control and that our whiney, "I can have anything I want" population has reached a point of shame that is disheartening, to say the least. People looking back through history at this time right now will shake their heads and laugh at what people today thought was important enough to sue over or feel alarmed at how amazingly self-indulgent the people of the late 2oth and early 21st century were. I hope they will, at least. That will mean that something that can truly be called human survived and that we, maybe, got past this period of idiocy.
I hate to admit it, but the current winner for my Wall of Shame for stupid lawsuits hails from my original stomping grounds. Nikolai Grushevski, of Corpus Christi, Texas, has sued the restaurant chain Hooters, claiming that they denied him a job purely because he is male. On the surface of it, the claim is false because Hooters does have a number of jobs that use male employees. Bartenders, cooks, hosts, even managers all include male employees. Grushevski, however, specifically wanted to be a waiter and, of course, we all know that Hooters does not employ male waiters. It is rather implicit in the name of the place.
According to Grushevski and people like him (this is actually not the first time such a lawsuit has been filed against Hooters), this is sexual discrimination. They say that waiting tables is not a gender-specific job and gender should not be used as a hiring criteria. Grushevski even claims that he applied for this position because it is one of the better paying jobs in town. Having grown up around Corpus Christi, I find that claim hard to believe - there are a number of waiter position in the Corpus Christi area that would both pay better and receive higher tips - but it isn't even relative to the suit. Is Grushevski claiming that a bartender at Hooters would make less than a waitress?
Having been a waiter in south Texas, I can dismiss Grushevski's money claim out of hand. Male waiters in south Texas do not, on average, make nearly the tips that female waitresses do (I state this having been one of the highest tipped waiters in my area at the time) and a male waiter at Hooters would make pretty close to zip because he would have offended a significant portion of the customers just by being there.
That last part, however, is the important part. Hooters has spent years building up a particular brand image, and doing quite well with it. In this particular case, the job of Hooters waitress is as gender-specific as the job of Chipendale dancer. Women - most women, at least - do not go to the Chipendales expecting to see female dancers and men, on average, do not go to Hooters expecting to see male waiters. Is that discrimination? Absolutely not! There is nothing that prevents anyone from running a complimentary female dancers group (in fact, there are plenty of them) and there is nothing that prevents anyone from running a complimentary restaurant with scantily-clad male waiters.
Comparisons have been made to such ground-breaking discrimination issues as allowing women to be firefighters or men to be nurses, but the comparisons are not valid. We are not talking about businesses catering to specific customers in those cases. It would be ludicrous to open a second firehouse to hire only female firefighters (though there could definitely be a calendar and Playboy spread in the idea) and a dying person does not care who is helping so long as the helper is capable of the job.
It isn't about the vagaries of the law or the fine-tuning of social consciousness. It is about common sense. So long as the variety and options continue to exist in the wider spectrum, there is nothing wrong with a business using their own brand image requirements for hiring. An advertising campaign looks for a specific appearance in the people they hire for specific advertising jobs. Is that discrimination? The Hooters girls are Hooters biggest advertising campaign and Nikolai Grushevski needs to just go submit applications elsewhere.

Remember The Alamo

Why is it that preservationists always seem to feel required to go psychotically overboard in their preservations? Aside from that, why is it that the preservation instincts are triggered by certain names and not by others?
In a place called Locust Grove, Virginia those questions are being acted out right now. Wal-Mart is looking to build a new store in a location that is about a mile from the protected and preserved Wilderness Battlefield, an important Civil War memorial. The preservationists, for some reason, believe that this proposed location is too close to the battlefield and want to stop the Arkansas-based retailer from building. Mind you, there is already a bank and a strip mall in the same general area so what, exactly, are the preservationists trying to stop? Are they afraid of building near the site or are they merely afraid of this particular building?
As a man who grew up in south Texas and is rather more intimately attuned to an earlier break-away conflict, that of the Texas Revolution, the one thing that comes instantly to my mind is the Alamo. If there is any location that is more sacred to that state's history than this small mission in San Antonio you would be hard pressed to prove the point. The memorials at San Jacinto and Goliad are certainly close (San Jacinto was the location of ultimate victory and Goliad, like the Alamo, was a part of the battle cry that roused the Texans to that victory) but the Alamo is arguably the only battlefield from that war that has captured the imagination of the entire nation. It was, in many respects, a Texan reenactment of the famous battle of the 300 Spartans, with much the same results. It was, in short, a massacre of people who were fighting for their lives and their freedom waiting for reinforcements that would never come.
And where is that sacred shrine to be found? Almost downtown in one of the largest cities in the state. One of the largest cities in the country, in fact. If you were to vist Alamo Plaza today, you would find strip malls, banks, and retailers of various flavours sharing its streets. Not a mile away, but across a small park. Last time I was there, there were even tawdry little tourist traps in the same neighborhood.
Yet none of this has diminished the honor, the beauty, or the sacredness of the Alamo. I have taken people not from Texas, not versed in the meaning of that building to the Alamo and they instantly felt it's presence upon entering. Everything that is outside, everything that is not of its memory disappears when you step onto that hallowed ground.
I have a feeling that the preservationists in Virginia aren't really fighting to preserve a memory in this particular fight. They are fighting against a retailer they have decided they do not like. If it were otherwise, why are there already businesses in the location they are fighting? If they are truly concerned about the integrity of the Wilderness Battlefield then all I can say to them is one half of the battle cry from San Jacinto: "Remember the Alamo." You'll find that truly sacred sites are more difficult to diminish than you might believe.