It is very weird that your precise case has to fit a couple of narrow criteria to be protected against discrimination in the US. From a moral perspective, discrimination is discrimination regardless of its grounds. The default position should be that it is illegal. This would avoid endless sterile discussion about whether this or that is a protected class.
Job requirements "discriminate" and narrow the candidate pool. Also only one state considers it a protected class. Compare that to sexual preference which 29 states consider protected. Being able to cut candidates if they were involuntarily cut from their job isn't high on my morality list compared to other social issues.
So all hiring, all decision-making about people would be presumed illegal, until proven to be based on unprotected characteristics? Sounds.. inconvenient? Not how the law generally works?
Well, not really, it just means that grounds for rejection come from inadequacies between the applicants and the role, not because of the recruiter’s prejudice. I know how the law works in the US, that was more or less the point. The fact that it works like that in one country or several does not mean that it is just, moral, or natural. Non-discrimination should be the default state. It’s like a legal system where you would need freedoms to be explicitly granted, which is counter to our common definition of liberty (along the lines of “rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others”). By narrowing down the definition of illegal discrimination, one gives more power to the people who are already in a position of power and so one keep pushing the status quo away from equal rights.
This is the language in the universal declaration of human right: “everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status”. This is not US law, but the fact that this was written and accepted by the vast majority of the countries on earth at least indicates that we (including nominally the US government) tend to hold that discrimination itself is morally wrong, regardless of whether the reason was put on a list or not. So it is not an unimaginable concept.
The problem is that 'discrimination' is exactly what you're trying to do in sifting job applicants, for example. Not unduly prejudiced discrimination, but you need to discriminate somehow.
I'm not all that familiar with US law fwiw, but I understand there's a concept of 'protected characteristics' very similar to here in the UK & EU countries. I don't really see that there's any other way of doing it - you have to use something - if you're not allowed anything then you can only pick randomly. (You may as well take the first applicant, except maybe that's not allowed either because it discriminates against slower applicants.)
