By Steve BermanIn USA Today, I read a piece about a “righteous living” lawsuit against Ramsey Solutions. Summed up, a man they hired was recently married, and disclosed his wife was pregnant. Ramey executives determined that the man must have gotten her pregnant before they were married, violating their ban on extramarital sex, so they fired him. They did this despite the fact that he was hired after the event which got him fired, and from the article, it doesn’t seem like he lied to them or tried to hide anything—they simply didn’t ask that question.
I didn’t have to read far down to figure out why this particular article was on page A6 of a national newspaper: it is relevant to the SCOTUS case 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. The heart of that question is whether public accommodation laws can compel an artist to speak or compel their silence. But private employers are generally free to hire or fire whomever they please, as long as they don’t discriminate on the basis of a protected status, courts have long held.
The problem is that employers rarely apply these rules consistently, and in doing so, promote harmful lies. I am not a huge fan of Dave Ramsey’s brand of financial planning. I don’t think it’s wrong to live debt-free, and certainly people who are addicted to overspending should have their own version of AA to help them. But Ramsey’s cookie-cutter approach denies many logical paths to wealth-building. My personal criteria for a financial advisor begins with “someone who won’t lie to me.” Ramsey’s organization in many ways falls short.
They fired a man who got his then-girlfriend pregnant, then married her despite their own HR investigation report. “He felt like getting married and making the lifelong commitment would be the right thing to do in the end,” Ramsey COO Michael Finney wrote in an email, “though he said he understood that we have to be consistent.” Put into perspective, the fired guy would have been better off lying to his employer to keep his job.
But another employee, fired because she got pregnant out of wedlock, sued in federal court, and is using the other man’s account in her lawsuit. She contends that Ramsey is okay with certain employees having affairs, but not others. For example, Chris Hogan, a broadcast personality, admitted to having oral sex outside marriage, but the act “was not completed” according his account (I am not sure how relevant that is). Ramsey decided Hogan was “broken” and “healing,” mocking his wife’s pain, and therefore oral sex outside marriage was not considered “sex.” (Bill Clinton would be pleased.)
It turns out Hogan was lying to his employer, having had multiple affairs, and eventually resigned in scandal. It seems Ramsey’s executives were fine getting out the slide-rules to see if Mr. X Nobody got his wife pregnant before marriage, but couldn’t make the connection “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” with someone more prominent.
Of course, this kind of religious adherence to rules in the persecution of “outsiders” isn’t uncommon, and isn’t limited to religious organizations.
Back in 2018, writer Kevin Williamson, of National Review and more recently, The Dispatch, was hired with much fanfare by editor Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic to be (if you’re cynical) the token conservative in their stable, to show their commitment to diverse viewpoints, I guess. It was a bridge too far for the liberal staff, especially when Williamson’s views on abortion bubbled up. Williamson is a professed Catholic, the kind who reads Papal Bulls and understands them, not the kind like Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden. His views on abortion were well-known and published in many places.
Yet, Goldberg pretended to be shocked when someone dug up a tweet exchange where Williamson wrote “the law should treat abortion like any other homicide.” When pressed, he offered, “I have hanging more in mind,” and “I’m torn on capital punishment generally; but treating abortion as homicide means what it means.” As a longtime editor and champion of clarity with words, Williamson left little doubt about his views on that subject. However, his erudite journalism, well-reasoned essays, and often laugh-inducing turns of phrase meant nothing if the one thing representing thoughtcrime could not be reconciled. In less than a week, Goldberg reversed himself and fired Williamson.
Conor Friedersdorf, in The Atlantic, offered a dissent from this act, which he believed was worse in itself than Williamson’s take on abortion—which Friedersdorf also vehemently rejects.
More specifically, I dissent from the way that Williamson was dragged, regardless of his position. That dragging would be a small matter in isolation, but it is of a piece with burgeoning, shortsighted modes of discourse that are corroding what few remaining ties bind the American center. Should that center fail to hold, anarchy will be loosed.
Friedersdorf called Williamson’s dragging and firing were “failures of tolerance.”
Is any single viewpoint so heinous as to warrant firing someone from a job? I have previously probed that question, outside the journalistic context, in The Atlantic. I concluded that Nazis, KKK members, and white supremacists are the easiest cases—and even then, engagement short of total shunning has its uses.
But in most cases—in this case—I depart from the conventional wisdom.
I reject the assumption that social justice or civic progress are advanced, that repressive outcomes are avoided, or that vulnerable groups are best served, by partisans who focus on everyone’s most extreme, or wrongheaded, or taboo, or outlying, or shocking, or problematic view—all but guaranteeing needless polarization.
The twin institutions of ministries and denominations of Christian evangelicals crowned with powerful leaders, empowered staffs, and dotted with scandal, both ethical and moral, have their gospels (small “g”) to defend. But mostly, they defend their right to continue in propagating extreme, partisan, taboo-punishing crimes against discourse in how they deal with employees.
Many newspapers had their own reckonings with thoughtcrime, centered around Twitter, of course. Ben Smith, who departed Buzzfeed for the New York Times in 2020, wrote a long-form essay tracing the coverage of Ferguson to newsroom revolts all over the industry, leading to the departure of James Bennet as NYT’s opinion editor. Smith is now working for a new news organization called Semafor (along with Dave Weigel, formerly of the Washington Post); the jury is still out as to its future.
Media is spitting its own out of its mouth for thoughtcrime faster than ministry. While defrocked ministers tend to end up hawking cheap health supplements and appearing on stage with Charlie Kirk and Lara Trump, fired journalists have rallied around Substack, and some have moved beyond it, like The Dispatch. (Though it should be noted, The Dispatch was not composed of fired journalists, more a mitosis of the center-right conservatives from the Trump-defending ones at places like National Review and the Washington Examiner.)
I also think the gentleman who was fired from Ramsey Solutions for marrying the woman he had sex with, or rather, impregnating his own wife, will probably do fine. God has not abandoned him a the altar of Ramsey’s “consistency” in applying its “standards.” Neither has truth or the ethics of journalism abandoned those who have been tossed from newsrooms.
But, and this is a big but, the actions of both the ministry and the media to compel speech, or constrain it, by their ability to affect the careers of employees, while probably not strictly illegal, are bad for America and our society. Promoting a divided, extreme, groupthink-infested bubble where all must think, act, and pray to the same altars, utter the same shibboleths, and dissent on a single opinion is enough to get you tossed, is not the kind of world where we can tolerate tolerance.
Worse than that, it entices and rewards those who lie, cover up, and act dishonestly to go along with where their bread is buttered. The organizations, both in ministry, media, and of course, politics, end up littered with scoundrels, power-hungry opportunists, and the kind of people who either defend Donald Trump because they like his style, or are never-Trump only because they fear their own outing as being just like him.
Meanwhile, those of us who really value discourse, tolerance, and the opinions of others end up, well, here, with you and me. May 2023 be a year or grace and tolerance for you, even with those with whom you disagree.
Follow Steve on Twitter @stevengberman.
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