Are homeless people protected by antidiscrimination laws? I was in a restaurant in New Jersey (USA) recently and witnessed the owners telling a (possibly) homeless person that he couldn't come inside because he smelled too bad. Is this legal? More generally, are restaurants and other stores allowed to refuse entry to people for "looking homeless"? I often wonder about this in NYC, where I can imagine store owners wanting to create a "high-class" atmosphere in their store, but at the same time facing possible discrimination laws (and of course ethical issues).
Anti-discrimination laws apply to certain protected classes only. Homelessness (real or assumed) is not one of them, so it is perfectly legal to bar such people from your premises. It is also perfectly legal to bar people with red hair (assuming this is not indirect discrimination against certain racial groups). Nobody is required to serve everybody who comes in; what you are not allowed to do is ban women, homosexuals or other groups set out in the applicable statutes.
There are regulations governing occupational safety, whereby e.g. an employer can be fined for forcing employees to work in a literally toxic environment, for instance breathing chlorine gas. You could file a complaint with a state or federal agency (OSHA). You would need to hire a labor lawyer to get advice about your specific circumstance, to see if there is indeed a provision that covers what you describe, though I doubt it would. OSHA's blurb on disease don't obviously cover your situation (they describe situations that govern healthcare workers in intimate contact with infectious materials). However, certain diseases such as TB or Ebola cause a general health quarantine to be imposed, so if a worker comes in with such a disease, action would be taken by the health department. This does not cover sniffles, and probably not pertussis (but that's a local decision). There are also regulations pertaining to disabled employees, whereby an employee who is disabled by having a severely compromised immune system can be entitled to reasonable accommodation, for example allowed to work in a closed room away from others (if the job is not a receptionist job). That entitlement only applies to the employee, and is controlled by objective health danger (requires a doctor's note), and not the comfort level of the employee.
Yes Businesses (and consumers) can choose who to do business with and what information they ask for and disclose and when they do that. If you’re uncomfortable with how they do business, don’t deal with them. If they don’t like how you do business, they are free not to deal with you. This is called discrimination. However, it is not unlawful because only discrimination against a person due to membership of a protected classes is unlawful. This person “won’t answer my questions” is not discrimination based on a protected class (unless they are a monk who has taken a vow of silence).
"Public space" is not a relevant criteria when considering trespass or other crimes/torts against property. The relevant criteria is who owns it and what they allow you to do on it. All land in the USA is owned by someone. That someone may be a government; that does not make it a public space - Camp David is owned by the US government; it is certainly not public. The owner of the land can decide (subject to the law) who has access to their land and in what circumstances. If they erect a fence then they are saying "You cannot access my land here" - if you ignore this then you are trespassing. This is true even if there are legitimate ways to access the land i.e. there is a place where there isn't a fence; to avoid trespass you would have to access the land from there. If you think of this in terms of a public building like a courthouse you are free to enter through the unlocked front doors but not by climbing through a window. The trespass is in the act of crossing the fence - that is the act that you have been implicitly denied permission to do. Being on one side or the other is not trespass. For the specific image that you show it is quite likely that those roads are owned by different people - the highway is probably owned by the state while the cul-de-sac is a local government road.
Google is very helpful in this regard. I typed nyc restaurant bath and it suggested nyc restaurant bathroom law, the first result being http://www1.nyc.gov/nyc-resources/service/2360/restaurant-bathroom-requirements. It says: You can make reports about any food establishment with 20 or more seats that has no toilet and was established after 1977. These establishments must provide toilets for their patrons. Food establishments that have been in operation since 1977 or before are exempt from this requirement. Food establishments with 19 or fewer customer seats are not required to provide bathroom access to the public. Food establishments are not required to allow public access to their employee toilets. Patrons are not permitted to use any toilets where the patron must walk through the kitchen or any food storage or food preparation area. Call 311 to report a restaurant with 20 or more seats that has no toilet and was opened after 1977.
It is not legal for an employer to discriminate on the basis of sex anywhere in the US (see http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/sex.cfm). Exemptions exist where the discrimination is for bona fide occupational qualifications and, irrelevantly, religious reasons. It is completely legal for a consumer to discriminate on the basis of anything they want to. It is also legal for a business to assist the consumer in that discrimination. Bona fide occupational qualifications generally only apply to instances in which the BFOQ is considered reasonably necessary to the normal operation of a particular business. Mere customer satisfaction, or lack thereof, is not enough to justify a BFOQ defence, as noted in the cases Diaz v. Pan Am. World Airways, Inc. and Wilson v. Southwest Airlines Co.. Therefore, customer preference for females does not make femininity a BFOQ for the occupation of flight attendant. However, there may be cases in which customer preference is a BFOQ—for example, femininity is reasonably necessary for Playboy Bunnies. Customer preference can "'be taken into account only when it is based on the company's inability to perform the primary function or service it offers,' that is, where sex or sex appeal is itself the dominant service provided." None of the occupations you mention would, on the face of it, meet the requirements to be BFOQ. Allowing their customers to express a preference for a specific gender may impact on the capacity for the business to deliver on that preference but it would not generally allow a BFOQ defence if this impacted their hiring policies. A possible exception is if the business catered to that preference exclusively, for example, an all female gym with all female staff but I am not aware that this has ever been tested and if a male personal trainer wanted to take them on he may very well win. As an aside, there is no BFOQ defence for racial discrimination except for artistic works where the first amendment rights overrule the anti-discrimination laws.
Excluding "ridiculously unacceptable conditions", it is legal to have "non-uniform" contract terms (where a company treats different classes of individuals differently), provided that the basis for distinction is not statutorily prohibited (race, religion, age, sex... depending on jurisdiction). There is a extremely slim chance that apparently legal income-discrimination can be a proxy for another form of illegal discrimination. However, "ridiculously unacceptable conditions" are unlikely to be found to be enforceable, regardless of any demographic properties associated with the condition. E.g. a clause requiring the surrender of a first-born female child would be unenforceable as "unconscionable". The specific circumstances surrounding such a finding by the court can't easily be summarized, since it relies heavily on prior case law, statutes, and legislative declarations. The underlying premise behind using the doctrine of unconsionability in such a case is that the clause in question is not something that a reasonable person would agree to, but they have no power to disagree. In the US, the case Williams v. Walker-Thomas Furniture is the leading case on this view. The clause in question was about a payment plan for furniture and the condition that no furniture could be paid off until all of it was. The consequence of the clause was that all of the furniture could be repossessed if any payment was missed, regardless of how much had already been paid. Various factors went into the court's ruling (that the condition was unenforceable), such as "absence of meaningful choice", "terms which are unreasonably favorable to the other party", :gross inequality of bargaining power". In the circumstance that you allude to, it is not obvious that the courts would follow Williams in making their ruling – it would depend on the extent to which one could reasonable conclude that the customer understood and freely accepted the term. There are upper limits on what a court can enforce, so a contract requiring a party to commit suicide would be utterly unenforceable (in most countries), and a contract requiring a party to break the law would be likewise.
I'm a notary. If someone showed me a marked-up license, I'd refuse to perform the notarization, and make a note of the persons name and phone number, to make sure I would never make another appointment with the person. Is there a law that says I have to refuse? I don't think so. Is there is a law that says I can refuse if I have any doubts about the person's identity? Absolutely.