You actually think your example is comparable to the topic, and some posters agreed with you? lol smh
it's in the same ballpark.
It's not even close. Using company email to send a personal statement on politics and social issues to your coworkers is not the same as eating a ham sandwich in the lunch room. Any HR department I've ever known would frown upon the email and not give shit about the ham sandwich.
Frown enough upon it to fire the person on the spot?
Sure. I've seen it happen in companies I've worked in. The solution is easy - leave your politics and social views at home. That's standard operating procedure for most professional companies. Any time you open you mouth about this stuff you run the risk of offending someone.
I used to manage and had many direct reports. You never know what's going to offend people. I used to tell my employees just do your job and don't talk politics/social issues. I once had to have a talk with a male employee because he made a female employee feel uncomfortable when he complemented her hair. Seems harmless enough, right? I've also had to have talks with female employees as well for inappropriate comments that were bothering male employees. I could never believe the shit that would set people off, but you just never know. As a manager whether I agreed or not I still had to take the incident seriously and address it. As far as the Google employee, yea that one would be hard to come back from so I understand the firing.
That's fine if all politics are banned, but you know lefty issues get a pass. Hell at a place like Google they are probably encouraged.
Well, unfortunately I'm not going to disagree with you on that.