Does the Fair Housing Act protect more privileged groups A legal professional friend of mine recently told me that when a cooperative housing organization is considering whether to offer a lease to an applicant, it is OK for those deciding to make statements of the form "I don't want another white guy living here," but not "I don't want another black woman living here." The logic, I'm told, is that the Fair Housing Act's prohibition on discrimination only applies to socially marginalized groups. Is this so? Has a court specifically addressed whether housing discrimination against, say, white men, is also prohibited? More generally, under what circumstances do US courts apply anti-discrimination laws differently according to the complainant's race?
The fair housing act does not mention "socially marginalized groups". It says that it shall be unlawful To discriminate against any person in the terms, conditions, or privileges of sale or rental of a dwelling, or in the provision of services or facilities in connection therewith, because of race, color, religion, sex, familial status, or national origin. The U.S. Supreme Court just ruled on a case, Texas Department of Housing &amp; Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project Inc., that covered disparate impact as a measurement of discrimination. Disparate impact raises the question of whether policies that appear to be neutral but result in a disproportionate impact on protected groups are legal. The Supreme Court, in its ruling, indicated that disparate impact claims can be brought but it also imposed significant limitations. How does this case apply to your question? The underlying situation in the referenced case is one where, from the ruling: The ICP alleged the Department has caused continued segregated housing patterns by its disproportionate allocation of the tax credits, granting too many credits for housing in predominantly black inner-city areas and too few in pre-dominantly white suburban neighborhoods. The basis of the claim, which can now be heard under a disparate impact claim, is that a government organization discriminated against pre-dominantly white neighborhoods. FHA protects against racial discrimination, not against racial discrimination only against certain groups.
user662852 has a good point -- whoever own the property has the right to make the rules. Is the property, land+construction in fact your's or does it belong to the HOA who just grant you access as a lease holder? Different states has different rules, but in my state it is illegal to maroon a property and there must be a access to public streets even when this necessitate passing over somebody else land. However that is irrelevant if the HOA owns the land your house is build on. I think you will have to look at your HOA agreement and see what it says.
Anti-discrimination laws in the U.S. have exceptions for someone who rents a room in a landlord's own residence, but generally speaking, for other purposes, there is not a distinction in U.S. or Florida law. People who stay at a place with the permission of the owner for a very brief period of time and not pursuant to a lease, such as someone who gains use of a particular seat in a movie theater pursuant to a purchased ticket, is, however, not a tenant with the full rights of a tenant, and is instead a licensee who does not have a property right to use that space, only a contract that can be terminated by the property owner or their agent at will, potentially with breach of contract damages if this is done without justification, but not with liability for violating a tenant's rights. In some cases, someone whose housing, at least part of the time, is for the convenience of the employer, like a medical resident who uses a sleeping room at a hospital, or a member of the crew of a ship who sleeps on the ship incident to their duties, may have reduced rights relative to housing when their employment is terminated for cause, although this is only sometimes clearly enunciated in statutes or case law and the law would not be terribly consistent in this area.
The overwhelming majority flats in England are leasehold, not freehold; older buildings typically have 80 or 100-year leases, newer buildings usually have 999-year leases. Therefore you are dealing with the freeholder as a landlord for the matters that a HOA would deal with in the US. Depending on your landlord you may want to reconsider your statement that HOAs &quot;are pure hell&quot;. It is possible for the leaseholders to collectively buy the freehold although it is time-consuming and expensive and happens very rarely. If they do they set up a body similar to a HOA.
The Code defines "Source of income" as: lawful, verifiable income paid directly to a tenant or paid to a representative of a tenant. There's nothing to suggest that the occupation is a relevant consideration otherwise. What it would mean is that if the occupation of a person is relevant to their source of income, it would be illegal to discriminate on that basis. I would consider occupation distinct from source of income - I could (but don't) have a family trust that is my source of income, and my occupation is volunteer work. My occupation is very clearly not my source of income.
No. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits an employer from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It is therefore generally forbidden for an employer to refuse to hire someone because they are not white/black/etc. or because they do not look white/black/etc. The law permits exceptions when the employee's religion, sex, or national origin is a bona fide occupational qualifiction, but not when the employee's race or color is a bona fide occupational qualification. The answer to your previous question was wrong because it adopts an &quot;is black vs. looks black&quot; distinction that doesn't really work. Discriminating against someone because they &quot;look black&quot; is the same thing as discriminating on the basis of color. Even if you were saying someone &quot;looked black&quot; because of their hair or facial structure or clothing, you're talking about &quot;perceived as&quot; discrimination, which many courts treat as equally impermissible. See, e.g., Perkins v. Lake Cty., 860 F. Supp. 1262, 1278 (N.D. Ohio 1994) (“Objective appearance and employer perception are the basis for discrimination and, in the opinion of this Court, the key factors relevant to enforcing rights granted members of a protected class.”). As far as I know, the question of whether one may discriminate on the basis of race or color in casting decisions is still unresolved, but the courts that have looked at it seem to so far be in agreement that casting directors may make engage in that kind of discrimination because their constitutional rights to create their art as they see fit under the First Amendment overrides their statutory obligation to provide equal employment opportunities under the Civil Rights Act. For example, the issue arose when a black man brought civil-rights claims against ABC for excluding him from auditions for The Bachelor. ABC argued that its casting decisions are an essential component of its expression, and the court agreed: Ultimately, whatever messages The Bachelor and The Bachelorette communicate or are intended to communicate — whether explicitly, implicitly, intentionally, or otherwise — the First Amendment protects the right of the producers of these Shows to craft and control those messages, based on whatever considerations the producers wish to take into account. ... Thus, whether enforcing § 1981 here would frustrate, enhance, or be entirely consistent with the message that The Bachelor and The Bachelorette conveys, the First Amendment protects the producers' right unilaterally to control their own creative content. Claybrooks v. ABC, Inc., 898 F. Supp. 2d 986, 1000 (M.D. Tenn. 2012).
Anti-discrimination laws only apply to people, see here – &quot;No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be otherwise subjected to discrimination under any program to which this part applies&quot;. Genetic information anti-discrimination laws are limited to employment and insurance, see here. In addition, I'm betting that your dog cannot meet the university admission standards (lack of a transcript is fatal to the plan).
The first thing to note is that your question is kind of the wrong way around. US states are sovereign and generally have the ability to make any kind of laws they want, unless they violate some specific tenet of federal law or the US Constitution. You suggest, for instance, that arguments which are "culturally founded" have no place in the law, but that's just your opinion, and there isn't generally anything preventing a state from making law based on such things, should its elected legislature see fit to do so. (Indeed, one could argue that nearly all laws are in some sense "culturally founded", since they are based on some notion of what kind of behavior is or is not appropriate, and those tend to be culturally based.) So legally speaking, the states aren't, by default, obligated to give any sort of justification for the laws they made. The burden of proof is on the other side. Someone seeking to overturn those laws would have to convince a court that the laws violated some specific provision of the Constitution (or another superior law). If they couldn't convince a court of this, the law would stand. From what I have read, before the US Supreme Court's 2015 legalization of same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges, the previous precedent was set in 1971 by the Minnesota Supreme Court in Baker v. Nelson. The decision itself is quite short and is worthwhile to read. Quoting Wikipedia's summary, the plaintiffs claimed that Minnesota's restriction of marriage to opposite-sex couples violated several provisions of the US Constitution: First Amendment (freedom of speech and of association), Eighth Amendment (cruel and unusual punishment), Ninth Amendment (unenumerated right to privacy), and Fourteenth Amendment (fundamental right to marry under the Due Process Clause and sex discrimination contrary to the Equal Protection Clause). The Minnesota court determined that none of the plaintiffs' objections were valid. Again, I'll refer you to the decision for the details, but the court mainly focused on their Fourteenth Amendment arguments (the others may have been addressed by the trial court, whose opinion I can't find online). They wrote: The equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, like the due process clause, is not offended by the state's classification of persons authorized to marry. There is no irrational or invidious discrimination. They specifically rejected any analogy to bans on interracial marriage, which had been held unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia: But in commonsense and in a constitutional sense, there is a clear distinction between a marital restriction based merely upon race and one based upon the fundamental difference in sex. Baker appealed to the US Supreme Court, but his appeal was dismissed "for want of a substantial federal question," without any further explanation. (Nobody quite seems to understand what they meant by that, but here is an essay discussing the situation in a little more depth.) The effect of the dismissal was that the Minnesota court's decision became binding precedent upon the whole nation - laws against same-sex marriage didn't violate those provisions of the Constitution. And that was how matters stood for 44 years until Obergefell. (Of course, there was nothing to stop individual states from deciding to allow same-sex marriage, and some in fact did so in the meantime.) You have suggested that laws against same-sex marriage were religiously motivated. This might suggest an argument that they would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The plaintiffs in Baker didn't raise that point, so it wasn't considered in the Minnesota court's opinion. I don't know whether any other courts have considered it; no such argument was mentioned in the opinion in Obergefell.