I discovered today that Arlington County, Virginia is quite discriminatory in their hiring practices. For instance, the Sheriff's Office has a strict policy against hiring employees who are currently married to blacks, and prohibits employees from marrying black people after they have been hired. Arlington County doesn't explain the policy, but it is similar to a policy in Fort Myers, Florida, whose Lee County Sheriff's Office also refuses to hire people who have black dependents. In Fort Myers, they claim it has to do with the cost of health care. Black people have higher health care costs, and they claim to be making an objective decision to cut overall health care costs. Although they are strictly prohibited by Federal law from discriminating against an employee who is black, they claim that they can dictate that an employee doesn't make a conscious decision to marry or adopt a black dependent.

Since that dependent would be covered by company medical plan, the Sheriff's Office claims they have a vested interest. The CDC even provides some of the evidence for them.

African American women are more likely to die of breast cancer than are women of any other racial or ethnic group. [...]

In 1998, rates of death from cardiovascular disease were about 30% higher among African American adults than among white adults.

The CDC also notes that Vietnamese women are five times more likely to contract cervical cancer, although there is no specific policy against marrying Vietnamese women, just blacks.

Check out this excerpt from a job posting on the Arlington County web site.

All new uniformed (sworn) Sheriff's Office employees must be non-smokers and will be required to sign an agreement that they will not smoke on or off the job during their tenure of employment.

Oops. I made a mistake again. They are discriminating against people who consciously decide to smoke, not those the consciously decide to marry a black person. Well, who the hell cares about smokers? They are dying out as a minority any way.

Still, you would think there was some sort of mechanism to just charge those people more for insurance. Oh wait, insurance companies already do that.