I never said racism was okay at home, you will not twist my words sir.

You are right about that actually, I'm sorry. I don't know where I took that from, but I apologize for that. I realize now that you're defending their personal freedom, and not condoning their actions. I spent the prior 3 days running on about 6 hours of sleep total and I was not in a very strong frame of mind at the time I wrote that. I just woke up from a long and much needed sleep and am rested enough to think relatively clearly now :)

I still disagree with a lot of what you're saying both on factual and ethical grounds. For starters, if an employer wants to make what you do in your home life their business, that is their right and if you don't like it it's your own right to not work there. This is not only how it goes in the USA, but also how I feel it should work. Have you even known anybody that works on a police force? Police are basically constantly monitored and scrutinized by their employer, and if they slip up in many even small ways in their own private time, they can be penalized or even fired for it. And the police force should be able to do that. By your logic here, police should be able to go home after their shift, hang out downtown on the street smoking pot, drinking, doing lines of coke, and playing illegal poker, and then be protected from being fired from their job the next day because somebody reported them. In my opinion they should be fired for that, shouldn't they? Even though the events occurred on the police officers own time, and he wasn't in uniform, or acting under the authority of his workplace at the time, and it certainly doesn't impact his ability to do his job at all the next morning.

You seem to be confused as to what privacy or a private conversation is. You can't have a private conversation with your friend in the middle of a restaurant, because it's not a private setting. You have no reasonable expectation of privacy there. I would fully support an employer firing somebody if they did that in the middle of a restaurant, on the street, on Facebook, or in the bathroom urinal at the office. I would not support the employer if that same conversation took place between you and your friend, in the private setting of your home, or over the telephone, or something similar. Allow me to reinforce the fact that if you're in a public setting, anything you say or do is not private, it's public and therefore fair game for employers or anybody else in the world to use either for or against you. That's just how it is, how it always has been, and how it should be. What if the person that reported you in the restaurant was (unbeknownst to you) a customer of your employers, and you were just ripping them a new one with your friend at the restaurant because they pissed you off at work or whatever. Would you still support that employees right to keep their job? Remember, if somebody can hear you and you don't have a reasonable expectation that they absolutely can't, then what you're saying is public, and not private at all. Period. It's up to you to assert and protect your own privacy. If you fail to do so, it's fair game.

A quick side note: Because Facebook is public and not private, I would say that it should be an employers right to ask for your Facebook information if they wish, and it is your own right to say no. If that means finding a new job because you don't like the company policy of this employer, then keep looking because thi...

I never said racism was okay at home, you will not twist my words sir.

You are right about that actually, I'm sorry. I don't know where I took that from, but I apologize for that. I realize now that you're defending their personal freedom, and not condoning their actions. I spent the prior 3 days running on about 6 hours of sleep total and I was not in a very strong frame of mind at the time I wrote that. I just woke up from a long and much needed sleep and am rested enough to think relatively clearly now :)

I still disagree with a lot of what you're saying both on factual and ethical grounds. For starters, if an employer wants to make what you do in your home life their business, that is their right and if you don't like it it's your own right to not work there. This is not only how it goes in the USA, but also how I feel it should work. Have you even known anybody that works on a police force? Police are basically constantly monitored and scrutinized by their employer, and if they slip up in many even small ways in their own private time, they can be penalized or even fired for it. And the police force should be able to do that. By your logic here, police should be able to go home after their shift, hang out downtown on the street smoking pot, drinking, doing lines of coke, and playing illegal poker, and then be protected from being fired from their job the next day because somebody reported them. In my opinion they should be fired for that, shouldn't they? Even though the events occurred on the police officers own time, and he wasn't in uniform, or acting under the authority of his workplace at the time, and it certainly doesn't impact his ability to do his job at all the next morning.

You seem to be confused as to what privacy or a private conversation is. You can't have a private conversation with your friend in the middle of a restaurant, because it's not a private setting. You have no reasonable expectation of privacy there. I would fully support an employer firing somebody if they did that in the middle of a restaurant, on the street, on Facebook, or in the bathroom urinal at the office. I would not support the employer if that same conversation took place between you and your friend, in the private setting of your home, or over the telephone, or something similar. Allow me to reinforce the fact that if you're in a public setting, anything you say or do is not private, it's public and therefore fair game for employers or anybody else in the world to use either for or against you. That's just how it is, how it always has been, and how it should be. What if the person that reported you in the restaurant was (unbeknownst to you) a customer of your employers, and you were just ripping them a new one with your friend at the restaurant because they pissed you off at work or whatever. Would you still support that employees right to keep their job? Remember, if somebody can hear you and you don't have a reasonable expectation that they absolutely can't, then what you're saying is public, and not private at all. Period. It's up to you to assert and protect your own privacy. If you fail to do so, it's fair game.

A quick side note: Because Facebook is public and not private, I would say that it should be an employers right to ask for your Facebook information if they wish, and it is your own right to say no. If that means finding a new job because you don't like the company policy of this employer, then keep looking because this one is obviously not a good fit for you. If enough people refuse to work for a company because of asinine policies like that, then they will either suffer for it or change the policy. Simple solution.

I suppose a good example is I think that a child rapist should be Sorry, I have to snip this quoted text to make room for my post. Not trying to censor you or anything here, I just wanted to indicate what I'm replying too while still leaving room for myself. Max character count on Snapzu is seriously short haha.

Again I'm not so sure. Why does one scenario (The child rapist torture) inherently and automatically make another, possibly completely unrelated scenario okay? I will say that torturing anybody for basically any reason under the sun is wrong and immoral. If it happened regularly and/or was condoned by society that still wouldn't make it right or ok to do, nor would it automatically make other unrelated horrible things justified along with it.

While I appreciate your stellar knowlegde of laws and your superbly put together response, you my friend still seem to believe that laws bring about protection. This debate is beyond what the law allows, it's about ethics. Snip!

Laws on their own certainly don't offer any protection by themselves as they are just pieces of paper with information on them. You're absolutely right that people enforce the laws, but it is my opinion that laws are there to serve as a guide as to what the people are able to protect against and how they are able to go about doing it. Does this mean that every injustice or unfairness will be protected against? No, of course not. The system is not perfect, and neither are the people within it. Also not every law is beneficial to society. Thus it becomes up to us, the people, to decide what laws we agree with and which ones are harmful. There is a whole subset of these laws as it pertains to changing other laws, so if we don't think a particular law or set of laws is doing more good than harm, it is within our power to protect against those laws as well. This is the ground work laid out by our system of laws and I believe it works decently well (It's certainly better than nothing). Again, I'm not saying it's perfect or ideal, but it's what we have and we have to work with what we have. While it is certainly commendable of you to take a stand and fire that racist guy and hire the black dude, you were only able to do that because we as a society haven't decided that bigots are worth it to protect and made a law to protect them from those things just based on the fact that they are indeed bigoted. On the other hand, we have done this with just about every class of people that we've decided are deserving or in need of this protection. This is why I don't believe it is true when you say that if we open up the door for employers to fire a bigot just for being a bigot, that it will open up the door for employers to do the same to people that require our protection.

Oh, in regards to looking into criminal filings etc, come on dude. Snip snip snip I may have a kind of rose-tinted view of this issue, coming from Canada, where we seem to be more fair judicially than the USA when it comes to private citizens. I won't say we're without our problems, but you're right, I honestly have never personally navigated the American justice system so I can't speak to the fairness of it.

And lol, you and I can strongly agree on the NSA bit. Snippity snip I agree up until you say that it's immoral for employers to seek out personal character not pertaining to their job. Why is that immoral? I'd argue that it's ethically neutral at worst (Barring a few extreme circumstances that I'm sure exist or could exist but can't quite think of at the moment), but probably an ethical positive if they are removing elements that are immoral themselves, such as bigots and homophobics.