The restrictions on teachers you speak of are in their functions as employees of the state while performing their duties on the job on the employer's time. Employers setting limits on the conduct of employees on the job is generally not a freedom of speech, or first amendment issue.

That goes double when we are talking about public employees whose conduct is directly the function of law.

That's a fair point.

> Employers setting limits on the conduct of employees on the job is generally not a freedom of speech, or first amendment issue.

In other words: you're allowed to restrict the speech of other people as long as you own private property. Turns out that freedom of speech in a liberal "democracy" is not all it's cracked up to be.

You skipped the rather pertinent bit where these restrictions apply only to people who chose of their own volition to take them on.

You are, of course, free to not take on the burden of employment from a particular organization if you find their demands on your conduct while they are compensating you for your time to be unacceptable.

This relationship is purely transactional. And, sorry, the idea that this is actually a bona fide problem is facile.

That line of reasoning would make sense if the have-nots in a liberal society didn't need to work just to survive. But that is not the case, is it?

Liberal society loves to characterise itself as a rigid, well-structured system in which individuals choose to make idealised rational decisions to work towards their own interests. As opposed to emotional reasoning, which is conveniently implied to be the diametrical opposite of rational thought. And I call it "convenient" because as a result can easily paint protests and strikes, as "irrational" and "despicable" actions perpetrated by "unreasonable" individuals.

However, as soon as one considers the fact that the disparity of power between people with private property and people without makes it so that the people without private property cannot afford to make decisions on a "rational vacuum". We quickly find ourselves reverting back to "what are you going to do about it? You don't work, you don't eat."

So because some people can’t afford property we should control speech?

Indeed, allowing employers to coerce the speech of employees by punishing them for actions outside of the reasonable scope of employment is very worrying. Unfortunately, a good deal of the modern "left" supports it when they dislike the person. Much of the right does too, which I have equal disdain for, but I will at least acknowledge it can be logically consistent with some right-wing philosophies (on the more ancap end). Whereas it's a bit strange to see "socialists" saying "but they're a private company!"

However speech in the classroom is within the scope of your job duties. So my employer should not be able to fire me for wearing a Trump or Biden sticker off the clock, but it is fair to prohibit me from wearing it whilst on the job, and to sanction me if I'm proselytizing to customers during my duties

People getting sexual gratification from exposing young children to sexual content is considered “protected speech”?

Pornography is pornography and pedophiles are pedophiles, but please, feel free to make your case for this.

I don't doubt many of the performers are deriving sexual satisfaction from the performance, but as long as the performance itself is not sexual it isn't harming children. Don't get me wrong, I think "Drag Queen Story Hour" is the gender equivalent of blackface, but a man dressing up like a mockery of womanhood and reading stories doesn't violate anybody else's rights, therefore we have no right to use violence to stop it.

Women can be drag queens too! For me, drag adjacent to Cabaret and Burlesque. I'm not a fan of any of those, but I appreciate that they are art forms that people should be free to express themselves in.

> Restrictions on what teachers are allowed to teach are restrictions on freedom of speech

Do you consider a curriculum to be a restriction on freedom of speech? I ask as a genuine question - being from the UK the norm for me is having a national curriculum and standard testing (albeit it executed by private-but-certified exam boards). It seems like common sense to me that obviously teachers have restrictions on what they can say in a classroom. Any employee does within their workplace and job duties, but teaching is one profession where I'd clearly expect a much higher level of restriction (along with the police, who represent the state, and doctors, who have duties of professionalism and to give medical advice only in line with the regulator, and various other regulated roles)