This is a straightforward and appropriate idea for people in nonsupervisory positions. The problem is that some types of speech that we call "political" are in fact discriminatory toward other individuals and therefore potentially incompatible with supervisory positions. A fully worked out version of this idea needs to address this fact.
I would support this rule change. I think the logic of the mob is simply punishment, to cause pain, but pain that is less than permanent unemployment, since the duration of the attention of the mob is finite, to say the least, and everyone involved knows this. The fact that cancellation is not actually as bad as being exiled doesn't really redeem it as a phenomenon though.
I think much of this is good in theory but has many practical concerns. For example, say a teacher says something clearly and unambiguously racist against black people on their private Facebook page. Should they be protected from firing, knowing that black students will be under their authority (and the black students themselves know this)? Should they be reassigned by the school system to a largely white school (a joke I hope)?
I think the exemptions would need to be expanded beyond political jobs.
The nice thing about this policy is that it removes the incentive for people to broadcast the teacher's views to their students.
Most students don't follow their teachers on Twitter. And yes, some of their teachers are racists, transphobes, and antisemites. But do the students benefit from knowing that?
If the teacher displays racism in class, you fire them. Do we really need Twitter to act as an early warning system?
Bob Williams posts on X that he hates black people. His friends back in Minnesota see it. His students don't have X, they don't have his X account, how do they know about it?
There has to be a mechanism. That requires action, and that action isn't always taken.
In 2001, a teacher at West Point Grey Academy in Vancouver wore blackface to a party. This was published in the school yearbook that year. It came to the attention of the Canadian and international media in 2019, four years after the teacher had become Prime Minister of Canada. People didn't know. Students at West Point Grey Academy didn't know. Some random guy read the yearbook 18 years later and publicized it.
(Additional context: Justin Trudeau was the son of an incredibly popular prime minister. He also wore blackface on at least four occasions.)
I have a public school teacher friend who spent about three years trying to get herself in trouble by making TikToks about turning kids trans. She was getting almost no views for a year, eventually some local conservative station found out about her.
Getting attention is _hard_. Getting somebody fired really incentivizes people to give attention to people and actions they don't like, but if you can't get somebody fired, they're not going to do it.
An incredible amount of stuff (Trudeau's blackface, George Santos' entire life) flies under the radar now, and more would if we weren't incentivized to publicize racist tweets.
Have you met students? They are far too online for their own good, lol.
That aside, I'll get to the crux of your argument. "There has to be a mechanism [of the students seeing the racist content]"
I'd say you underestimate that social media wouldnt still amplify these cases. That local news would report on it if it did get boosted on social media. And then from there, its easy to see how students engage with it. Your example from 2001 is from...2001! The internet and social media are far different now. The very concept of 'private' is just not a thing online. People get attached to their reddit, discords, etc which don't even have their real name. You say that this wouldn't happen with some of the incentive gone of getting someone fired. But you underestimate how much people like to shame and prove themselves superior online. It would still be a popular endeavor.
Finally, there's an assumption in your argument that its okay if a genuine, provable racist teaches black, white, latino, asian (etc) kids because it happened in the past. I don't find that a credible argument. If a school system learned that the teacher was posting unambiguously racist stuff, I'f argue they have a duty to remove them.
You want parents of a black kid to accept that their kids teacher is a racist but we don't know if that translates to the classroom? You think they would accept that? I wouldn't. I think its paramount that every child receives an equal education, which includes not being taught by a proven racist.
There’s probably some way to write the regulation such that managerial roles that require authority over employees are allowed to be fired on the basis of disparaging a group of people, just as religious roles that require orthodoxy are allowed to be fired on the basis of expressions of doubt, and perhaps a few other tailored exceptions for other types of controversial speech.
Yeah, and I think as of right now, in some cases, it would be extremely hard to differentiate violation of freedom speech from lack of qualifications. to an extent,
I might even argue that the qualifications required in each company is different and it might just make sense to move ppl from one work place to another from a practical standpoint.
The example you gave above is def very good here and another I can think of, and it is actually based on what happened in Japan is “a guy hired at the support center for disabled people shared extremely discriminatory view towards disabled ppl online” - he ended up killing some ppl there so he clearly is unfit working at that place. (And I acknowledge this is a really extreme case fwiw) If he was just moved from this facility to say other jobs, there’s a case to make that this actually benefits everyone.
I think there are some edge cases like these to think about .
I think the middle ground here I can think of are
- make it clear what is fireable offense in writing
- and basically treat offensive speech like low performance and have them go through more lengthy process with a chance of redemption rather than summarily firing anyone
These are just examples and prob not the best ideas
I think your coworkers should be able to complain about you. If I heard about a coworker of mine espousing neo-Nazism, I wouldn't feel comfortable working with them. You don't want a situation where a company loses most of their good employees to competitors because they have no way to get rid of a Nazi.
However, random internet strangers shouldn't have any influence on hiring and firing of anyone anywhere. I don't know how one could write the law to make this distinction, but I think it's worth making.
If you overheard your coworker quoting Mein Kampf over the water cooler, under these rules you could still report him to HR. The only difference is you couldn't if he posted that same comment on Facebook on a weekend. So the simple solution is don't follow your coworkers on social.
My main contention lies with the claim that “if someone can be rehired after being fired, then they weren’t too toxic to be employable to begin with”. I find this confusing because toxicity is (a) relative to the job and (b) not a fixed quantity.
A saucy opinion on race might fly in Company A, but Company B’s customers won’t have it—Company C, meanwhile, may have the *employees* start to revolt. It makes logical sense that someone fired from the latter two could be rehired after the fact.
I have some philosophical questions qualms with the exception to the speech protection rule. For one, what counts as a ‘political organization’? More importantly, it’s easy to argue that certain political opinions, even for nonpolitical organizations, do affect your qualification. Refer back to Company C’s employees; someone who hates x people is not qualified to work with a company composed mostly of x.
I am curious how you view municipal regulations like the one that exists in Seattle, which ostensibly protects people from firing for their political views or from being, for instance, thrown out of their housing. Have they been effective?
If I find out I’m employing a Nazi, I’m firing that Nazi, because I do not care to associate with Nazis, much less give them my money. If someone interviews for a job with me and I learn they’re a Nazi, I’m not going to employ them. If the government passes laws forbidding these policies, I will ignore them, and I will declare bankruptcy before paying any judgment to a Nazi who sues me because I refuse to associate with him.
Conservative authoritarians and neoliberals have introduced and emphasized the idea that employment is, in fact, a *privilege* one "earns" for presenting a pattern of pro-capitalist (i.e. "good") behavior.
It is not.
As stated, employment is merely how we organize production within capitalism. And employment relationships are not really voluntary…
Again, as stated, getting someone fired denies a worker access to employer-controlled systems needed to generate the income needed for their own *survival*. Getting someone fired is thus a *severe* punishment, which is imposed by a non-authority, and without due process.
Simply put, getting someone fired is assault.
Amending workplace anti-discrimination laws to include protection against retaliation for off-duty speech and political participation is a brilliant idea.
Overall, this was one of the best and most well stated essays I've read so far on The Argument — an important, rarely-addressed take, on an equally important topic.
I don't think that is idea: getting someone fired is assault, is "simply put". It's confusing.
1) It's idiosyncratic usage, which is not ideal. (harassment would be the more obvious descriptor)
2) Who is actually committing the assault? The people spamming a company's phone lines and tagging their social media, demanding your pink slip (harassing the employer to take action?) Or the person who decides to fire you? It makes much more sense that *they* are the ones who have assaulted you. But I'd guess you wouldn't argue *every* firing is an assault. So, I think this description doesn't work too well.
I meant that social media users who "get someone fired" by harassing an employer to do so — with the full intention, if not expectation, that it will do so — causes such an extent of personal injury to the employee that it amounts to an extra judicial assault on their life.
I prefer to use idiosyncratic language sometimes, when it's able to convey a precise meaning, because it attracts attention in a way that more commonly used language can no longer do — precisely because it's so commonly used. I like how idiosyncratic expressions provoke the sort of thinking which they tend to do…
If an executive at a company says something that offends a large portion of its customers and they boycott the company costing it profit and market share should that executive's job be protected on grounds of free speech ? ( I think it's unfair to tell consumers that they should ignore the offence and spend their hard earned dollars paying the offenders salary )
How about a cashier who says racist things to the people he checks out in an ethnic neighborhood driving away customers?
It's easy to say people shouldn't be fired for speech when the act of "canceling" is just depicted as a petty attack on differences of opinion, but it gets hard when it affects bottom lines.
Do you mean a government that causes problems people who don’t have an employer, or a government that tells employers they shouldn’t fire people for non-work-related speech?
Chick-fil-A boycotts are not meant to fire somebody, they're meant to bring down a company. Same with Budweiser. Same with a range of other boycotts related to owners' or executives' speech.
Presumably, Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert wouldn't be protected by this either. Can you tell CBS/ABC they can't cancel a show?
Same question for Roseanne. In that case, apparently, a bunch of employees quit or threatened to quit over Roseanne Barr's comments. How do you thread that needle?
Does the NFL have to sign Colin Kaepernick to a quarterback position? Who has to make the offer and suffer the consequences?
Republicans (as individuals, acting freely) can shut down the NFL. Democrats can shut down MLB. China can shut down (or, at least severely wound) the NBA if a coach expresses an opinion on Hong Kong.
(That last one is super tricky.)
I think we need a culture of not boycotting on account of speech if we want to make free expression possible.
Consequentially, I think we can consider Chick-fil-A boycotts (to take an example) as being sufficiently different from firing an individual as to not be conflated. It is true boycotts do act as a pressure (usually a weak pressure) to stifle the political activity of company executives, but I think you need to weigh this against the huge imbalance in "speech capability" between average consumers and the ultrawealthy. These people have a strong countervailing incentive to remain politically active because their money allows them to have huge influence.
Practically, I don't think hectoring boycotters over free speech principles is likely to do anything anyway, and making boycotts illegal would be very problematic.
Possibly Chick-Fil-A does? They did give a lot of money to anti-gay marriage charities, though I don't know what they got from it.
I can't find political donations from Colbert or Barr. (Colbert had a fake super-PAC, but it ultimately gave away all its money to pretty uncontroversial charities.) Kimmel gave 10k to a few senate races, but I doubt it benefitted him much.
I left out Brendan Eich, but his big donation that led to the campaign against Mozilla (which he founded and led) was $1,000 for California's Prop 8. Not a huge influence in my book.
And it's not about hectoring boycotters, it's about not boycotting. It's about learning to accept that we live in a society among people with deplorable viewpoints, and we need to be tolerant. I don't _need_ to know Pedro Pascal or Lebron James's politics to watch them on TV or even buy their merchandise. And this is a place (unlike, say, gerrymandering), where we liberals can do a lot of good simply by laying down our arms.
Do you think boycotting was wrong in the civil rights era? Am I committing cultural fauxpa if I choose not to get a cake from a bakery which refuses gay people? A business is fundamentally different from a person. The primary problem illustrated in the piece above is that a fired person is effectively 'dead' if they can't find employment. But there's no 'right to exist' for a corporation.
Discrimination is not speech. If the Civil Rights Leaders had targeted everyone who said things they didn't like, they would have failed badly. Their boycotts targeted segregated businesses.
(Also, the distinction between firing everyone at a bakery and forcing that bakery to close isn't landing for me. Both lead to the exact same outcome and "effectively dead" people?)
How is it firing everyone at a bakery? Am I compelled to buy a cake from them? Is the government suppose to punish me if I don't eat at Chickfila or say something mean about them? You see the difference between that and an individual who is beholden to an employer?
No, you're not compelled. As I said in my comment, having a society that embraces free speech can't be achieved via laws alone.
We need ordinary people like you to not look up what their local bakery, restaurant, or bodega owner has ever tweeted before buying from them. Buy from them because they make a good torte or gyro, not because they're on your team.
Why should I be required to turn a blind eye to the character of the people making me a gyro? If I can find a satisfying gyro supplied by someone who doesn't offend me why shouldn't I buy from them instead ? Why Am I obligated to support the livelihood of someone who's views if put into practice would harm me?
They can say what they like. I can spend how I like. Their right should not take away mine.
I work hard for my money, why shouldn't I spend it on what I get the most value out of ?
Doesn't like literally every country in Western Europe kind of have something like this? This is pretty much an exclusively American phenomenon you're describing. Although those countries actually DO impose legal penalties for offensive speech, so I guess we've never really had a polis where you can truly express an offensive political opinion without risk of termination OR prosecution. I guess American Public Sector jobs with strong unions like Police comes close to this.
This is a straightforward and appropriate idea for people in nonsupervisory positions. The problem is that some types of speech that we call "political" are in fact discriminatory toward other individuals and therefore potentially incompatible with supervisory positions. A fully worked out version of this idea needs to address this fact.
"What do you actually want to happen?" is always such a good question to ask.
Okay, the person is fired. What should happen next? What do you want to happen to them in the longer term? Is the idea to force a public submission?
This literally happened to a colleague of mine. I would fully support this kind of reform.
I would support this rule change. I think the logic of the mob is simply punishment, to cause pain, but pain that is less than permanent unemployment, since the duration of the attention of the mob is finite, to say the least, and everyone involved knows this. The fact that cancellation is not actually as bad as being exiled doesn't really redeem it as a phenomenon though.
I think much of this is good in theory but has many practical concerns. For example, say a teacher says something clearly and unambiguously racist against black people on their private Facebook page. Should they be protected from firing, knowing that black students will be under their authority (and the black students themselves know this)? Should they be reassigned by the school system to a largely white school (a joke I hope)?
I think the exemptions would need to be expanded beyond political jobs.
The nice thing about this policy is that it removes the incentive for people to broadcast the teacher's views to their students.
Most students don't follow their teachers on Twitter. And yes, some of their teachers are racists, transphobes, and antisemites. But do the students benefit from knowing that?
If the teacher displays racism in class, you fire them. Do we really need Twitter to act as an early warning system?
I promise you, the students would know. You overestimate the cultural impact of such a law.
I don't think you can keep that promise.
Bob Williams posts on X that he hates black people. His friends back in Minnesota see it. His students don't have X, they don't have his X account, how do they know about it?
There has to be a mechanism. That requires action, and that action isn't always taken.
In 2001, a teacher at West Point Grey Academy in Vancouver wore blackface to a party. This was published in the school yearbook that year. It came to the attention of the Canadian and international media in 2019, four years after the teacher had become Prime Minister of Canada. People didn't know. Students at West Point Grey Academy didn't know. Some random guy read the yearbook 18 years later and publicized it.
(Additional context: Justin Trudeau was the son of an incredibly popular prime minister. He also wore blackface on at least four occasions.)
I have a public school teacher friend who spent about three years trying to get herself in trouble by making TikToks about turning kids trans. She was getting almost no views for a year, eventually some local conservative station found out about her.
Getting attention is _hard_. Getting somebody fired really incentivizes people to give attention to people and actions they don't like, but if you can't get somebody fired, they're not going to do it.
An incredible amount of stuff (Trudeau's blackface, George Santos' entire life) flies under the radar now, and more would if we weren't incentivized to publicize racist tweets.
"His students don't have X"
Have you met students? They are far too online for their own good, lol.
That aside, I'll get to the crux of your argument. "There has to be a mechanism [of the students seeing the racist content]"
I'd say you underestimate that social media wouldnt still amplify these cases. That local news would report on it if it did get boosted on social media. And then from there, its easy to see how students engage with it. Your example from 2001 is from...2001! The internet and social media are far different now. The very concept of 'private' is just not a thing online. People get attached to their reddit, discords, etc which don't even have their real name. You say that this wouldn't happen with some of the incentive gone of getting someone fired. But you underestimate how much people like to shame and prove themselves superior online. It would still be a popular endeavor.
Finally, there's an assumption in your argument that its okay if a genuine, provable racist teaches black, white, latino, asian (etc) kids because it happened in the past. I don't find that a credible argument. If a school system learned that the teacher was posting unambiguously racist stuff, I'f argue they have a duty to remove them.
If it's not reflected in their behavior in the classroom, why?
You want parents of a black kid to accept that their kids teacher is a racist but we don't know if that translates to the classroom? You think they would accept that? I wouldn't. I think its paramount that every child receives an equal education, which includes not being taught by a proven racist.
There’s probably some way to write the regulation such that managerial roles that require authority over employees are allowed to be fired on the basis of disparaging a group of people, just as religious roles that require orthodoxy are allowed to be fired on the basis of expressions of doubt, and perhaps a few other tailored exceptions for other types of controversial speech.
Yeah, and I think as of right now, in some cases, it would be extremely hard to differentiate violation of freedom speech from lack of qualifications. to an extent,
I might even argue that the qualifications required in each company is different and it might just make sense to move ppl from one work place to another from a practical standpoint.
The example you gave above is def very good here and another I can think of, and it is actually based on what happened in Japan is “a guy hired at the support center for disabled people shared extremely discriminatory view towards disabled ppl online” - he ended up killing some ppl there so he clearly is unfit working at that place. (And I acknowledge this is a really extreme case fwiw) If he was just moved from this facility to say other jobs, there’s a case to make that this actually benefits everyone.
I think there are some edge cases like these to think about .
I think the middle ground here I can think of are
- make it clear what is fireable offense in writing
- and basically treat offensive speech like low performance and have them go through more lengthy process with a chance of redemption rather than summarily firing anyone
These are just examples and prob not the best ideas
I think your coworkers should be able to complain about you. If I heard about a coworker of mine espousing neo-Nazism, I wouldn't feel comfortable working with them. You don't want a situation where a company loses most of their good employees to competitors because they have no way to get rid of a Nazi.
However, random internet strangers shouldn't have any influence on hiring and firing of anyone anywhere. I don't know how one could write the law to make this distinction, but I think it's worth making.
If you overheard your coworker quoting Mein Kampf over the water cooler, under these rules you could still report him to HR. The only difference is you couldn't if he posted that same comment on Facebook on a weekend. So the simple solution is don't follow your coworkers on social.
Interesting essay!
My main contention lies with the claim that “if someone can be rehired after being fired, then they weren’t too toxic to be employable to begin with”. I find this confusing because toxicity is (a) relative to the job and (b) not a fixed quantity.
A saucy opinion on race might fly in Company A, but Company B’s customers won’t have it—Company C, meanwhile, may have the *employees* start to revolt. It makes logical sense that someone fired from the latter two could be rehired after the fact.
I have some philosophical questions qualms with the exception to the speech protection rule. For one, what counts as a ‘political organization’? More importantly, it’s easy to argue that certain political opinions, even for nonpolitical organizations, do affect your qualification. Refer back to Company C’s employees; someone who hates x people is not qualified to work with a company composed mostly of x.
I am curious how you view municipal regulations like the one that exists in Seattle, which ostensibly protects people from firing for their political views or from being, for instance, thrown out of their housing. Have they been effective?
If I find out I’m employing a Nazi, I’m firing that Nazi, because I do not care to associate with Nazis, much less give them my money. If someone interviews for a job with me and I learn they’re a Nazi, I’m not going to employ them. If the government passes laws forbidding these policies, I will ignore them, and I will declare bankruptcy before paying any judgment to a Nazi who sues me because I refuse to associate with him.
Conservative authoritarians and neoliberals have introduced and emphasized the idea that employment is, in fact, a *privilege* one "earns" for presenting a pattern of pro-capitalist (i.e. "good") behavior.
It is not.
As stated, employment is merely how we organize production within capitalism. And employment relationships are not really voluntary…
Again, as stated, getting someone fired denies a worker access to employer-controlled systems needed to generate the income needed for their own *survival*. Getting someone fired is thus a *severe* punishment, which is imposed by a non-authority, and without due process.
Simply put, getting someone fired is assault.
Amending workplace anti-discrimination laws to include protection against retaliation for off-duty speech and political participation is a brilliant idea.
Overall, this was one of the best and most well stated essays I've read so far on The Argument — an important, rarely-addressed take, on an equally important topic.
I don't think that is idea: getting someone fired is assault, is "simply put". It's confusing.
1) It's idiosyncratic usage, which is not ideal. (harassment would be the more obvious descriptor)
2) Who is actually committing the assault? The people spamming a company's phone lines and tagging their social media, demanding your pink slip (harassing the employer to take action?) Or the person who decides to fire you? It makes much more sense that *they* are the ones who have assaulted you. But I'd guess you wouldn't argue *every* firing is an assault. So, I think this description doesn't work too well.
I meant that social media users who "get someone fired" by harassing an employer to do so — with the full intention, if not expectation, that it will do so — causes such an extent of personal injury to the employee that it amounts to an extra judicial assault on their life.
I prefer to use idiosyncratic language sometimes, when it's able to convey a precise meaning, because it attracts attention in a way that more commonly used language can no longer do — precisely because it's so commonly used. I like how idiosyncratic expressions provoke the sort of thinking which they tend to do…
If an executive at a company says something that offends a large portion of its customers and they boycott the company costing it profit and market share should that executive's job be protected on grounds of free speech ? ( I think it's unfair to tell consumers that they should ignore the offence and spend their hard earned dollars paying the offenders salary )
How about a cashier who says racist things to the people he checks out in an ethnic neighborhood driving away customers?
It's easy to say people shouldn't be fired for speech when the act of "canceling" is just depicted as a petty attack on differences of opinion, but it gets hard when it affects bottom lines.
Possibly unconstitutional under the First Amendment, but a fun essay nonetheless!
A government that decides it should control who people associate with is on shaky ground.
Do you mean a government that causes problems people who don’t have an employer, or a government that tells employers they shouldn’t fire people for non-work-related speech?
Love this essay.
But it's also a bit narrow.
Chick-fil-A boycotts are not meant to fire somebody, they're meant to bring down a company. Same with Budweiser. Same with a range of other boycotts related to owners' or executives' speech.
Presumably, Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert wouldn't be protected by this either. Can you tell CBS/ABC they can't cancel a show?
Same question for Roseanne. In that case, apparently, a bunch of employees quit or threatened to quit over Roseanne Barr's comments. How do you thread that needle?
Does the NFL have to sign Colin Kaepernick to a quarterback position? Who has to make the offer and suffer the consequences?
Republicans (as individuals, acting freely) can shut down the NFL. Democrats can shut down MLB. China can shut down (or, at least severely wound) the NBA if a coach expresses an opinion on Hong Kong.
(That last one is super tricky.)
I think we need a culture of not boycotting on account of speech if we want to make free expression possible.
(But I still like the no firing protections.)
Consequentially, I think we can consider Chick-fil-A boycotts (to take an example) as being sufficiently different from firing an individual as to not be conflated. It is true boycotts do act as a pressure (usually a weak pressure) to stifle the political activity of company executives, but I think you need to weigh this against the huge imbalance in "speech capability" between average consumers and the ultrawealthy. These people have a strong countervailing incentive to remain politically active because their money allows them to have huge influence.
Practically, I don't think hectoring boycotters over free speech principles is likely to do anything anyway, and making boycotts illegal would be very problematic.
Possibly Chick-Fil-A does? They did give a lot of money to anti-gay marriage charities, though I don't know what they got from it.
I can't find political donations from Colbert or Barr. (Colbert had a fake super-PAC, but it ultimately gave away all its money to pretty uncontroversial charities.) Kimmel gave 10k to a few senate races, but I doubt it benefitted him much.
I left out Brendan Eich, but his big donation that led to the campaign against Mozilla (which he founded and led) was $1,000 for California's Prop 8. Not a huge influence in my book.
And it's not about hectoring boycotters, it's about not boycotting. It's about learning to accept that we live in a society among people with deplorable viewpoints, and we need to be tolerant. I don't _need_ to know Pedro Pascal or Lebron James's politics to watch them on TV or even buy their merchandise. And this is a place (unlike, say, gerrymandering), where we liberals can do a lot of good simply by laying down our arms.
Do you think boycotting was wrong in the civil rights era? Am I committing cultural fauxpa if I choose not to get a cake from a bakery which refuses gay people? A business is fundamentally different from a person. The primary problem illustrated in the piece above is that a fired person is effectively 'dead' if they can't find employment. But there's no 'right to exist' for a corporation.
Discrimination is not speech. If the Civil Rights Leaders had targeted everyone who said things they didn't like, they would have failed badly. Their boycotts targeted segregated businesses.
(Also, the distinction between firing everyone at a bakery and forcing that bakery to close isn't landing for me. Both lead to the exact same outcome and "effectively dead" people?)
How is it firing everyone at a bakery? Am I compelled to buy a cake from them? Is the government suppose to punish me if I don't eat at Chickfila or say something mean about them? You see the difference between that and an individual who is beholden to an employer?
No, you're not compelled. As I said in my comment, having a society that embraces free speech can't be achieved via laws alone.
We need ordinary people like you to not look up what their local bakery, restaurant, or bodega owner has ever tweeted before buying from them. Buy from them because they make a good torte or gyro, not because they're on your team.
Why should I be required to turn a blind eye to the character of the people making me a gyro? If I can find a satisfying gyro supplied by someone who doesn't offend me why shouldn't I buy from them instead ? Why Am I obligated to support the livelihood of someone who's views if put into practice would harm me?
They can say what they like. I can spend how I like. Their right should not take away mine.
I work hard for my money, why shouldn't I spend it on what I get the most value out of ?
Speech Codes: A Modest Proposal to allow Greater Freedom of Expression and Political Participation from Employees of Companies
Doesn't like literally every country in Western Europe kind of have something like this? This is pretty much an exclusively American phenomenon you're describing. Although those countries actually DO impose legal penalties for offensive speech, so I guess we've never really had a polis where you can truly express an offensive political opinion without risk of termination OR prosecution. I guess American Public Sector jobs with strong unions like Police comes close to this.