re: Clay Travis article on Michael Sam, Sterling, etc.

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There is no such thing as a "right" to hold whatever opinion you want without having to face the consequences.

The only "right" you have with respect to free speech is that the government has limited ability to control it.

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Now, I want to jump into the First Amendment here, which is frequently misapplied in cases such as these. The First Amendment protects us all from government punishment for our words. What it doesn't protect anyone from is freedom from the consequences of those words; that is, your private employer can certainly react to your comments, online or otherwise, and hold you accountable for them. But I'm more interested in this fact, major American corporations have become increasingly socially liberal in the past decade or so. Many corporations are every bit as powerful as governmental entities. As corporations continue to increase in power, their censorship of employee opinions can start to have many of the same impacts as governmental restraint of speech. Wal Mart employs one in every hundred workers in our country. If Wal Mart's corporate policies restrict their employees rights to comment on controversial issues, shouldn't that be a little bit scary to everyone? Add up several Wal Marts and you have a large segment of the population that doesn't have actual freedom of speech if that speech differs from the opinion of the corporation that employs them.

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