Sunday, September 30, 2012

When a Republican Mormon is Your Boss

 A few weeks ago I wrote a blog about how my former employers would impose their Republican views and Mormon beliefs onto their workers. I never posted it.

One reason is because I accidentally erased it off my pen drive. So, I sat down to re-write it and then paused. What if it were divine intervention that caused me to lose the article? Maybe a post like that wasn't meant to be published.


Then I snapped out of it. Of course, a redunkulous work environment like that needs to be talked about. It needs to be shouted about from the highest of mountains! I mean, everybody knows that there is no place for religion or politics in the work place.

If your workplace is designed after the LDS temple, RUN!
And employers, especially, have no right to put them there. Not only does it cause division among workers, it takes them away from doing their jobs and could potentially pass that fine line into harassment.

Case in point – My former employers chose to infuse politics and religion into our work environment by putting bumper stickers on their cars to rally the Mormon cause for Prop 8 (that was the California initiative to ban gay marriage). By doing so, they were basically setting themselves up for a harassment lawsuit from the many gay workers they employed.

In fact, my direct supervisor (aka the owner’s daughter), decided to slap one of those yellow stickers on her highly visible car, despite the fact that she had, at the time, about six gay people on her staff. 


I would have loved for someone to step up and say, “Hey, that’s harassment!” But no one did. Fear has a way of silencing people.

I really would have loved it more if she would have had the guts to tell her parents or the bishop at her LDS bunker, "Hey, I'm not putting that thing on my car. I have gay people on my staff and that would teeter on harassment. Plus it's just rude."
 
But of course, that didn't happen either.

So what happened was, conversation started. Not gossip. Just like-minded employees talking about the nerve and all-out gall of these despicable people who felt a need to shove their beliefs down our throats and the stupidity that came along with it, knowing that they were harassing a segment of their employees.

Basically, all of their ploys and plans to keep everybody shut up and quiet were sabotaged by their own hateful and bigoted actions. Absurd!

So here is my advice: If you do happen to work for a company with owners that straddle the fine line of harassment, and you’re afraid to speak up (or hire a lawyer), just do the next best thing – talk about it, blog about it, tell your friends and family about it and never erase it from your memory card.