Let’s say you find yourself needing to save money, and find someone to share living expenses. I’ll get a roommate, you think. This is a sensitive matter. This is the person you will be sharing at least a kitchen and living quarters, perhaps a bathroom, a garage, and definitely your set of house keys with for months, maybe years. This person is going to have access to your personal belongings, your family, your friends, your phone calls, and your computer. Trust and compatibililty are paramount.

But the government, via the Fair Housing Act, says it is not okay for you to choose this person based on basis of “race, color, religion, sex, disability, familial status, and national origin.”

This is simply not practical, or sensible. People choose their living companions based largely on compatibility and convenience.

Take weekends, for example. Let’s say like to have your friends over on Friday nights, to do your household chores on Saturdays, and then attend church on Sundays. You might want to think seriously about whether you are going to be compatible with someone who considers Friday or Saturday to be a sabbath or a day of rest. Or holidays. Things can get a little awkward when one person is celebrating Christmas and Easter while the other is committed to weeks of mourning. Meals? Maybe you have a fettish for pickled pigs feet, and like to keep them in the fridge at all times. This is likely to totally gross-out someone who either doesn’t eat pork, or doesn’t eat meat at all. It isn’t that it is impossible to find solutions to these problems, but maybe this is just more “diversity” than either of you is going to want to deal with on a 24/7 basis.

And seriously. While gender and sexual orientation can be none of anyone’s business in public or the work place - it’s pretty hard to ignore these personal matters when someone is in your home. Traditionally, roommates have often chosen to live with someone of the same gender, specifically to avoid the uncomfortable situation in which one roommate becomes sexually attracted to the other. Is that no longer possible? Familial status…Wouldn’t it be nice to know if your potential roommate has a spouse and children that are going to be in your home every weekend?

Online, roommate matching services have operated largely in the same way that dating services have operated, in which a series of questions is answered by each applicant, and then possible matches are made by the computer. Until now, websites have been protected from lawsuits by the law. As Wired.com explains:

Apartment hunting site Roommates.com cannot shield itself from an housing discrimination lawsuit by claiming it is just an internet forum, because the site requires users to answer questions about their gender, marital status and sexual orientation, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Thursday.

The ruling is an important one because it sets a limit on a federal law protecting internet forums from lawsuits. Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act largely frees websites, online forums and ISPs from responsibility for what users say on their sites. Online freedom advocates describe that law as the best thing Congress has ever done for freedom of expression on the internet, since it allows social networking sites, hosted blogging services and news sites with commenting features — like this one — to let users be responsible for their words.

That legal immunity doesn’t apply to Roommates.com, the court ruled, because the check boxes on the site actively solicit discriminatory content, making the service much more than a simple forum….(more)

The larger story here is that the advocates for the political-correctness agenda onine have just won a major victory while advocates for personal liberty and freedom of speech online have sustained a loss. Watch for more lawsuits like this, in which things like “discrimination” and “hate speech” become not only frowned upon by the online community, but actually illegal.

What about dating sites? Well, for now, they’re safe. At this time you can at least still use sexual orientation as part of your screening process is choosing a date. For now.

Also see: .pdf of the ruling

(hat-tip, Mashable)