CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: To stop ‘cancel culture,’ protect people’s viewpoints under civil-rights law  Wed Jul 08, 2020 4:21 am | |
| An epidemic of workplace discrimination is sweeping the United States. It threatens not only people’s jobs and livelihoods, but the very structure of our civic life. It calls out for an amendment to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
The victims aren’t targeted over their race, sex, sexual orientation or even gender identity (that last category now being recognized as covered under the act by a recent decision of the Supreme Court). All those groups already have protection. The epidemic I’m talking about is workplace discrimination against people whose political views are distasteful to the newly energized and apparently ascendant woke mob.
Amazingly, the Civil Rights Act doesn’t protect such people, so when their employers bow to the mob and fire them, or pass them over for promotion and hiring, the bosses make a cost-free decision. Indeed, employers would almost have to be crazy not to bow to the rampaging mob.
The mob can stage a boycott of the employers’ businesses or stores. It can expose employers to a shaming campaign. It can camp out at employers’ places of business — or even the human-resources managers’ homes.
Meanwhile, the victimized employee or job-seeker is defenseless. He has no legal remedy under the Civil Rights Act and is therefore in no position to force employers to make decisions on the basis of his abilities and qualifications.
It is this gaping hole in the state of the law, not some society-wide agreement with the radical views of the mob, that explains the mob’s newfound power to dictate employment decisions.
We call this social phenomenon the cancel culture, yet if anything that term is too mild and too euphemistic to capture the sinister dynamics in play. Its true effect isn’t censorship — but self-censorship. People don’t even give voice to their opinions on important public matters out of fear for their paychecks and their ability to put food on the table. That’s downright un-American.
Title VII should be amended to add to the list of prohibited discriminations — race, color, religion, sex or national origin — a new category: “viewpoints or beliefs.”
Employers must face a choice between bowing to the threatening woke mob — and firing an employee who can bring suit to enforce his (or her) right to be free from viewpoint discrimination. Now imagine the added possibility that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and, in extreme cases, the Justice Department can threaten enforcement actions for such surrenders to the mob.
It is more than a little surprising that such antidiscrimination protection has been absent from our civil-rights law. What civil right could be more important than the right to hold views and beliefs without suffering economic and social hardship for doing so?
Apparently, four states and the District of Columbia have some sort of viewpoint-discrimination protections in their law, but that means 46 states don’t.
Moreover, people employed by the government, to whom the First Amendment applies, have free-speech protections, subject to certain limits developed by Supreme Court decisions. So how is it fair for those who seek or hold jobs in the private economy to be left in the legal cold?
The baleful effects of this legal black hole aren’t limited to employment decisions. People who hold or seek employment in the private economy are forced to curtail their expression of ideas that may run afoul of the mob’s whims. Across the country, the mob’s ability to block or ruin its enemies’ careers has created a climate of fear and repression. People, especially young people, are keeping their heads down lest their livelihoods disappear.
This is an issue on which right and left — except for the extreme left and the libertarian fringe — ought to be able to come to swift agreement. Let’s make sure the Civil Rights Act protects freedom of speech, the foundational right from which all others flow. There is no better cure for the cancel culture.
https://nypost.com/2020/07/07/to-stop-cancel-culture-protect-peoples-viewpoints-under-civil-rights-law/
_________________
Anarcho-Capitalist, AnCaps Forum, Ancapolis, OZschwitz Contraband
“The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”-- Max Stirner
"Remember: Evil exists because good men don't kill the government officials committing it." -- Kurt Hofmann |
|
