This was posted anonymously there.

I learned an interesting thing about legal issues with free speech as they apply to blogs while talking to a relative recently. My relative is a judge who's specialty is employment law.

When she asked me what I was doing these days for a living, I told her part of my job is scanning blogs to see what people say about the company I work for. She asked me about the content of the blogs, and I told her about one I read recently in which a young woman wrote a bout being in a coffee shop after applying for a job with my employer. She saw two men together in the coffee shop and wondered if they were gay. She wrote that younger gays don't look the same as they did 10 years or more ago.

My relative said that I should pass the information on to my human resources department so they don't hire this young woman. Shocked, I asked her what this woman's personal observations had to do with her employability.

She said that blogs are considered public information, what you do on your personal time is considered legally to influence your behavior in the workplace, and that if an employer hires this woman and the woman is subsequently accused of discrimination in the workplace, the employer can be held liable because they hired a person who engaged in hate spee ch in a public domain (and it's reasonable to expect the employer to have known about it).

When I asked my relative about the personal right to free speech, she said there is no such thing as free speech against a "protected class" of people. So what we say outside work can be used to deny us employment, even if it's in a personal online journal with a limited audience, and if, by some stretch of the imagination, what we say can be perceived as even slightly against a member of a "protected class," which includes everyone except straight white males.