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Comment by aluhut | Hacker News Reader

We had a guy fired basically because he was an islamophobe. He was annoying people with his "opinion" all the time. That did not work out pretty well with all the other colleges so he did not get jobs. Nobody wanted to work with him. His chargeability was messed up and then he was gone.

I'm pretty OK with that.

Generalizations never work.

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Someone getting fired for annoying people with unprofessional opinions is vastly different than a guy making a dick joke to his friend loudly enough that someone else heard it, was offended by it, and told his employer she demanded his resignation.

I worked for a company thatnwas owned by 2 christians. An employee, who talked about his athiest ideas all the time, was fired for the same reason (many coworkers were christian) Are you also okay with this??

My brother works with a guy that talks about islam contantly, to the point that it makes many people in the company feel uncomfortable. Should this person be fired?

i would have no problem if we gave equality to all, but its just not happening.

Yes. I'm OK with it for the same reasons.

Guy is interrupting business. If people don't want to be around him. He needs to go. The company is not there for you to spread your theist or atheist ideas. Keep it to your private life where it belongs to.

That sounds like a pretty standard HR situation. Can't do that shit at work. But your personal life should be different (no matter how inconvenient that is in some cases), and the social justice movement is looking to change that. They're causing people to lose their jobs over something that they did in their personal life; on their own time, separate from work. That's fundamentally different and it isn't justice. It isn't freedom. It's oppression.

I'm not sure it's that they're looking to change it, vs. take advantage of something for their own political ends that already exists (and has for a long time). The traditional "rule" in the US is that you can do whatever you want on your own time, unless it's something that your employer finds out about, and finds sufficiently offensive, embarrassing, or inconvenient. Then, since employment is at-will, they can fire you for it, as long as it isn't from a specific list of things that would constitute unlawful termination. The main change, as I see it, is that using it as an organized tactic (compiling lists, contacting employers, etc.) has mainly been done by conservatives in the past, directed at communists, the LGBT movement, flag-burners, etc. Those more on the left using it (or at least, using it with any success) is a somewhat newer development in the US.

To me the fundamental place to tackle this would be at the mechanism: the problem is that employers can and do fire people who have opinions they either dislike or find embarrassing. That will continue to be true, unless labor laws are changed to make it more difficult.

It sounds like that he would be fired even if he was annoying people in a different, politically-correct way.

That doesn't sound as that much of a problem.

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