AIBU to think being a lone parent should be a protected characteristic?

[neednotknow]

I dont know if this is controversial or not but I see that there's a lot of discrimination against lone parents when trying to engage with services.

There's a sigma and the assumption that you've failed in life if you end up living as a lone adult with your child but there are lots of reasons why it may happen.

While people are entitled to have their personal opinions, I don't think organisations/businesses should be allowed to indirectly discriminate based on whether a child has two or one resident parents.

(I would include men and women in that definition.)

I'm respectfully open to debate on this. Its more a rail against bureaucracy than anything else.

[quote Mumoblue]@PurpleOkapi

You claim to think there’s nothing wrong with it, but why should it be ok to discriminate if people chose it? Pregnancy is protected. People choose to get pregnant.[/quote]
I was responding to someone's statement that being a lone parent isn't a choice. Whether being a choice should make it deserving of protection is a separate issue.

Personally, I don't think pregnancy should be protected, at least not to the extent that it is, for that very reason. But even if it should, I think it's a huge leap to extend that protection to a person's relationship status, which is what we're actually talking about here. What other life choices should qualify for this protection? Not owning a car, maybe? If every choice that makes a person's life more difficult is considered deserving of protection for that reason, there's no obvious stopping point.

@PurpleOkapi being a single parent isn't always a choice!
And I would imagine that the majority of women who chose to leave their DPs and become single parents didn't make that choice lightly !

@PurpleOkapi As others have said, marital status is protected, and people choose to get married, and that’s a relationship status.

@InglouriousBasterd

One massive discrimination I noticed was during first lockdown where children weren’t allowed in the supermarket. I got stopped and asked to leave my child outside (in a rough part of town) and had to really battle to get in to actually buy food, which was necessary as I couldn’t get a delivery for love nor money.

Had the same, I just thought it was a particularly unpleasant security person, but it now looks like it maybe was a policy. The children were 4 and 6 at the time, was asked to leave them outside or for their dad to watch them (the dad lives on the other side of the country or even abroad, don't know exactly). I wasn't let in then, told that I need to find a solution.