"Racist" professor found dead in home

[mahagonny]

If something like "race relations" is a big part of the job, statements like this can indicate potential bias or ignorance that would prevent you from properly doing your job, so firing is a perfectly acceptable outcome

If race relations is mentioned in your job description these days, there is a very specific script you must follow. And it would look like Black Lives Matter wrote that script, even if they didn't. That's why I think we're in a wave of hysteria and intolerance. And many don't see it if they agreed with that script already.

[Wahoo Redux]

No time to read the discussion that followed, but I wanted to respond to this. We can carry things out to an extreme. If a school administrator refers to minorities using the N-word, talks about nooses, keeps white sheets in his office, and is in charge of discipline for a school with minorities, they are clearly incapable of doing their job properly. It's not a matter of free speech. If a science teacher stands in front of the class and teaches the kids that all other planets rotate around Neptune, that science teacher should be fired. You can argue that these are not merely political or religious opinions. Well, some would say they are. There's a threshold where speech indicates inability to do the job you're paid to do.

As for Fox and Breitbart, they'll have something to talk about no matter what others do. The firing in question was crazy because it was crazy, not because Breitbart can make a story about it.

The conversation that follows covers this, more or less, and the big problem with the extreme hypothetical, the reductio ad absurdum, is that it gives license to the censors and the zealots.   

Do we have a Klucker principal somewhere?  No, I don't think so, at least not in the extreme you describe.

Or do we have nursing deans being fired for saying "all lives matter"?  Yes, we do.

So we are using the hypothetical to limit the reality.

And in any event, both of your examples take place on the job.  That's where the line is. 

I do have to disagree: FOX can make a headline out of almost anything, but these sorts of events are their bread and butter.  This is what these "news" services live for.  The worst part is one cannot challenge and deconstruct the event as one can with many FOX headlines.