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You see how you just went "No one is doing that, anyway I'm going to do that" right? I don't see why your boss shouldn't be able to fire you for that. At will employment is the default in the US after all. He can fire you because he doesn't like the color of your shirt, because he doesn't like that your voice sounds annoying, that he saw a picture of your lawn and thought it wasn't taken care of well.
And yet, restricting citizen's freedom of association (which in the US is an implied right under freedom of speech) via fear of reprisals is? If you don't like a company firing John for his speech then you can boycott the company for that, as is your right.
When someone is making a 'this is how I think things should be' argument, it's very annoying to receive a 'well this is how things actually are' response. We're not really playing from the same sheet of music here.
I don't see how I did that unless you are arguing that there is not a difference between hurling personal insults at your boss and publicly voicing a political opinion he disagrees with. I see that distinction clearly, and I also think that expressing political opinions and handling political disagreements is a basic and necessary function of living in a democracy. If you don't see the inherent conflict of serving your democratic duty as an active participant in the political process and being liable to lose your job because of that then I feel we are at an impasse.
Outside of that I feel like we are roaming back to my original point. And I would just directly challenge your conception of 'having rights' in America as you present them here. For example, you can't fire a person because they are black. The Civil Rights Act just doesn't allow that. So you don't really have at will employment by default so we don't even need to act like 'At will Employment' is a point here to begin with.
And that highlights my problem with this predicament. Boycotting a company because they fired an honest and good man for bad reasons is what losers with no rights do. People with actual rights just point the upholder of their rights to the person that violated them and the upholder deals with it.
If you have to uphold your own rights in the immediate sense then you just don't have rights. Like, insofar as rights are real, you have to have an external mechanism that enforces them. Otherwise you are just kind of doing what you want and calling it 'having rights'.
Ok sure, fair enough.
So if you say to your boss "your wife is a bitch" he can fire you because it's private, but if you post on your public work associated Facebook "I think my boss's wife is a bitch", he can't because it's public?
And wait, let me anticipate the "oh that's different it's political" response. Where's the exact distinction? Like extreme example but real political thing that happens in some countries. What if say, his son is gay and the employes tells the boss (or I guess, posts on his public Facebook) "your son is a freak who should be executed by the moral police"? That sounds distinctly political, which people should and should not be executed by government moral police. How about "women shouldn't vote, including your wife"? I think he should be able to find that insulting and fire you. Or hell what if they just say "I hope the president issues an executive order calling your wife a bitch". Can't get more political than your hopes of a particular policy from a politician. Maybe he's really creative and inspired and makes a troll campaign (but he plays it completely seriously) for local waterboard commissioner and while in an interview makes a point to repeatedly say "yeah, part of what inspired me to run is that my current boss's wife is a bitch. I figured maybe something is wrong with the water making her so bitchy".
How are you going to draw the lines in a fair manner, where does "politics" a topic about basically every part of life in at least some way actually begin here? This isn't some gotcha, it's an extremely difficult task to actually make a good overarching definition that isn't able to be abused. Just try with only the examples I gave alone and it'll be hard without making a convoluted mess.
This is some crazy logic, boycotting companies is your right. The government should not be micromanaging your financial decisions like that. Do you want every time you use a different gas station or try a new brand at the store to be open to scrutiny by bureaucrats to make sure you aren't "cancelling" anyone?
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