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Comment by fzeroracer | Hacker News Reader

I can understand working with people you disagree with; I do that all the time. But there's a difference with disagreeing with someone, and that other person believing you don't deserve the same rights as other people.

Even if he can manage to separate out his professional life from his personal life, that sort of belief poisons the well for people that have to work with him.

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So then, in your opinion, what jobs should be open to people who oppose gay marriage? There is a limited number of lighthouses that haven't been automated.

What jobs should be open to racists? What jobs should be open to pedophiles? The current social construct is built on at least trying for equality of opportunity; there's nothing to be gained bending over backwards to accommodate people who believe other humans to be some how lesser.

The alternate question is: How far are people able to ignore personal beliefs before they refuse to work with/under someone? If you asked a gay person, there are a fair amount of people who would refuse to work with someone that opposes gay marriage. If you asked a black person, I imagine the majority would walk away from a job if it turned out one of the highest level employees was a Grand Dragon of the KKK.

When those views become part of the public sphere they're put under scrutiny. Each person has their own individual limit for what they're willing to put up with, and a community in turn has a collective limit. There are some companies that might be more friendly, but I would imagine if you held an opinion like that in say, Seattle you might have a bit of trouble if it was well-popularized.

I know this is a popular way to phrase it, but opponents of gay marriage are not saying gays shouldn't have the same rights as other people. Not being allowed to marry a person of the same sex is a universal law, it doesn't just apply to gay people. It does only affect them though, but that is not the same,especially when people are using this argument (as you do) to insinuate that people opposing gay marriage think gay people are lesser beings or something like that.

>It does only affect them though, but that is not the same,especially when people are using this argument (as you do) to insinuate that people opposing gay marriage think gay people are lesser beings or something like that.

Actually to the best of my knowledge, it is the same, at least under US law. De facto discrimination is still considered discrimination.

You're drawing a distinction without difference. You can phrase basically any rule that discriminates against a subgroup as a rule on the larger group that only affects the subgroup. For example, I don't think anyone would say, "It isn't discrimination against women to forbid all people from doing something without a Y chromosome." The fact that the phrasing doesn't say "women" doesn't make it not discrimination, because it specifically targets attributes of women.

If you want to be inclusive, you have to be inviting towards other opinions, too, only that's the same difficulty as including the opposite site. Sure everyone has the right to their opinion, but whoever brings it to the workplace or other professional environment has to stand for it.

This is difficult to discuss in the work place, because this makes it topical.

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