Alas, this doesn’t help. Stop using words like cohesion, collective, and immutability. The only thing that you’ve done is move the ick factor back one step. I see no qualitative difference between the two things you’ve listed above. Again, put some meat on the bones so we can discuss it further. How do you measure society’s rights? How do you compare it to an individual’s rights? If you can answer that we have something to discuss.
Telemark I don’t understand what is so incomprehensible about ‘an issue that divides people so that they can no longer work together.’
Anything can divide people. I understand that completely, we all do. But it doesn’t help us discuss this issue.
Assume an all straight office finds it difficult to deal with a gay employee. Can they cause him to be fired? How do I decided based on your ideas? What framework can you build that helps me decide the issue?
And how does mutability of gender enter into it? There’s nothing about that particular issue that is any different from other things that divide people. If the deciding factor is Something That Divides People, we’re back to square one.
Good.
Well that’s sort of what I wanted to discuss here. I wanted to know where the line was drawn, and you and many other people don’t seem to want to dry a line. I want to know what that line is. I just don’t think civilization can work with “Be tolerant of everyone”. You have mentioned productivity as the main concern.
I don’t see the mutability of gender issue as being quite the same as any other issue that divides people. There are reasons that things divide people and each one is unique, even though it has in common that it divides people. I understand that you don’t think it’s a big enough reason to justify intolerance in the name of the social good. Reiterating that won’t make me understand it more, because I already get it. I want to know where the line is. I brought up extreme examples and you simply accept them and stay with a standard position based upon an ethic of tolerance and tomndebb dismisses them. Everyone else screams ‘You’re evil!’
So let me ask you a question:
Do people have the right to form insular communities based upon certain standards? Could a town for instance make transgender individuals illegal?
I worked in a shop that was 95% Catholic where one employee was a Southern Baptist who was not afraid to let her co-workers know they were damned to hell. (She did not go around preaching at them, but was willing to voice her opinion if a religious topic came up.)
Should she have been fired?
I worked in a shop that was entirely Fundamentalist Christian other than me. I never made an issue of it, but frequently overheard calumny voiced against the RCC, including statements that no Catholic could ever be trusted.
Should I have been fired as a potential source for a lack of “cohesion.”
There are a lot of people who consider homosexuality to be the ultimate ick factor. Is it right to permit gays to be fired to promote “cohesion” in the workplace?
Based on your claims of the need for group cohesion, we should permit discrimination against anyone for matters of race, religion, social class, or bad hair. If you do nmot agree with this, then what is your critierion/criteria?
Physical threat. Contagious disease. Violence. Absolute refusal to engage in any social interaction.
Anything that is a voluntary act by an individual that will cause a disruption.
Tomndebb Well to take it to a larger macrocosmic perspective, we are currently fighting a war to keep two majority muslim countries from being run as Muslim countries. We are attempting to impose secularism on them when secularism is incompatible with their religion. We cannot have it both ways, it can’t be tolerant of Islam and secular, because Islam has mandates for laws by which you define your society. It has commandments that Islam should reign supreme in Dar al Islam, but we come over with our liberal multiculturalism, cruise missiles and high paid mercenaries and attempt to setup a government for them. It can’t be both ways, we can’t be tolerant of their religion and force them to be tolerant of others. When you are tolerant of one group, you must be intolerant of the group that is intolerant of them. Moral and ethical continuity are all well and good, but at a certain point all things are decided by raw and naked power.
Societies in America today are sub-sets of the whole of American society. Those sub-sets have agreed, as part of the larger society, that certain things about society transcend the determinations of those sub-sets, such as race, religion and gender. As long as they belong to the whole, they must abide by those restrictions or seperate themselves from the greater society. And very few societies are willing to truly seperate themselves from the rest of the nation.
Getting a sex change is a voluntary act. Maybe being transgendered is not, but getting the surgery is.
So you don’t see the ability to have a relationship is important?
I’d still like to know what you say about whether or not people have the right to form a town where only certain types of people are allowed.
Fair enough. How do you feel about spreading secularism so that we expand this notion to the rest of the world?
I am working to figure that out.
Rampant imperialism is hardly a normal part of a discussion of personal rights and responsibilities in the workplace.
I have already addressed the issue of this “voluntary act.” No one can see another person undergoing a sex change (unless they get invited to the operating theatre). No one “changes” sex in the workplace. There is no impingement of violence or disease upon fellow workers.
Relationships are important, but it is the person who actively destroys the relationships that should lose a job: the person who excludes or harrasses a co-worker for their sexual orientation, race, religion, or gender assignment is the one who has forfeited the right to employment, not the person who simply shows up for work in a certain status or condition and is then pilloried for that.
I suppose that if a group would like to purchase land, jointly, and establish rules of participation, they are free to do so. We already have religious communes. However, if they attempt to simply declare some large region to be under their control and establish exclusionary laws that apply to other citizens already in their “territory” or attempt to prevent individuals from buying private property based on some exclusionary rule of class, then they are out of line.
Fair enough
So my question for the group is this:
Do we only care about this issue as it applies to America?
Dragoness in another thread said that she thought I was bringing up things that were unrelated to this thread by bringing up these macrocosmic issues.
I want to clarify that I am just trying to define limits on this issue, so I am bringing up broad implications and seeing where people rein them in.
I don’t want mentions of secularism or Iraq to confuse people more than is necessary.
What level of confusing people is necessary? 
I’d prefer if you answer some basic questions about how you measure the collective’s ick factor, how you set up a framework to weigh individual rights vs group rights, and why people changing is a problem. Let’s work on some bedrock questions before you start bringing different cultures into it.
Since I can barely relate to your premise in the context of our culture, I’m not interested in moving the playing field just yet.
Cute 
Ok, let’s use the Stanton case. Apparently social cohesion was disrupted to such a high level that s/he was fired and we are discussing it here. I think that’s a fairly clear indicator of a disruption of social cohesion. I don’t know if there is really a clear metric, but I think the breakdown of ability to work together is pretty clear cut in this case.
Well, then place a boundary marker, that’s all I am asking people to do. Make some statements about relevant context, I’ll tell you if I think they are fair and then argue within them if they are or I will try to explain why I think they are not.
Sorry but you’ve completely sidestepped the issue. I asked how you decide when something rises to the level that someone can legitimately lose their job, and you responded with the fact that they lost their job, so it must have been enough. This isn’t an answer. How do I decide whether the bosses made the correct decision here?
How do I as an employer decide whether the problem is the employee in question or the disruptive coworkers who are making her life miserable? Suppose the employee were a woman and she got divorced and was now in the dating pool. In response, her male co-workers started propositioning her, got into fights, wouldn’t work with each other or the woman. Would you be justified in firing her because she disrupted the office? It seems to meet all your criteria, and yet, seems completely unfair. But based on your criteria (disrupted workplace) it is perfectly valid. If you believe this is different from the Stanton case, please explain why.
Why are you asking me to answer my own question? That question is what this discussion is about. If I had that answer at the ready, I wouldn’t bother talking to you about it. It’s not a sidestep at all.
Well basically I would handle this like this. What would cause the greatest disturbance to workflow? Firing the person who is the focal point of the disturbance or firing the multiple people who are the exacerbating it? Say firing Stanton causes less disruption than keeping her on, or firing the other people who are making the trouble. I think it’s context specific, it depends on how vital to the operations of the organization each individual member is. You fire the least essential part of the operation. In this case, they deemed that the least essential part was Stanton.