Find Matt on Facebook (facebook.com/mattkempnercolumnist) and Twitter (@MattKempner) or email him at mkempner@ajc.com.
If a widely circulated screen shot is to be believed, a career can pretty much evaporate in three minutes.
That's how much time apparently elapsed between when Christine McMullen Lindgren posted an ugly, racially driven tirade and when someone on Facebook posed this question: "You work at Bank of America huh?"
Lindgren hadn’t mentioned her employer in her post, but apparently she listed it elsewhere on her personal Facebook page. Within 24 hours she was dumped from her banking job in metro Atlanta.
Free speech is a nice idea. But, as we keep seeing, if you use it to show ugliness or share unpopular views, expect to pay a financial price.
Gerod Roth is happy he was able to find work again.
Last year he had posted a Facebook photo of himself along with the three-year-old son of a co-worker. Friends posted dumb racist comments about the child. Roth, apparently in response to someone asking about why kids were running wild in his office wrote, "He was feral."
Ten months later, he’s still getting ripped online, where he’s been labeled a racist. His employer wasn’t listed on his Facebook page, which also wasn’t under his real name. But it didn’t take long for people to figure out his real identity and where he had worked as an office manager.
They asked that he be fired. As it turns out, he already had been laid off for unrelated reasons before the firestorm even began.
But the blood-letting may not be over.
“What do you think internet sleuths?” someone re-posted recently about Roth and his friends. “Can we get the rest of them fired? I Think We CAN!!”
A website was set up at gerishilton.com (using one of Roth’s Facebook pseudonyms). It starts with this: “Geris Hilton – The Racist …. Just in case you are thinking about hiring this guy. Know this is who he is.”
Roth told me that for months he avoided looking for another paying job. When he finally did apply for work, he said he didn’t use his full name, figuring he’d never get a job again if he did.
He said that his “feral” comment wasn’t tied to race, that for days he hadn’t seen some of the ugly comments friends had posted, that he had urged them to stop and that he should have acted sooner. He also said that if he was the boss and knew only what was posted online – some of which he contends was altered by “social justice warriors” – he would have fired himself.
“Free speech is not freedom from consequence,” he said. “You can have an opinion. But if your opinion is made intentionally to hurt somebody or impede their liberties, that’s where it becomes a massive problem.”
(Roth told me that important details about what he faced will be featured in a TV episode of a new broadcast network show slated to air this fall. He said he is under a non-disclosure agreement. He didn’t share details that would allow me to verify that.)
Recently, a colleague of mine at the AJC wrote about a Roswell police officer who was fired after flying a Confederate battle flag at her home. A nearby resident who complained said the officer's police vehicle was parked in the driveway at the time.
The officer disputed the part about the vehicle. She also said she hadn’t realized such flags are often controversial. No kidding – that’s what she said.
A giant middle finger
Of course, any decent police force would want to avoid having officers displaying a flag that — for some who wave it — is a giant middle finger aimed at splintering and debasing our collective family.
Of course, businesses want to protect their reputations, their investments and the rest of their workers from the image damage that can be done by an employee who spews hate into an online megaphone.
Of course, anyone who cares about basic decency wouldn’t want a kid’s image passed around online with racial smears.
I just wonder where this path will take us and if the destination is where we want to be.
The U.S. Constitution's free speech protections restrict the government's ability to quash your voice, not the ability of your boss, your neighbors or strangers to make you regret speaking. A hodgepodge of other federal and state protections offer some defense, but they are limited.
Confrontation of ideas is healthy. Criticism and debate is a good thing. Employers should – and, generally, do – have the right protect themselves from employees who might cause them damage.
But what views will be allowed to stand in the light — where they can be seen and questioned?
And which will become the targets of vigilantes intent on not only confronting ideas they don’t like but also crushing the financial futures of those who hold them?
