Obama Administration Attacks 'Reasonableness' and 'Common Sense' in Sex Harassment Investigations

Article here. Excerpt:

'This letter has been criticized by education reporters for ignoring the law and attacking common sense. Reason magazine’s Robby Soave writes that “In holding ‘common sense,’ ‘reason,’ and ‘reasonable persons’ in contempt, OCR is effectively saying that colleges should base their decisions on the perspective of an unreasonable person.”

This letter’s extreme position is at odds with OCR’s past position when I worked there in its national headquarters. But it reflects the position of left-wing women’s groups whose staff frequently end up working for the Office for Civil Rights and the Civil Rights Division under Democratic Presidents. In court briefs, these groups have argued that women should be able to sue over sexual discussions or relationships among co-workers that only an unreasonable person would view as sexual harassment. For example, in the Supreme Court case of Harris v. Forklift Systems (1993), the National Women’s Law Center, “joined by the Women's Legal Defense Fund, demanded that women be allowed to sue employers for sexual remarks by co-workers even if no ‘reasonable woman’ would find the remarks offensive. This demand was so extreme that it was rejected by the Supreme Court and condemned as biased by the Legal Times.” In 2001, the Supreme Court overturned a ruling against the Clark County School District, ruling that a “reasonable person” could not “have believed that [a] single incident” of offensive remarks amounted to harassment.'