The Left -- those great supporters of the First Amendment -- have all been outraged by Trump's recent remarks about how the NFL should fire the protesting players. How dare he question the players' right to protest! Does he not realize that such protests are protected by the Constitution?! Do these players not even have the right to an opinion?! How dare he suggest they lose their livelihoods!
They have a point, of course: free speech is protected in this country.
But where was the Left when James Damore was fired by Google for having exercised his First Amendment rights? The only thing the Left had to say about the Damore affair was to condemn him for his sexism. And to claim that it was people like him who were holding women back.
In fact, many on the Left demanded Damore be fired.
Damore, of course, wrote his essay on his own time, and hadn't intended for it to get national publicity. The NFL players, on the other hand, want their TV audience to see them refusing to stand during the playing of the national anthem.
Another difference is that Damore was basically speaking the truth: in his well-reasoned and balanced essay, Damore pointed out there are innate and well-documented differences between men and women that account for their disproportionate numbers in Silicon Valley. If there simply aren't as many women interested in programming, how is the larger number of male engineers evidence of sexism?
The BLM movement, on the other hand, is based on a big lie: that the police are out to kill innocent blacks. Any clear-eyed view of the statistics immediately shows that to be untrue.
The other difference, of course, is that while Damore was fired for his heretical beliefs, no NFL player will be. Everybody fears the wrath of the Left; nobody fears the wrath of the Right.
In any case, I haven't seen anyone else draw a parallel between the protesting players and James Damore, but the principles involved are the same. Either people should be allowed to protest at their place of employment, or they shouldn't be.
But the Left doesn't see it that way. They evidently believe that the First Amendment only applies if you're speaking the Leftist line.
But, we pretty much already knew that.
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4 comments:
When an employee is working on company time and wearing the company uniform, his employer has an absolute right to regulate what the employee says and does, especially in public. The NFL players do not have the rights of expression they claim to have, not on company time.
Mark --
sounds like you know the law better than I do. All I know is the principle should be the same for both the players and Damore. Though since you phrase it that way, Damore theoretically wrote that memo on his own time, and hadn't intended to make it public, which should actually offer him more protection.
One of our many rights we have as citizens in the United States is the right to protest the government. We are given a great amount of leeway as citizens to express ourselves through various peaceful means without interference from the government...meaning the government cannot punish us for our speech with inprisonment etc. However, the right to free speech does not mean that speech is free from consequences from other entities not related to the government. For instance, an employer has the right to fire an employee if the employee's speech is deemed to be detrimental to that business or company even if that speech is political in nature. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom of consequences. Damore is a good example of this. The same goes for an NFL player. An NFL player's political speech will not protect him of any consequences his employeer may bring upon him because of that speech. At this point in time, the NFL has judged it best to give players leeway in their speech but that doesn't mean this will always be their policy. I think the bottom line with the NFL will always come down to money. Once the owners start to see the "free speech" of the players starting to impact revenue in a negative way, that speech will then become curtailed.
Hannah
Hannah --
That makes perfect sense. NFL revenues have been going down recently, and I think the politicization of the league -- with everybody taking sides on the kneeling issue -- is going to impact revenues further. And as advertisers withdraw, and attendance decreases, some hard decisions are going to have to be made.
With Google, I think they were afraid of lawsuits if they didn't fire Damore. These days you can't talk about racial or gender differences realistically without people screaming racism or sexism, and inviting either boycotts or protests or lawsuits. So Google took the path of least resistance.
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