Discrimination in Plain View

America is really weird. Just when I think I'm starting to settle in and feel at home, something else comes along to perplex me. I am English. We like to keep things simple, not too much fine print with us.

I know that when you are applying for and interviewing for a job, your potential employer is not allowed to ask you things like "Are you married?" or "Do you have children?" or "Do you enjoy showtunes of the 40s and 50s?" - questions that almost anywhere else in the world are considered 'conversational' and 'charming', in a getting to know you, awkward kind of a way. Not here. Here they are considered sinister and incriminating. In order to navigate the dark and seedy world of job interviews when the answer to any of those questions is YES one must develop a steely and cool exterior akin to a captured solider behind enemy lines, so as to not reveal your secret penchant for love, the continuation of the human race or Louis Prima.

So what's so confusing? I thought the point of that, in a really ass backwards way, was so that you could not be discriminated against based on your gender, marital or family status, sexual preference, age or race etc. And yet. AND YET. The number one most important job in the country (nay, in the free world right now) has daily been reduced to an argument over whether or not we should have a woman, a black man, or an old man, in the White House?

Fucking hell America. Make your bloody mind up. Can we discriminate or not? I just want to know so that next time I interview somebody I can crap on and on for hours about how earth shattering it would be to have a woman in the job, not making coffee or operating switchboard.

Blimey.