The Thought Police

 As a country, the left-hand side of the political spectrum wants to go down the road of firing people who disagree with them.  I am very uncomfortable with this kind of thinking and where it might lead.  Let me elaborate.

As a culture, we are more and more becoming intolerant of opposing views.  If someone espouses insane or even evil things, it seems our culture's reaction is veering off into punishing the person for thinking that way.  Look- people are going to espouse stupid and/or evil stuff.  I don't want the world to go down the path of automatically punishing someone for holding such views.  We think we are doing the world a favor by destroying someone's livelihood or their social status simply because they espouse a belief we abhor.  This kind of thinking does not do us favors.  If you are someone who thinks that the extreme right shouldn't be employed anywhere... think about it another way.  Imagine you were living in the Midwest, and you are prochoice.  You make a tweet about how you feel about abortion, which goes viral.  Suddenly your employer finds out and cans you.  How do you feel?  Because the shoe can always be on the other foot.  We can always find ourselves being the one with an unpopular opinion.  Doesn't mean we need to be canceled.  This is a real problem.

I'm not saying that doing evil should not have consequences.  If you are a business owner, and you don't hire black people because... you racist... that's a problem.  If you actually went to DC on January 6th and participated in the attempted overthrow of our government... see, that's not good because that's a crime and you belong in jail.  If all you did though, was espouse unpopular views on social media... see... companies shouldn't be firing people like that.  At least not for that reason alone.  Just think- some day you may be the one with the opinion that's unpopular with your employer, and you are going to be grateful if your employer doesn't decide to fire you for "badly representing the company."  As a Christian who holds views that could make him unpopular anywhere (reluctantly prochoice, believe homosexual behavior to be a sin, not sure environmental concerns should be made the highest priority over the needs of people, generally complicated views on almost everything) it matters a great deal to me that we as a culture don't treat people who disagree with us as though they are monsters who need to be severely punished.  I hope we can all peacefully coexist.  Should we try to engage with people who disagree with us?  Sure.  If someone is an absolute dick to you online, should you block them?  Sure.  But that doesn't mean we should have the aim of destroying anyone who disagrees with us.  As a Christian, I think we should attempt to connect with those with wild and unhealthy point of views, more than just making sure they get fired and no longer can work.  We shouldn't be the thought police...