WEEKEND MEMOS

'Weekend memos' give our editorial writers a chance to express their own opinions, comment on topics they have been writing about, or take a lighter approach. The opinions in 'Memos' do not always follow the Enquirer's editorial positions.

The latest targets of the "bias police" are companies that hire good-looking or sexy sales people. Gap, Abercrombie & Fitch, Benetton and L'Oreal are listed among the perps accused of adopting a conscious policy of hiring attractive sales clerks. A New York Times story reported some chains (gasp) admit it.

There's nothing illegal about hiring babes and hunks who "look great," but it is illegal to use looks as a pretext to discriminate on the basis of age, sex, color or ethnicity. Some stores won't hire people who look "too ethnic." Plaintiffs' attorneys have filed lawsuits. Why are we not surprised?

A cosmetics company ought to have the right not to hire a sales clerk with a scary case of acne or a fitness club to reject a 400-pounder, but we know what happened to airlines that tried to dump aging, overweight flight attendants. In the neverending push to add more victim groups to the group rights list, people who are fat, ugly or just plain may be next up for stardom. Since anthropologists and geneticists say all our ancestries trace back to Africa, could we just declare us all the same group and be done with it? No such luck.

As if to demonstrate just how silly this hire-for-looks issue can get on both sides, one school of political thought firmly believes Americans even pick presidents on the basis of looks, and that Abe Lincoln, one of our greatest, couldn't get elected today. Abe was not what you would call just another pretty face. The "classic American" image Abercrombie seeks to project in its models, catalogues and salespeople is far from Lincolnesque. It's variously described as blond, blue-eyed, preppy, college frat or sorority. Blond is "classic American"?

"God must have loved the plain people, he made so many of them," Lincoln said. I wish I could report plain folks are turned off by retailers' bias for beautiful people, but you couldn't prove it by hordes of chunky women who buy skimpy, navel-baring tops they should never wear in public, or by guys who buy sneakers because they think it will make them look or play like Michael Jordan. That may be cause for pity, but it's not a matter for the Supreme Court.

Tony Lang