Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier recently sent a warning to the National Football League about its hiring policies, and implicitly cautioned other employers that hiring must be based on merit.
Of course he got there in bigoted fashion, presuming that an employer who uses a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) strategy to ensure the open and fair recruitment of qualified candidates, and who then hires a female or a minority candidate, has abandoned merit in their hiring decision.
Call this his civil rights derangement syndrome.
Is Uthmeier obsessed with ‘reverse discrimination’?
The Attorney General is obsessed with the idea that laws underpinning equal treatment for groups that have been historically discriminated against amount to discrimination against white men, and are therefore unconstitutional. In his worldview, laws prohibiting race-based employment discrimination constitute unconstitutional “reverse discrimination.”
The object of Uthmeier’s wrath is the Rooney Rule, voluntarily adopted more than two decades ago by the NFL to ensure that minority candidates are interviewed for coaching positions. The rule was later expanded to include minority and female candidates for all positions, including front office jobs.
But the Rooney rule does not mandate race or sex-based hiring. It does no more than require an expanded candidate pool to ensure that minority and female candidates are considered and given a shot.
It’s embarrassing that our state’s chief legal officer thinks that the law or the constitution requires private employers to hire on the basis of merit. While it may be bad business practice not to do so, no law requires it. (His appointment as Attorney General is proof enough!) Civil rights laws leave employers free to hire (or not) on the basis of merit or any other consideration — except those prohibited by anti-discrimination laws.
Florida’s attorney general succumbs to bigotry
Where Uthmeier succumbs to bigotry is in the presumption that DEI means unqualified. He insultingly and offensively presumes that when a person of color of a woman is hired it must have been “a DEI hire“ without regard to merit,” violating the civil rights of white men.
Actually, if the NFL, or any employer, had a policy of excluding minority or female candidates from consideration for employment (or a practice in the absence of a policy) that would presumptively run afoul of provisions prohibiting employment discrimination under federal and state civil rights laws.
If it were not for laws prohibiting discrimination, private employers such as NFL clubs would be free to adopt and enforce a whites-only or men-only rule.
James Uthmeier is the least qualified person to occupy the office of Florida Attorney General in decades. Florida historians can document whether he is the least qualified in our state’s history.
He was a political operative for the Governor. Recall his central role in tricking immigrants in Texas to fly to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts with the empty promise of jobs. And then there was his central role in funneling $10 million from a lawsuit settlement that should have gone towards healthcare for the people of Florida. Instead, the public dollars went to a DeSantis political fund to subvert ballot measures to decriminalize marijuana and constitutionalize women’s ability to access reproductive health care. The latter caper was certainly a more explicit violation of law than anything associated with the Rooney Rule.
Uthmeier is our un-elected attorney general. Gov. DeSantis appointed his apparatchik to fill the vacancy created when he appointed then-Attorney General Ashley Moody to the seat held in the U.S. Senate by Marco Rubio.
But Uthmeier has an albeit ironic point that the NFL and other employers are better served by hiring based on merit. This November, the people of Florida will have an opportunity to hire a new Attorney General, one who focuses on the actual duties of the Attorney General like protecting the people of Florida from fraud and other crimes and consumers from exploitation by utility and insurance companies.
I hope that voters keep merit in mind this November when we will all decide if this is the guy we should hire.
Howard L. Simon, served as executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Florida from 1997–2018.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Florida attorney general deserves a flag for his NFL-DEI fight | Opinion
Reporting by Howard L. Simon, Opinion contributor / Palm Beach Post
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