Of course, there is a fundamental right to have (and express) a dissenting opinion or voice.
There is also a fundamental right to have (and express) displeasure with an opinion or voice, whether dissenting or not.
And there is no fundamental entitlement to a job whose responsibilities include managing the public image of a corporation, and if you are unable to do that in the real circumstances and public image problems the corporation faces, whether or not your own speech acts are the source of that PR problem, you shouldn't expect to continue to have that job.
Technological advances such as social media make vilifying dissenting views (and the people who express them) cheaper and more effective than ever before. There must be some kind of a balance between the right to dissent and the right to "have a displeasure with an opinion" as you said, and I feel like the way things are going now, it doesn't look like we have found that balance. Ultimately a healthy society will need both.
In reality, though, I think a jury would be very skeptical of a company's claims that someone was fired for promoting the gay agenda (which would be legal) and not for being a gay person.
Since we're not talking about the constitution, which strictly relates to government and public property, then we're talking about private entities and private property.
You do not have the right to speak on my property. Forcing that is in direct contradiction to a free society that has a concept of private property.
I am all for fostering tolerance to offensive speech, but not at the expensive of destroying the concept of private ownership. It is absolutely not a fundamental right. It should be a social norm, but that's all it should be.
> It seems to me that it's up to all of us to tolerate non-extreme dissenting voices
Who gets to define what is and is not extreme?
Freedom of expression means tolerating something offensive by definition. If it's not offensive, it doesn't need to be tolerated.
Then again, if you keep chopping off the edges of the bell curve, everything that doesn't precisely match the middle is extreme by comparison.
Except a lot of private entities receive a lot of money from the federal government - either as subsidies, tax breaks or programs. So they should abide by the rules of the government too. Giving public money to entities that not view the first amendment as obligatory for them - that is wrong for me.
As currently stands, you can stand in the town square and promote affirmative action it would be very risky legally to fire you. But if you get up and argue for the repeal of some affirmative action legislation you can be safely fired with no objection from legal.
Legally, promoting either of those opinions is subject to exactly the same degree of protection. The willingness of a particular employer to accept the legal risk maybe different between them, but that's a different issue than the law itself.
In what specific, concrete ways does it not work out the way you think it is intended?
> One way would be to say that all behavior "off the clock" and all attributes of a person not related to the job are protected. Another way would be to say nothing is protected.
Those are obviously potential rules, but I don't see that either of them is closer to any reasonable interpretation of the intended result that antidiscrimination laws are intended to serve.
I think we are starting to go in circles, but: It has the effect of cancelling out free discourse which is important to a functioning "democracy". A trivial example is that a business owner cannot be vocally anti-same sex marriage, because if she is, and a gay employee is fired for a "legitimate" reason, her behavior will go a long way towards convincing a jury.
Where this is going is why we are expanding the number of protected classes over time is that the real "intended result" is that you should not suffer at work for attributes that have nothing specifically to do with the job you are hired for.