DICK’S Sporting Goods may face an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation after a civil rights complaint was filed Wednesday by America First Legal.
AFL argues that DICK’s post-Dobbs announcement guaranteeing up to $4,000 in travel reimbursements for employees and family members seeking abortion violates
The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978
, an amendment to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed “sex discrimination on the basis of pregnancy.”
While other companies also
announced new abortion assistance
initiatives, many offer comparable benefits for mothers giving birth. DICK’s does not, leaving them open to the discrimination charge.
“Subsidizing travel for an abortion, while denying an equivalent benefit to a mother welcoming a new baby, is perverse and unlawful,”
said
AFL Senior Counselor and Director of Oversight Reed D. Rubinstein.
Giving abortion preference over pregnancy would be hard for any company to justify. It is especially difficult in DICK’s Sporting Goods’ case, in which no alternative is offered for mothers who choose life. Whether the EEOC will see it that way remains to be seen.
To bolster its discrimination case, the AFL included in its complaint civil rights violations perpetrated by the company in its openly discussed sex and race-based hiring quotas. DICK’s
2020 Purpose Playbook
states that it has goals to “increase BIPOC representation in leadership by 30% by 2025” and “women in store leadership to 40% by 2025.”
“DICK’S management is an avatar for the rot and danger of corporate wokeness,” Rubinstein continued, noting that racial quotas have been “illegal for decades.”
The Left, in the pursuit of equal outcomes, continues to trample over equal protections. DICK’s isn’t the first or only one to be called out. Similar methods of legally challenging preferential policies rooted in identity categories are popping up elsewhere.
A Florida small-business owner, backed by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, is
suing
the Biden administration over a provision in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that allocates $37 billion exclusively to minority and female-owned small businesses.
Even as an immigrant from communist Romania, Christian Bruckner’s race and gender mean he does not qualify for the funding. Bruckner argues the racial quota method of awarding contracts is discriminatory.
“The new infrastructure projects should be open to all small businesses based on the ability to do the work, not based on race and gender,” he
said
.
Challenging woke policies and hiring practices using existing civil rights law highlights how absurd it is to call them inclusive. It’s past time to expose these progressive ideals for what they often are: blatant discrimination.
Katelynn Richardson is a Summer 2022 Washington Examiner fellow.