Posted on 06/28/2011 9:03:59 AM PDT by Kaslin
Are you supposed to have sex at work? I guess it depends on your profession, but for most of us the answer is “no.” Why then is corporate America obsessed with training about sex?
As described in several recent columns by Mike Adams, I was fired as a vendor by Cisco for my conservative beliefs about sex and marriage even though my beliefs were never expressed on the job. When a homosexual manager found out on the Internet that I had authored a book giving evidence that maintaining our current marriage laws would be best for society, he couldn’t tolerate me and requested I be fired. An HR executive canned me within hours without ever speaking to me. This happened despite the fact that the leadership and teambuilding programs I led always received high marks (even from the homosexual manager!).
How could an experienced HR professional commit such a blatant act of discrimination unless the Cisco culture was decidedly tilted left? Why didn’t Cisco’s relentless emphasis and training on “inclusion and diversity” serve to prevent this? Maybe it’s because “inclusion and diversity” means something different to corporate elites than to normal Americans. That’s why their training didn’t prevent the problem but actually created an environment of intolerance that led to the problem.
Cisco’s chief “Inclusion and Diversity” officer, Ms. Marilyn Nagel, had trouble on the phone defining what “inclusion and diversity” actually means at Cisco, so she sent me several links from the Cisco website. As in our conversation, I found no specific definition on the website but plenty of platitudes, such as Cisco is committed to “valuing and encouraging different perspectives, styles, thoughts, and ideas.”
If that’s the case, then why not value my “perspectives, styles, thoughts and ideas?”
Because only certain perspectives, styles, thoughts and ideas are approved, you see. “Inclusion and diversity” to corporate elites actually means exclusion for those that don’t agree with the approved views. Whoops, there goes “diversity.”
Shouldn’t the real intent of Cisco’s value of “inclusion and diversity” be to ensure that people in that diverse workforce work together cordially and professionally even when they inevitably disagree on certain political, moral or religious questions? It would seem so. In a large multicultural workforce, people need to work together despite political or religious differences. That’s a noble and necessary goal. It’s totalitarian, however, to subject people to “diversity” training and corporate sponsorships that go beyond teaching respect for people to advocacy of what they do in bed.
All employees should treat one another with kindness and respect because they are fellow human beings, not because of their sexual behavior. If people are to be respected simply on the basis of their behavior, then none of us qualify for respect because we have all behaved badly on occasion.
So instead of trying to force all employees to accept any sexual behavior—especially something as controversial as homosexuality—the inclusion and diversity police should be urging us to treat all people with respect simply because we are human beings. That’s all you need to be productive at work anyway.
But as soon as you start telling people from different religious and cultural backgrounds what they must think about homosexuality, you will offend and create conflict andr resentment. As a Christian, I am commanded to respect all people. That’s what I was doing at Cisco. But don’t tell me that I have to respect and celebrate what people do in bed. Don’t tell me that I must violate my conscience or my God in order to make widgets. That’s not only immoral and un-American; it’s manipulative and stupid. How does accepting homosexual behavior have anything to do with job productivity? Are we supposed to have sex at work?
There simply is no business reason to judge my beliefs about sexual behavior or anyone else’s. And even if some corporate nanny could dream up a reason, it would not justify the assault on an employee’s conscience or religion.
Notice that Cisco did not have a problem with my behavior. My job performance was deemed excellent, and I was “inclusive and diverse” by working in a respectful manner with people of all moral, religious and political views.
Cisco had a problem with my thoughts. Although I certainly accepted homosexuals, I committed the thought crime of disagreeing with homosexual behavior and homosexual political goals. So despite all their talk about “inclusion and diversity,” Cisco deemed my thoughts about something irrelevant to the workplace as grounds for immediate exclusion. Do you think they would have excluded me if I had pro-same-sex marriage thoughts? Of course not—that’s an approved view that Cisco actually sponsors (even though they deny it).
But people who don’t accept homosexual behavior don’t have to work at Cisco then!
True, they don’t. But if Cisco or any other company wants to make it a requirement that every employee and vendor personally accept the behavior of homosexuality or homosexual political goals such as same-sex marriage, then tell us directly. Broadcast it to the world. Cisco can’t and won’t because such a requirement would be a clear violation of the religious protections codified in the Civil Rights Act, and it would result in a mass exodus of employees and customers.
Instead, they create an oppressive culture of political correctness under the false banner of “inclusion and diversity” to achieve the same ends. They tell the world that they value and encourage “different perspectives, styles, thoughts, and ideas” while they punish or intimidate into silence people who have “different perspectives, styles, thoughts, and ideas.” While Cisco executives would never admit this, their actions reveal this twisted truth: Cisco values homosexual behavior more than honesty, freedom of religion and freedom of conscience.
Is it the same at your workplace? Are you tired of having to hide your conservative or religious beliefs as if you live in a totalitarian state rather than America? If you continue to cower in silence before an intolerant militant minority, it will only get worse. To paraphrase Edmund Burke, “All that is necessary for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing.” It’s time to do something—speak up.
Another thread today had this quote:
“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Last week Hannity was blathering about “I don’t care what people do in their bedrooms” in regard to the NY marriage law. I got so mad I turned him off.
Chesterton’s quote has Hannity nailed.
Tolerance is NOT opened ended, a blank check, in ANY society. Some actions are INTOLERABLE. “Tolerance” has become a mantra for those without convictions or a knowledge of truth who sit and stare at their belly buttons all day.
/rant
“New Plaintiff joins Cisco Discrimination Suit”
I can see it now:
On what purpose did you sue?
Me: campaignPete R-CT told me to
Hahahahahahaha...the laws of unintended consequences...
Funny. People excoriate Apple, Disney and now Cisco, but Microsoft, GM, Boeing and nearly every other corporation under the sun and under the American flag is a complete and willing prisoner to this bullcrap.
It all started with organizations like the Rainbow Coalition that made their bones (and generated income for Jessie Jackson’s private plane) by shaking down companies for their supposed racial hiring shortcomings.
Companies would just pay tribute to the organization to avoid protesters on the sidewalk outside headquarters, and that turned into this ridiculous frenzy of seeing what company could bend over further backwards to show they weren’t intolerant racists.
Now, it is to show they aren’t intolerant homophobic, sexist racists.
Bill
POST OF THE DAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Tolerance is the virtue of a man that respects others’ convictions.
I went to the CISCO site to see how they peddle their systems. This page was interesting: http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/automating-cisco-ucs-management-with-windows-powershell/ If you know about the guy getting canned for his work outside the company (because he doesn’t think homosexual behavior is all it’s cracked up to be) this particular piece really shouts a different sort of message than CISCO imagines they’d been doing. Actually makes me want to AVOID systems where CISCO is involved. There could be a lot of blow-back. Their stock should start tanking soon (again, as usual ~ the company is not really well strung together).
My new tagline. Thank you.
Publicly-held companies tend towards political correctness. They tend to only seek to protect their image in the eye of the public to avoid stirring up public anger against themselves. Publicly-held companies will very often undertake causes and projects that will curry favor with the general public. However, they will also put off and hide problems, sometimes for decades, since the next quarterly report is all that really matters. They will always attempt to curry favor with politicians as it is an easy way to make money without having to do the work of real production. The concept of “right and wrong” is purely relative for publicly-held companies, since their only guide to right and wrong is the current law.
Privately-held companies reflect the values of their owners, good, bad or indifferent.
Were you speaking from a technical point of view?
I work in IT, but only have peripheral dealings with Cisco. I do know that my brother, who has to deal with them directly in installation, configuration troubleshooting and repair absolutely detests, with a white-hot intensity, having to deal with them directly or indirectly through their website.
He says once their systems are set up, they work well, but the documentation of their arcane configurations is putrid, and dealing with their technical support can drive your blood pressure through the roof.
Through the years "they" decided to broaden Steve and get him involved in more and more aspects of HR ~ like running non-RIF RIFs. (USPS lost several really big cases that cost them hundreds of millions for having violated the laws concerning Veterans' Preference BTW, but this is not about that).
Steve became the Angel of Death for management and staff. When he came around to talk to you it meant your office was being abolished, or maybe you would lose your job, or be demoted ~ and all for no reason at all, but Steve was the messenger for top management in these matters.
Slowly but surely as he got older Steve handled things like this less well, and I think he began to suffer some serious mental deterioration as the work he was doing became less and less consistent with his personal knowledge base.
He knew the rules ~ management didn't ~ and he knew what was unlawful, or at least highly questionable.
I retired a couple of years before he did, but I'd won several federal government wide precedental cases against USPS regarding RIFs and reassignments.
In the end I was the only guy Steve could talk to man to man. I didn't fear him. He feared me.
The proper terms are “jack” and “plug” ( and have officially been that for some time).
Ironically, “jack” is the female part.
I doubt that any company would have such a policy unless it were required by the law, or demanded by one or two radical leftists within the company who threatened to sue or "go public" with some nonsense about how they were discriminated against. The company would rather deal with superfluous training than "bad publicity."
I have been asked (twice) in job interviews my opinions on "diversity" and how I would encourage it in the workplace. I remember thinking, "What does this have to do with the job I am applying for?"
One company I worked for required people to go through "diversity training" but fortunately they were very respectful toward the person being trained. The company found a way to comply with the law but not insult their employees in doing so. I was impressed.
How about this, they give a brief seminar on having sex casually:
Watch out for people with genital warts, because HPV is resistant to the traditional chemical means of killing viruses!
Watch out for HIV/AIDS and respect the 1/8 chance that they claim you have of contracting it during protected sex, not to mention have a more expensive life because the drugs for slowing down HIV Progression aren’t cheap.
Watch out for genital warts because it causes tumors on the worst of places later down the road.
Could I go on?
I understand people who get infected with all the serious STDs because of rape, or a bad blood donor, but seriously, just when our society is supposedly getting so prosperous, someone has to find some lesser appetite to treat as an urgent need.
HR is just the enforcement arm of the management team, that's all.
Most of the places I've worked have used it to bump up their Affirmative Action Quotas....can't do that at the sharp end of the stick, but within HR, there's plenty of room. An added bonus is that the positions are forward-facing, so that the company gets a "two-fer".
Plenty more places that I've worked use it as a passive-aggressive method of enforcement. Older ladies, unfailingly polite, bring in cookies on Friday, and so on. Then, they hit you with a "Please, just be a dear and sign off on this re-vamped employment agreement. You're the last one, it's Friday, and we can all go home as soon as you sign off."
Worthless Bureaucrats, all.
I work extensively with a small technology company. They were talking about needing to bring in an HR person to handle some of the day-to-day. The owner squelched it by saying "We're having fun right now. Why bring in HR and put a stop to it?" :-)
If telling the truth about the reason for discharge or breaking the contract it sounds like a good suit.
Absolutely - I've been saying for years that big business is as big a threat to our liberties as big government. Of course, the libertarians get mad at me when I say it.
It can be done, Cisco. Other companies have done it. Don't cave in to pressure from the left.
HR is the American corporate version of the zampolits in the Soviet military. The function of the zampolit (political officer) was to not only be a pain in the @$$, but to be a major threat to the authority of the military commander and a threat to all subordinates. Any action or statement was evaluated by the zampolit to see if there was any political disloyalty, real or imagined. On the whole, the zampolit was beyond useless, in fact, an obstacle.
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