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For another example that's going around, Steven Fulop is the current mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey. Jonathan Gomez-Noriega was a mayoral aide, who previously was part of the Jersey City LGTBQ+ Task Force. Emphasis on was:
Background on what Valencia Gomez said as reported by LGBT media groups, originals here. (cw: it's exactly the Olympics Discourse you'd expect).
And while he was told to give a heartfelt public apology and did, it doesn't look like that matters; he’s fired.
In some ways, this is more 'clear'. Gomez-Noriega donated 1250 USD, not a tenner, with the most recent donation just under a month ago, and while Gomez is an unlikely and not especially competent candidate (in an 8-way race for the primary), she's undeniably a politician and she's made very clear that She's Not A Fan Of the Gays
(... enough that I was tempted to spam a Femboys and Firearms (cw: exactly what it sounds like) cover or Cathode_G link on twitter, though I recognize That Wouldn't Help).
In other ways, it runs into Problems, and not just in the optimistic sense that we might not want to punish people for political donations where the recipient acts poorly afterward; or demand employees disavow family; or look as more of a shrieking harpy as the shrieking harpy. New Jersey does not have unusual protections for the speech rights of rando employees, and it definitely doesn't have some equivalent to California's charlie foxtrot of a situation. There's a judicial construct that kinda gets twisted into protecting speech when judges want it to, but it's not gonna count here, and even were there strong and directly relevant statutes, as California demonstrates, an employer's interest in countering disfavored enough speech will get remarkable amounts of deference.
But Gomez-Noriega was a city employee; Steven Fulop is the mayor.
Unlike us private-sector peons, that implicates state power directly. While rare, cases have rarely even survived both motion to dismiss and inevitable attempts to moot them where a state could have threatened or retaliated directly over private speech on matters of public concern.Of course, as the ACLU (caveat: New York ACLU) helpfully points out, there's a broad exception where the speech "disrupted its work or have the potential to disrupt its work, including by affecting public perception of your employer if you frequently interact with members of the public in your job", and while the specific examples of exceptions reflect places where the speaker directly "targets individuals or communities because of their racial, ethnic, or religious identity", I wouldn't want to try to talk an employment lawyer into taking the case on contingency on the basis of that distinction.
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