If Bob Eschliman was a dishwasher working at IHOP, I think people might have a different view about him being fired for making anti-gay comments on his personal blog, but he was the editor of a newspaper.
Now he’s claiming that he was fired for expressing his religious beliefs, which isn’t really the case. He was fired for writing things that hurt the reputation of his employer and undermined their reputation for objectivity. It’s as if the IHOP dishwasher peed in the pancake batter.
But that doesn’t mean that it’s easy to draw the legal lines in a case like this. Employees do deserve some legal protections against dismissal for having unpopular religious beliefs. Does every paper boy for the Newton Daily News have to refrain from objecting to gay marriage?
This is going to continue to come up. As a general matter, employers are under no obligation to employ people whose expression of personal opinions is an embarrassment to the company. But it’s not easy to balance people’s right to religious freedom with employers’ right not to have to tolerate embarrassing employees. I could easily see a case where an employer is of the opinion that anyone who is Mormon or Muslim is clearly out of their minds and an embarrassment to the company who alienates clients. These determinations cannot be left entirely to the subjective interpretation of employers. What’s to prevent me from firing anyone who goes to a Christian church because I think the story of the resurrection is embarrassingly silly?
This idea that anti-gay speech is religiously protected speech is very irritating, but it isn’t that easy to dismiss. Are newspaper editors a special case where different standards should apply? How do we define that difference?
The legal source of the religious right varies. Federal and state interference with free exercise of one’s religion can generate first amendment claims (the free exercise clause). Private discrimination based on religion is prohibited by various federal and state civil rights statutes. Private employers are subject to the latter, prohibiting discrimination based on one’s “religion”. You can’t fire (or fail to hire) a Muslim just because you find his religion to be an embarrassment, for example (although Roberts Repubs could always change that whenever they like.)
Remember, too, that almost every vicious societal practice in the Western world has been located (somehow) in the testaments of the Bible (or Koran). Thus slavery was found to be a part of Southern “religion” by the pastors of American Slavepower. And apartheid by the Africaaners. And of course the inconceivable anti-Semitism of Luther, with the press arm of the Catholic Church whipping up hysterical hatred of Jews from the late 1800s on. And you don’t need to go too far into today’s embarrassing Rightwing Christianity to find that the wimmens was clearly meant to be second class citizens “led” in all things by their man (or boss). True Christianity abhors all other (false) religions as well.
So yes, the followers of these fine religions and their endless “rules” set up to ostracize and demean and harm and diminish and brutalize others are always on solid ground when they claim their hateful acts and speech are simply them “expressing” or “exercising” their (crappy) religion. It’s been a huge problem for ages and isn’t ever going to go away. The Religious you will always have with ye, haha.
The law used to muddle through this endless shit. What we have now is that (thanks to “conservative” activists masquerading as “judges”) the ephemeral rights of the hate-filled “believers” are frequently trumping the social (statutory) rights of the groups disfavored or denounced by the various Iron Age scriptures, like gay people.
This sort of litigation is back on the rise, thanks to “conservatism”. Until we get better judges (and clerics and theologians), whatever garbage from Iron Age societies found in these texts will hysterically be avowed as “crucial!” to one’s “religion”, the (actual) negative effects on others be damned.
I recently learned that if you’re a Sabbatarian Christian who refuses to work on Sundays you can be fired in New Jersey because apparently the consciences of employers (like the Greens at Hobby Lobby) are just a lot tenderer than those of employees and the courts owe them more deference. By that standard Eschliman has nothing to complain about.
And for that reason I’d really hope there’d be a fairly high bar for his employer to cross before firing him. The newspaper is in the business of speech, so they have a particular interest in their employees’ words bringing obloquy on them. Did he have a proper disclaimer on the blog to the effect that it didn’t represent the views of the Newton Daily News? Did he express his views on a particularly offensive fashion? (Looks like yes.) Could you say he was creating a hostile environment in the workplace? (Wouldn’t be surprised.)
Since Iowa is a right to work state, his employer can fire him for wearing brand new shoes to a highschool football game on his offday.
“This idea that anti-gay speech is religiously protected speech is very irritating, but it isn’t that easy to dismiss.”
It’s just as easy as dismissing religious-based arguments for racism. Religion should not be treated as a trump card for protecting bigotry and discrimination.
Get down from the cross, Eschliman, you’re embarassing Jesus.
Exactly. Your right to express your religious beliefs should end precisely at the point where you start denigrating (or worse) other people. (Before that point it should be absolute.) I don’t think that’s a very hard line to draw.
He didn’t discriminate against anyone, though. He wrote something on his blog.
And let him who doesn’t have a blog or an employer cast the first stone, because the rest of us aren’t on very solid ground.
I think Bearpaw meant that the gay-hating editor had not been discriminated against by being fired.
One can write all sorts of things on a blog that likely will get you fired if you have some position of prominence at a corporation. Hell, the IHOP janitor can likely accomplish the same notoriety.
The rights of employers over workers have been exponentially growing in the conservative era; the employment laws supposedly protecting workers are getting pretty toothless for almost all discrimination claims–especially race and sex based. Workers frankly don’t have too many rights to their job in America, this has been a long term Rightwing propaganda goal (as part of its decades long union-hating work). And as far as I can tell, the ordinary boob approves and thinks that his feudal master (boss) should have complete power over him.
What we have now is a new “conservative” legal gambit–that conservative white males are being discriminated against by expressing their (anti-gay) “religious” beliefs—persecuted by the (corporate?) “Gaystapo”. Or that conservative white males are having their religious free exercise rights (or their RFRA rights) infringed if gub’mint requires making contraception coverage available. The latter position has just been blessed by Roberts Repubs, as you as well aware. A case such as this anti-gay editor’s firing will be the new battleground.
Workers usually lose all cases in which they claim their bosses infringed some right or illegally fired them. Roberts’ Repubs are the most pro-corporate Court since 1880. Yet the five catholic males of Roberts Repubs are also very solicitous of “conservative” religious claims. We will see if the usual rule that the “feudal lord always wins” will hold when conservative males start making claims of employment discrimination based on their religious fervor to express gay hatred.
As I wrote, “Religion should not be treated as a trump card for protecting bigotry and discrimination.”
He wrote that “the Gaystapo” are “deceivers” who “want all Christendom to abandon their faith”, and called on people to “fight back against the enemy.” That’s bigotry. And now he and his lawyer are claiming religious persecution.
If he had made similar public comments about “feminazis” or “spearchuckers”, the paper might have similarly decided they no longer wanted him as an editor. There was a time — and still are places — where people would dress up those bigotries in Bible verses, too. But I like to think most judges these days would laugh that out of court, and most lawyers wouldn’t even try.
What’s to prevent me from firing anyone who goes to a Christian church because I think the story of the resurrection is embarrassingly silly?
Nothing in a “right to work” state. That’s their baby? Isn’t it?
Most all states allow firing for cause, and most employers know how to phony up any cause so as to stand up in court.
And the only way an employer knows you go to a Christian church is if you tell them, and especially if you wear that status on your sleeve and are proselytizing at work.
Not being in a right to work state doesn’t save you.
Exactly.
The First Amendment protection of speech is relatively narrow and doesn’t allow everyone to say whatever they want without repercussion anywhere they want.
Once you enter into a right to work state, though, it really doesn’t make a difference one way or the other. Your boss can fire you for any reason they want. Which is inherent in the phrase “right to work”!
Why is “the right to religious freedom” the right to scream and shout religion into the ears of others who don’t want to listen or simply have other things to do?
The problem here is not legal, it’s theological. Politicized churches are using this and anti-abortion talk to divert from what theologians have traditionally called “the offense of the gospel”. Politicized churches and enterpreneurial clergy have always used fine point of morality as a way to increase clerical wealth and power while ignoring the injunctions for peace and for caring for the poor.
And this sort of politicization and entrepreneurialism are not limited to Christianity. You can find this strain in almost all religions and even in reform movements of religions–the behavior of Franciscans during the Spanish Conquest of America being a case in point.
We actually have no idea at all how God or Jesus actually considered homosexuality. But we know for sure how the Hebrew culture that framed the Torah consdidered it (and the eating of shellfish and a bunch of other things) and how the Hellenized Roman citizen and Jew Saul/Paul considered it. And the political/cultural identity motives that were driving those opinions as well as the problems with homosexual practices that drew their ire, such as the sodomizing and rape of vagrants and nomads in Sodom and Gommorah. Or the great ambivalence about homosexuality in Hellenic culture, which is the topic of Michel Foucault’s three-volume history of sexuality.
What I think you are seeing in this religious justification is just a new search for people to discriminate against as each new wave of groups of people say no to gratuitous abuse by bigots who pop off.
The only intervention of government in this is the privileges that government provides to corporations, one of which is to deny freedom of speech on penalty of firing. On the other hand, an employer cannot discriminate in hiring, promotion, or firing on the basis of religious belief; an employer may nonetheless make those decisions about how an employee treats vendors, customers, co-workers, and the general community from which the employer draws its customers. Most of these so-called religious belief cases are more about rude behavior than belief.
This is another sign that the whole structure of corporate privileges has outlived its usefulness. It clouds the assignment of responsibility and makes guaranteeing civil and human rights much more difficult.
That editor had he been a single-man newspaper firm would find the community boycotting his paper. He is expecting the corporate shield to protect his sorry ass. He still has the freedom to do a blog, stand on a street corner and spew, or whatever.
This looks like a stunt to draw attention to a guy seeking a foothold on the escalator of conservative grift.
In the future dystopia novel Cloud Atlas, the final stage of human organization before complete environmental collapse was “corpocracy”, government by corporation, haha. Guess it’s not that futuristic–which was the point, most likely.
It seems the more vicious a biblical doctrine or rule, the more likely a reactionary pastor and his church will celebrate it and raise it to “mortal sin” levels. Thus, we are to hate gays but ignore shellfish, haha. Add this to the “live your faith” (i.e. actively harm others) crapola, which is also a supporting beam of today’s fundamentalist revivalism. Of course, even the more “moderate” Catholic church (via its fine bishops) has been leading the charge against gay marriage.
This conservative “religious rights” stunt is their newest legal strategy. They need to make use of their great asset, the conservative federal judiciary, and they are doing so. But they are gonna run into another “conservative” legal and ideological dogma—that the corporate world is above the law, a commandment very near and dear to the Chief Corporatist, er, Justice, John Roberts. Which tenet of apocalyptic “conservatism” will trump the other?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1937 wrote a book on discipleship, translated in English as The Cost of Discipleship that looks as witnessing and action as disciplined Christians in the midst of Nazi Germany. It’s focus is on what he calls “cheap grace”, which he and the Confessing Church movement considered what the German Lutheran Church establishment was involved in. This work was one of the key documents that motivated the clergy who were active in the civil rights and peace and justice movements. Bonhoeffer himself was executed for having a minor role in the resistance within the Abwehr.
The reactionary pastors always focus on the sins that people outside their congregation have (never challenge the bankers’ theft) because the church budgets go mainly to the church building and the pastor’s salary and fringe benefits. Not good to upset the donors. And shunning or excommunication allows even the insiders to become outsiders.
1. There is no such thing as a private blog. Anything you share on the internet is public and may come back to bite you. 2. His problem wasn’t his religion, it was his insulting, inappropriate way of expressing his beliefs. It makes it clear that he is not impartial, and can not be trusted. That’s a problem for a newspaper. 3. He was in a high enough position that his behavior does reflect on the paper. Nobody assumes the delivery man speaks for the paper. Editors do. 4. None of this is complicated. He’s just a bigot who is surprised to find that he’s not above public reproach.
He likened gay activism to naziism.
Would his employer have been justified in firing him if he made the same accusation against anti-abortion activists? The NAACP? The Israeli government? Game of Thrones fans?
I think they would–and there goes his “religious sentiment” argument.
For a newspaper editor to traffic in victims-are-the-real-oppressors trope is evidence he’s not capable of doing the job his employer expects and he is justifiably looking for a new position.
“I could easily see a case where an employer is of the opinion that anyone who is Mormon or Muslim is clearly out of their minds and an embarrassment to the company who alienates clients.”
Can’t we just simplify this and acknowledge that anyone who has a supernatural belief system that dictates their actions in the real world is not playing with a full deck?
The alternative is an endless propagation of Judean People’s Fronts all insisting that they be excused from various slices of reality they don’t like.