Over the weekend a Columbus City Schools official said termination was in the works for an employee who posted hateful comments against LGBTQ people and the city's Pride Festival on his Facebook page. Although the district is now declining to comment on the matter, garage assistant supervisor Chris Dodds has an unlikely ally. Ohio Public Radio's Andy Chow reports.
Chris Dodds works for the Columbus City school district’s garage. A post from his account used a slur to describe gay people and said they should be “killed or at least relocated.”
Elizabeth Bonham with the ACLU of Ohio finds these comments to be vile and hateful, but says Dodds should not lose his job because, in the end, it’s still protected free speech.
Bonham: “What we shouldn’t do is give a power that we own over to the state and say ‘you censor people that we don’t like now’ because what we’ll see inevitable, time and again, is that later on that power that we’ve given away to the state is going to come back and be used against the most vulnerable people.”
Bonham believes hateful speech has been on the rise but argues that the answer is not to suppress it but to combat it with more, educational speech.
