Age. Race. Sexual Orientation. Should Political Expression Be a Protected Class Too?

            Your boss can’t fire you because of the color of your skin. He can’t get rid of you because he doesn’t like your religion. Federal law protects you against employment discrimination based on your sex, race, pregnancy status, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, genetic information or (if you are over 40) age.

            Should he be able to deprive you of your ability to pay your rent because you’re a Democrat? Or a Republican? Of course not—yet he can.

It’s time to add another protected class to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: political expression.

            Every year, especially during election years, American employers fire, demote and/or retaliate against loyal workers because they disagree with their constitutionally-guaranteed right to hold a political opinion. While a company may well have a reasonable interest in keeping politics out of the workplace—the owner of a restaurant might not want a waiter to engage in a political debate with their customer, for example—many employees get let go despite never having expressed a political opinion on the job. In most states, they can’t sue.

Going after a person over their politics is unfair. But it’s a much bigger problem than a violation of common decency. Because threatening a person’s livelihood over their opinions has a chilling effect on the expression of other workers as well, allowing such thuggish behavior stifles the speech necessary for a vibrant political system and is thus profoundly undemocratic.

“Most important,” a 2022 New York Times editorial opined, “freedom of speech is the bedrock of democratic self-government. If people feel free to express their views in their communities, the democratic process can respond to and resolve competing ideas. Ideas that go unchallenged by opposing views risk becoming weak and brittle rather than being strengthened by tough scrutiny.” Most Americans, however, do not feel that they live in a Land of the Free. Only a third of voters said they felt free to express their political views freely, according to a contemporaneous poll.

Nowhere is speech circumscribed more than at work—unless you’re a government employee, where you’re protected by the First Amendment, or you live in one of the handful of states that protect private-sector workers who express political opinions. Private employers are authoritarian dictatorships where it’s best to keep your views to yourself. Your boss’ harsh governance should end at the end of your work shift.

Yet it does not.

            Employment discrimination in response to political expression is not limited to victims with fringe political views, like the pizza-shop and hot-dog-joint workers who got fired after online sleuths discovered that they had attended a far-right white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville in 2017, or the white-collar workers canned for their presence at the January 6th Capitol riot. To be clear, however, there was no evidence that the doxxed-and-dumped employees in these situations had expressed their views while on the job. They should not have been let go.

            Citizens with vanilla affiliations within the duopoly are targeted too.

            An Alabama woman was famously fired from her job at an insulation company in 2004 for being a Democrat, and more specifically the Kerry-Edwards bumpersticker on her car, which she parked in the employee parking lot. (Her boss, a Bush supporter, had passed out GOP flyers to his workers.) She had no right to sue.

            In 2022 a woman who co-founded a non-profit organization that provides financial stipends for Congressional interns was fired by her own board after it learned she was a conservative Republican. She filed a long-shot federal lawsuit, which is pending.

            More recently, antiwar activists who oppose Israel’s war against Gaza have found themselves the victims of retaliation. People have been fired for personal social-media posts supporting the Palestinians. Pro-Palestine college students have been doxxed, suspended, expelled and blacklisted by prospective employers. Google fired 50 employees for staging a protest against the company’s contracts with Israeli tech firms; the company said they lost their jobs for causing a disruption rather than their opinions. A baker’s dozen of federal judges went so far as to declare that they wouldn’t hire any student who graduated from Columbia University—my alma mater and ground zero for a wave of campus encampment protests—regardless of their views, or lack thereof, about the Israel-Hamas War.

            Corporations routinely discriminate based on politics. A 2019 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that employers are less likely to hire a job applicant when they become aware that they favor different parties. And workers are well aware that they face political discrimination. A 2020 Cato Institute/YouGov poll found that 32% of workers were “personally are worried about missing out on career opportunities or losing their job if their political opinions became known.” Only 32%?

            We have a choice. We can build a politically permissive society where a wide range of views and opinions may be freely expressed (with exceptions for defamation or calling for specific violence) without fear of being discriminated against, understanding that we will frequently take offense at what is being said. Or we can continue to push politics underground, keeping our views so secret that some “shy” voters won’t even admit their party affiliation to pollsters. We may feel more comfortable in a seemingly politics-free zone but, as the Times editorial argued above, censorship and self-censorship will encourage the spreading of outlandish, stupid and demonstrably wrong ideas that occasionally become the law of the land.

            (Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

SYNDICATED COLUMN: “Selma” and Hollywood’s Sleazy Perversion of History

Movies are the historical record.

Americans experience the Vietnam War by watching “Apocalypse Now,” slavery in “12 Years a Slave,” and D-Day through “Saving Private Ryan.” A lot more Americans watch historical movies than read history books. Which, when done well, is not a bad thing. I’ve read countless books about the collapse of Nazi Germany, but the brilliantly-acted and directed reenactment of Hitler’s last days in his Berlin bunker depicted in the masterful 2004 German film “Downfall” can’t be beat.

When a film purports to depict a historical event, it becomes the only version of what most people believe really happened. So, as we move further into a post-literate society, misleading historical filmmaking isn’t just a waste of 2-1/2 hours.

It’s a crime against the truth.

The Ava DuVernay-directed film “Selma” is at the center of controversy, both due to its semi-snubbing by the Oscars – viewed as backtracking from last year’s relatively racially diverse choice of nominees – and accusations that it plays loose with history.

Former LBJ aide and Democratic Party stalwart Joe Califano fired the first shot with a Washington Post op-ed. “Selma,” wrote Califano, “falsely portrays President Lyndon B. Johnson as being at odds with Martin Luther King Jr. and even using the FBI to discredit him, as only reluctantly behind the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and as opposed to the Selma march itself.”

He’s right.

Robert Caro’s magisterial four-volume biography of Johnson portrays him as a deeply flawed man, but one whose passion to push for desegregation and an end to discrimination against blacks informed his political career throughout his life, though it wasn’t always obvious to his detractors.

It was only after JFK’s assassination brought him to power – actually, a movie portraying Kennedy as reluctant to support civil rights would have been accurate – that he had the chance to push through both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which he did aggressively and quickly, despite what he famously predicted would be the loss of the South to the Democratic Party for a generation or more.

Johnson gave J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI too much latitude, which Hoover used to harass King, but there’s no evidence that, as the movie depicts, it was LBJ who ordered Hoover to send audiotapes of King having sex with other women to his wife. And let’s be clear: every important conversation in the Oval Office was being taped. We have the transcripts. We would know if that had happened.

Califano takes his defense of his former boss too far when he says “[the march on] Selma was LBJ’s idea.” Otherwise, the facts are on his side: the LBJ in “Selma” is not the LBJ King knew.

Fans of the film argue that it doesn’t matter.

“Did ‘Selma’ cut some corners and perhaps tilt characters to suit the needs of the story? Why yes — just like almost every other Hollywood biopic and historical film that has been made,” the media writer David Carr writes in The New York Times.

Yes, in a movie the story is the thing. It’s hard to imagine “The Queen” — about the inner workings of the British monarchy and its relationship to then-Prime Minister Tony Blair in the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana — working without a lot of made-up dialogue between the principals. However, the great detail of these obviously private conversations signals to the audience that they don’t come out of a transcript, and that we must be witnessing a fictionalized account.

There comes a point, on the other hand, where so many corners get cut and so many characters get tilted that a film ceases to resemble history and enters the territory of complete fabulism and, in the case of “Selma” and LBJ, retroactive character assassination.

The clash between MLK and LBJ – King pushing, Johnson resisting – isn’t merely some extraneous detail of the script in “Selma.” It’s the main plot of the film.

It didn’t go down like that, yet thanks to this BS film, a generation of Americans will grow up thinking that it did.

Alyssa Rosenberg of The Washington Post repeatedly calls “Selma” “fiction.” As in: “film and other fiction.” To her, apparently, film is always fiction. But it’s not.

Like books, film is a medium.

Film can be nonfiction.

Film can be fiction.

“Califano’s approach,” she writes, “besides setting a [sic] odd standard for how fiction ought to work…suggests that we should check fiction for inaccuracies.”

As usual, the crux of the debate boils down to an inability to agree on definitions of terms. For those like Rosenberg who believe that everyone knows movies are just for fun, it doesn’t matter that “Schindler’s List” depicts showers at Auschwitz spraying water rather than Zyklon B — even though that never happened, and thus serves to understate one of the horrors of the Holocaust. To the all-movies-are-fiction crowd, “Zero Dark Forty” is cool despite its completely false claim that torture led to the assassination of Osama bin Laden.

“This is art; this is a movie; this is a film,” director DuVernay told PBS. “I’m not a historian. I’m not a documentarian.”

That’s sleazy. Truth is, her film is being marketed as fact, as she knew it would be. And it’s doing better because of it.

Audiences need a ratings system to separate films that purport to recount actual historical events from those like “Selma,” which are fictional tales using historical figures as hand puppets.

I suggest that the MPAA institute the following ratings:

Rated H for Historical: a film that makes a good faith effort to recount history accurately.

Rated S-H for Semi-Historical: a film that relies on devices like made-up dialogue and encounters, but whose basic plot line reflects history to the best of our knowledge.

Rated H-F for Historical Fiction: a film in which anything, including the basic plot line, can be made up out of whole cloth.

If the movies are going to lie to me, I deserve to know before shelling out my $12.50.

(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and cartoonist, is the author of the new critically-acclaimed book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.” Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)

COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

 

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