I agree with your thoughts. I can’t agree with your proposed actions of firing a person for speaking their mind. You should have known from the start when someone is not a good fit for a company. I worked for a positive minded new age magazine, and a freelance journalist wrote a piece on ‘some topics Hitler was right about’. Everyone agreed this would not be perceived as a fitting piece for our new age magazine. He said he wanted to make things positive that were seen as negative. He did have a point. But for the magazine it was a bad fit. Still, we just told him ‘this piece is unacceptable’. That doesn’t mean he can’t provide good work.

Open communication is the most important thing. To solve a problem, you first need to acknowledge that it exists. I think this Googler showed the dark side of a positive movement and it should not be discounted because it reeks of a negative world view.

The joker was always the one person who could tell the king he was wrong, without getting beheaded. Every community needs a joker.

Open communication implies we should be able to say, is it possible that “blacks are dumb”, “women are inferior”, “homosexuals are not born this way”, “nazis are good people”, “lizard aliens are really ruling the world”.

And we can discuss those, investigate those, and hopefully, prove these people wrong! If we follow those statements without proper discussion and open communication we end up in racism, segregation, oppresssion and world war II.

Oh and please don’t take those quotes above out of context!