This past year, I was talking to someone I know that was applying to
law school.? Given the competition of getting in, we discussed the
fact that if he told the law schools he was gay, which he isn’t, it
might help him get into better law schools.? Of course, he didn’t
do that nor did I recommend it, but the fact that it could help is
enough for other people to “pretend” to be gay in the application
process.
How would schools ever know what sexual orientation
someone really is?? If a male applicant had a girlfirend at the
start of the first year, how can they prove that he wasn’t gay at the
time of applying (or he isn’t still gay)?
There is no “remedying past discrimination argument” that can be
made for giving preferences for gays (schools didn’t know one way or
another about someone’s sexuality).? That really was the
problem–gays needed to remain in the closet.? A school can’t
discriminate against someone for being gay when it doesn’t know he is
gay.
The only argument is diversity, which of course is the current
rationale for affirmative action programs.? However, even if
diversity is the goal, how do schools know they aren’t already diverse
when it comes to sexual orientation??
Sexual orientation
is private for most people, and is not something, practically, that can
be objectively known without violating someone’s privacy–it is a lot
different than race or ethnicity.
