Supreme Court Case Admits Justice Policy Creates Gender Conflict

In the Koira vs Metro Car Wash Supreme Court case the court actually admits that justice system policy keeps men and women at each other's throats: :

"Men and women alike suffer from the stereotypes perpetrated by sex-based differential treatment. (See Kanowitz, "Benign" Sex Discrimination: Its Troubles and Their Cure (1980) 31 Hastings L.J. 1379, 1394; Comment, Equal Rights Provisions: The Experience Under State Constitutions (1977) 65 Cal.L.Rev. 1086, 1106-1107.) When the law "emphasizes irrelevant differences between men and women[,] [it] cannot help influencing the content and the tone of the social, as well as the legal, relations between the sexes. ...


As long as organized legal systems, at once the most respected [40 Cal.3d 35] and most feared of social institutions, continue to differentiate sharply, in treatment or in words, between men and women on the basis of irrelevant and artificially created distinctions, the likelihood of men and women coming to regard one another primarily as fellow human beings and only secondarily as representatives of another sex will continue to be remote.


When men and women are prevented from recognizing one another's essential humanity by sexual prejudices, nourished by legal as well as social institutions, society as a whole remains less than it could otherwise become." (Kanowitz, Women and the Law (1969) p. 4.)
Whether or not these defendants consciously based their discounts on sex stereotypes, the practice has traditionally been of that character. For example, in Com., Pa. Liquor Control Bd. v. Dobrinoff (1984) 80 Pa.Cmwlth. 453 [471 A.2d 941], the trial court relied on just such a stereotype in upholding a tavern's cover charge distinction based on sex.



The court suggested that the purpose of the discount was "'chivalry and courtesy to the fair sex.'" (Id., at p. 943.) The appellate court held, however, that a variance in admission charge based "solely upon a difference in gender, having no legitimate relevance in the circumstances" violated the Pennsylvania Human Relation Act's prohibition against sex discrimination. (Ibid.)


Similarly, in striking down the New York Yankees "Ladies' Day" promotion, the New York State Human Rights Appeal Board observed that "the stereotyped characterizations of a woman's role in society that prevailed at the inception of 'Ladies' Day' in 1876" were outdated and no longer valid "in a modern technological society where women and men are to be on equal footing as a matter of public policy." (Abosh v. New York Yankees, Inc. (1972) No. CPS-25284, Appeal No. 1194, reprinted in Babcock et al., Sex Discrimination and the Law, supra, at pp. 1069, 1070.)


With all due respect, the Washington Supreme Court also succumbed to sexual stereotyping in upholding the Seattle Supersonics' "Ladies' Night." (MacLean v. First North. Industries of America, supra, 635 P.2d at p. 684.) The court found that the discount was reasonable because, inter alia, "women do not manifest the same interest in basketball that men do." (Ibid.) fn. 16


This sort of class-based generalization as a justification for differential treatment is precisely the type of practice prohibited by the Unruh Act. (See [40 Cal.3d 36] O'Connor v. Village Green Owners Assn., supra, 33 Cal.3d at p. 794; Marina Point, supra, 30 Cal.3d at pp. 739-740.) "[T]he Unruh Civil Rights Act prohibits all forms of stereotypical discrimination." (San Jose Country Club Apartments v. County of Santa Clara (1982) 137 Cal.App.3d 948, 952 [187 Cal.Rptr. 493].) These sex-based discounts impermissibly perpetuate sexual stereotypes"