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)

The Telegraph is quoting a Saudi clerick, Ali al-Maliki, critical of Facebook:

Facebook is a door to lust and young women and men are spending more on their mobile phones and the Internet than they are spending on food.

He says that like it’s a bad thing - I mean, afterall, we wouldn’t want the Saudi teens to get fat, and start resembling “ugly Americans,” now, would we?

Facebook has become quite a divisive issue in Saudi Arabial, according to Arab Media and Society, with the young women arguing that, it “to express their feelings and build friendships with young women from all around the world. They continued that it granted them the opportunity to learn about different customs and traditions…”

Unfortunately, there is a very sad side to this story. Maliki’s attitude represents that of many other Saudi’s, and one of these men took it to the extreme by murdering his daughter after he caught her communicating with a man on Facebook, in what is commonly called an “honour killing.”

A friend who brought this story to my attention pointed out that there is a third perpsective on this issue, which is the west’s observation and commentary on the events. On the U.S. based social news site, Digg.com, a user posted the story from ValleyWag, to Digg.com. His comment (thanks, Tim!) was, “You should keep an eye on not the article itself, but the Digg-no-crati’s response…already the first couple of comments are out of this world!”

He was right. The story had made the front page of the site, and received over a thousand Diggs, and over 350 comments. While the submitter’s story description was simply neutral and factual, the comments were very empassioned. Some of the comments expressed the expected shock and sadness over the death of the young woman.

Many of the comments, however, were attacking those who dared to insinuate that this “honour killing” might reflect negatively on Islam. Some commenters attacked the submitter, simply for posting the story. Others pointed out that Christians and Jews do bad things, too. Some were attacking the institution of religion altogether.

Here’s an interesting comment, by omegaredIX, basically blaming the west for the problem (***** indicates words deleted by the profanity filter):

Well dumbass Radicals on both sides ***** things up for moderates on both sides as well. Does the westboro baptist church define all baptists? I condemn violent acts on both sides but i also condemn ignorant tools saying “religion of peace” like they know what the ***** they are talking about. Extremist ruin things for everyone. We should also understand why people kill in the name of Allah and why they are blowing themselves up etc. All you have to do is look at the Wests impact on the Muslim world. Throughout Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Iran, Iraq, the Iran-Iraq war. This research will also take days seeing as you actually have to open a ***** book and study thousands of years of history to really grasp and know what the ***** you are talking about.

ralphthemagi defended the Saudi culture:

It’s their country. Their a sovereign nation. It is, like it or not, their right.

One Digger named slyzxx bemoans:

what is digg turning into anti islam ?…

And this pseudo-intellectual, Stryder81, assumes that the young woman apparently deserved to be killed, because if she didn’t want to follow the rules where she lived, she should have simply moved. This one even includes a catchy phrase at the end [emphasis mine]:

I swear if one isn’t careful on digg, they can catch a heart attack.

How so many give such Naive & ignorant comments to this day on a social news site is incredible to me.

First off, This is in ” Saudi Arabia ” done by an ” Arabian Individual ” it has NOTHING to do with Religion.

# 2, Whether you or I like it, that is the way they operate over there. Knowing that, You should not play with fire unless it is justified one way or another, unless you are a female.

Those of you bashing on Religion so quickly just because of a story or 2 then taking out verses that are meant for one thing and not the other to try and justify your own personal disagreement shows nothing more than pure ignorance at it’s finest.

Bottom Line, This girl was going on there looking for a guy, not to socialize with friends. You people who look at this as ” wow thats crazy, all she did was talk to a guy ” are the same ones who look at 14 year olds on Maury Povich with 10 kids and say ” Damn, society today has really changed ” and flip the channel.

If you live somewhere where you can’t wear a red shirt, don’t wear it or move. What is so complicated.

I don’t condone murder, I don’t care what it’s for, but don’t try to push the buttons of the hand that feeds you especially in a country that has had these laws for many many years.

Laws of the LAND ( Saudi Arabia ) not ” The Qu’ran “

I find the number of people on this social “news” site willing to defend and excuse something as brutal as killing one’s own child shocking. I can think of only two reasons for this happening: Either Digg.com has become the go-to place for the a heartless, mindless subset of the internet generation, or there is an element operating on the site, systematically spreading disinformation.