Last week my biggest fan, Grammarian, posted a comment linking to an article about a librarian who lost her job because of something she wrote. Sally Stern-Hamilton was fired from her job as a library assistant when they discovered she was the author of a "disturbing look at life in the library." The librarian and her attorney have called it an infringement of her 1st Amendment rights. We should all be outraged. But that's not true.
The 1st Amendment to our Constitution reads (in part) that Congress shall make no law "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press... ." Leaving aside the freedom part of this, let us note that the Mason County District Library did not have the librarian arrested or file criminal charges against her. No one has suggested she broke a law when she wrote her tell-all novel. In fact it was actually stocked on the shelves there.
Additionally, no one at the library questioned her freedom to write the book. We are free to write or say pretty much anything we want. If I want to go around telling everyone that 90% of all Americans are fools, I'm perfectly free to do so. If I want to write those things and publish them (or any of the other drivel in this blog), I'm perfectly free to do so. (Good thing too!) If I wanted to say and/or write that my boss is an evil slag (she's not), I am perfectly free to do this also.
But --and here's the part that Ms. Stern-Hamilton and her attorney forgot or missed or didn't understand in 12th grade government-- your words and actions (verbal or written) have consequences. If I did write up a blog post about my boss in some misguided fit of pique and said some nasty things about her (which, I will repeat, could not be true because she is an excellent boss) and she, by some bizarre twist of fate, read my post; she would be perfectly within her rights to fire me.
She would not be questioning my right to say or write what I want. She would be firing me because I said horrible things about her. These opinions could inhibit our ability to work together. Which is exactly what the librarian did.
We do not have a right to a job. The 1st Amendment does not guarantee that no repercussions will occur as a result of our exercise of our freedoms. It just guarantees our freedoms. We ought to be happy enough with that.
2 comments:
It's called consequences. I don't think people understand the meaning of this word any more.
And I thought I was your biggest fan. ^^
LSH
I call bullshit. Taking a job does not make one the property of one's employer. What one does outside the workplace is no business of the boss. You can cutely argue that no one is entitled to a job, but the obverse of this statement is that no one is entitled to a quiescent workforce that passively accepts restrictions on its private behavior that would provoke riots if implemented by the state.
I refer you to Kevin Carson:
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/02/contract-feudalism.html
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