Facebook gay wedding comment man wins demotion case

[Dennis the 'Bloody Peasant']

Thoughts?
Personally find his point of view irritating and repellant, so don't give a shit about his 'rights', but this argument about religious / personal freedom of expression and belief keeps coming up on the gay marriage subject.
Do the bigots have any kind of case re being directly penalised for their beliefs? Are they entitled to have them without fear of financial penalties or criminal proccedings?

A Christian who was demoted in his job for a comment he wrote on Facebook about gay marriages has won a breach of contract action against his employers.
Adrian Smith, 55, lost his managerial position and had a 40% salary cut after saying a gay wedding held in a church was an "equality too far".
Mr Smith, from Bolton, claimed Trafford Housing Trust (THT) acted unlawfully in demoting him.
He also alleged that the trust had breached his human rights.
Disciplinary action was launched against Mr Smith when he wrote "an equality too far" next to a BBC News Online story, written in February 2011, with the headline, "Gay church 'marriage' set to get the go-ahead".
The father-of-two's comments were not visible to the general public, and were posted outside work time, but the trust argued he broke its code of conduct by expressing religious or political views which might upset co-workers.
High Court judge Mr Justice Briggs said: "Mr Smith was taken to task for doing nothing wrong, suspended and subjected to a disciplinary procedure which wrongly found him guilty of gross misconduct, and then demoted to a non-managerial post with an eventual 40% reduction in salary.
"The breach of contract which the Trust thereby committed was serious and repudiatory."
Matthew Gardiner, chief executive at Trafford Housing Trust said it accepted the court's verdict and the trust had been defending its social media policy.

(from BBC NEWS)

[Philosophos]

If I got it right he said that gay marriages shouldn't take place in churches. So what's the big deal? the church and almost every religion say that homosexuality is a sin, so how can they "bless" the sin with marriage? It's not something new we already knew that and I don't really think it's going to ever change...

[Blake's Baby]

It's not up to his employers what his idiotic religious views are, all sorts of people believe some really ridiculous shit and it makes no difference to how they do their jobs.

[NoOneIsIllegal]

He was a boss who was taken away from his managerial position and had his wages cut due to his bigoted views?

Good.

[Vanguard1917]

Personally find his point of view irritating and repellant, so don't give a shit about his 'rights'

Would you support the sacking of a worker based on his or her political opinions?

[sixdollarchampagne]

A prohibition on expressing religious or political views that might be "upsetting" to one's co-workers is an obvious violation of freedom of speech. People should have the right to be wrong. If opinions cannot be expressed, then how can they be countered? A corporation or a bourgeois government should not be trusted to censor thought. Such censorship can easily be used against the workers' movement, and it will be. That's why it should be opposed.

[Ocean Seal]

Would you support the sacking of a worker based on his or her political opinions?
He wasn't sacked and he wasn't a worker.

[Os Cangaceiros]

He wasn't sacked and he wasn't a worker.

The logic by which he was demoted would probably apply to an outspoken person of any political persuasion, though.

[robbo203]

The logic by which he was demoted would probably apply to an outspoken person of any political persuasion, though.


Yes, absolutely correct. And this is why on principle I oppose appealing to the state to ban or prevent the expression of any point of view however outrageous or disgusting, including fascist ideas. Give them the slightest excuse to intervene and you will soon find yourself on the receiving end of state repression.

Years ago when i lived in the UK and briefly worked in a goddamn awful job penpushing in the civil service, I was warned by my employers when I handed in my notice, not to reveal anything about my work. It transpired that the Personnel Department had been monitoring letters I wrote to the local press and were concerned about my radical ideas. Today I might well have been sacked by the sound of things

[blake 3:17]

The guy is a bigoted homophobe, but I would agree he shouldn't lose his job over that.

[Ocean Seal]

The logic by which he was demoted would probably apply to an outspoken person of any political persuasion, though.
I'm just saying that he wasn't a worker because he was a manager. He was demoted to being a worker. This was probably a freak overreaction by some liberal boss who thinks that he's the shit as far as equality is concerned (the irony), but that doesn't mean we should jump to the defense of a non-worker with bigoted views. Fuck homophobic managers, and fuck bosses who think they have the right to invade your privacy.

[Comrade Jogiches]

If I got it right he said that gay marriages shouldn't take place in churches. So what's the big deal? the church and almost every religion say that homosexuality is a sin, so how can they "bless" the sin with marriage? It's not something new we already knew that and I don't really think it's going to ever change...

Leviticus, which notes sodomy (this includes getting oral and anal sex between a man and woman, even) as an abomination.

Leviticus, using the same language, discusses shellfish as being an abomination.

I highly doubt those same folks justifying the denial of civil rights to homosexuals, are too careful about what they eat.

[Sea]

I have the sudden urge to look up his number and see if he wants to go to chippendales with me...

[GerrardWinstanley]

I'm on the side of the housing trust. For one, they have every right to demote Smith if they think he has the propensity to discriminate against vulnerable tenants (and judging by his comments after the trial, he sounds like a raving homophobe). Furthermore, I don't care if he said this stuff outside of the workplace. He posted it to Facebook where his colleagues could see it and obviously upset them.

How a demotion for this any worse than demoting somebody for spreading malicious gossip or insulting your manager or colleagues publically online, I don't know. I suspect Peter Tatchell wouldn't care (who doesn't cherish free speech all that much when it comes to attacks on his spotless public image).

[hetz]

Holy shit, I didn't even know you could get fired/degraded for FB comments of whatever sort.

[TheGodlessUtopian]

Holy shit, I didn't even know you could get fired/degraded for FB comments of whatever sort.

This isn't the first time something like this has happened over a Facebook comment. I remember another story where a kid said something and the pigs came and interrogated him. Plenty of these kind of stories buzzing around.

[Yuppie Grinder]

Employers should never have that much authority. What you do outside of your workplace is your own damn business.

[hatzel]

Not to get totally off-topic here, but...


Leviticus, which notes sodomy (this includes getting oral and anal sex between a man and woman, even) as an abomination.

Oh, that's interesting. Now would you mind explaining to me why oral and anal sex between a man and a woman have always been permitted in rabbinical hermeneutics, and why it has been stated repeatedly for the last two thousand years that the biblical prohibition in question refers exclusively to male-male penetrative anal sex, not even referring to oral sex between men, let alone between a man and a woman (though admittedly other forms of same-sex intercourse have historically been prohibited in other ways, but not by association with the verse you're highlighting here)

When you're done with that, you can justify your decision to use the word 'sodomy' as if it had any biblical basis (and even if it did, it wouldn't have anything like the meaning you want to ascribe to it) and why you think that 'abomination' is a suitable word to use in this context, when it doesn't mean the same as the original Hebrew word that was then translated into Greek and then into Latin and then into English as 'abomination' by some crusty old dude a few hundred years ago, but that's less important, because indeed the same word - however you choose to understand it - is used to describe a wide variety of practices, very few of which are too harshly frowned upon by the Christian Right...

Yeah, sorry about having to do that. I certainly agree with your sentiment - there is very rarely one-to-one correlation between the Bible and the opinions of those who claim to uphold it, and their reading of scripture is clearly shaped by extra-biblical factors - but when you make claims which are themselves innaccurate (though they may well be claimed as accurate by certain currents of thought, which in fact only goes to show how external influences can redefine the biblical inheritance), suddenly it becomes difficult for me to throw myself behind what you're actually trying to get across here, which is a real shame.

As for the OP: as others have said, one may have good reason to be cautious of these kinds of developments. It doesn't really matter who he is or what he said or anything else, the important point is that an employer (it could just as easily be the police or anybody else, as other recent examples have shown) took action because they didn't like what somebody put on their social networking profile. I think that general idea is far more interesting than the specifics of this particular incident, so getting trapped in those kinds of details is really missing the bigger picture, which should be considered on its own terms...

[Blake's Baby]

Well, maybe he could, but if you look he's been banned, so, probably, no not so much.

I suspect that the use of 'abomination' for the eating of shellfish and 'lying with a man' depends on the translation. The version I have to hand, the NIV, says for Leviticus 11:12 "Anything living in the water that does not have fins and scales is to be detestable to you" and for Leviticus 18:22 "Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable". Perhaps the term used in the Bible that Comrade Jogisches was consulting said "Anything living in the water that does not have fins and scales is an abomination to you" and "Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is an abomination". We're usually not Biblical scholars, just interested amateurs, and there are literally hundreds of translations available. Want to give us your take on why 'abomination' might not be a useful translation of whatever the Hebrew is?

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

I'm on the side of the housing trust. For one, they have every right to demote Smith if they think he has the propensity to discriminate against vulnerable tenants (and judging by his comments after the trial, he sounds like a raving homophobe).

This is a point that deserves emphasis. Personal beliefs can reflect actions, and if the housing trust has reason to believe that one of those working for them may discriminate against tenants, then it behooves them to take action to prevent that.

[soso17]

Re: FB used by pigs. I accepted a friend request from this girl I barely knew. Three days later, the police came to my house and told me she had "disappeared" (apparently she had a history of running away, despite the fact she was 27 yo). They proceeded to question me bc her FB showed that I was her most recent "friend". Bullshit. Needless to say, I purged my page of any loose cannons.