And so The Beautiful Kind blogger, that chronicler of deviant kink, has been outed and fired. She calls it "crazy unfair" and "lifestyle discrimination."
And she is incorrect.
You know what "crazy unfair" would be? If she were a lesbian, and her employer discovered it and then fired her for that specific reason. That'd be like getting fired for having blue eyes.
However, she wasn't fired for her sexual orientation. Nor was she even fired for her sexual activities. She was fired for exhibiting those sexual activities to the entire planet in such a way that anybody with a computer and elementary-school Google skills could link her activities to the non-profit she worked for.
Not that we frown on her hobby. In fact, compared to the torrent of soulless, dignity-less, misogynistic porn that saturates the Internet, TBK always struck a good-natured and healthy tone in her explorations -- explorations that, frankly, outside of the Midwest, would not be a big deal. And, um....it was kind of a turn-on. But obviously the non-profit was not turned on.
The identity of that non-profit has not been disclosed, but it's pretty crucial. Tony Rothert of the ACLU's Eastern Missouri branch has suggested to Daily RFT that perhaps the parties could've salvaged the situation by getting rid of the Twitter glitch that allowed her employer to connect the dots.
Maybe, but there are a million other ways for any blogger to get outed. Hell, she posts a lot of pictures of herself, in what looks like might be her own home, and she even attended an RFT blogger party undisguised! If the non-profit is a prominent one, either its enemies or some scandal-hound journalists might've found out another way.
Rothert further suggests that, because the non-profit fired her on the spot without trying to find someway to erase the link between themselves and the blog, they weren't pleased with the content. Well, isn't that their right? What if the non-profit is founded on a religious worldview that doesn't tolerate TBK's actions? Could you blame them for wanting to replace her with somebody else?
And had they not fired her for legal discrimination reasons, they would've found some other reason eventually. And why would she want to stay there at that point?
What if they asked her during the hiring process if anything about her background would compromise their goals, and she failed to bring up her blog, which, let's remember, she publishes for her own amusement?
Learning a few more details might change our mind about your predicament, TBK. But we do know this: there are legions of employers out there who don't give a hoot about what you do in your spare time. Donate to the non-profit, if you wish. Work where your other, secret life, doesn't matter.
Read the Tuesday Tussle rebuttal: TBK Got Screwed!
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed herein
should be construed only as argument for the sake of argument, and not
as the personal opinions of the authors. In fact, the authors' positions
in "Tuesday Tussle" are decided by coin toss.