"The public use of one's reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among men. The private use of reason, on the other hand, may often be very narrowly restricted without particularly hindering the progress of enlightenment. By the public use of one's reason I understand the use which a person makes of it as a scholar before the reading public. Private use I call that which one may make of it in a particular civil post or office which is entrusted to him. Many affairs which are conducted in the interest of the community require a certain mechanism through which some members of the community must passively conduct themselves with an artificial unanimity, so that the government may direct them to public ends, or at least prevent them from destroying those ends. Here argument is certainly not allowed - one must obey. But so far as a part of the mechanism regards himself at the same time as a member of the whole community or of a society of world citizens, and thus in the role of a scholar who addresses the public (in the proper sense of the word) through his writings, he certainly can argue without hurting the affairs for which he is in part responsible as a passive member."
In short, the chief checks his beliefs at the door, but he gets to retrieve them and proclaim them when he returns home. He did not publish the book in his role as fire/rescue chief, but as a free citizen of a free society. It is an outrageous tyranny of the highest order that he would be professionally lynched because he did not bow down his knee to the Progressive Massa. Mayor Kasim, have you left no sense of decency?
M4L