Questions of effectiveness only complicate matters. Greason, who is wary of firing people for holding unpopular views, told my colleague that while firing racists might seem like a quick fix, “those folks are then sent out into the world without any means of changing, and they connect with others who share that same hate.” In a spot-on conclusion, my colleague responded, “That’s true: Firing someone for their racist ideas is unlikely to make them less racist. But it's also true that the public, with the business community as its actor, often has the right to use its power to reject some ideas and ideologies. And doing so is part of the messy, haphazard process by which the country decides what the future will look like.”

If being fired for one’s political views was an ordinary rather than an extraordinary occurrence, it would impose an enormous social cost. So which cases are exceptional enough to justify or warrant termination? If I were a business owner asked to fire an employee, here are some factors I might weigh:

Is the person hateful?

Stigma is a fraught tool: Humans have a long history of misapplying, overusing, and abusing it. And even when applied justly, stigma is often ineffective. So I’ve often wondered if we’d be better off were the prevailing norm to stigmatize only hatefulness. Deciding what qualifies is sometimes tricky, but few champion hatefulness itself.

If I discovered that I had an employee who spent his off hours spewing or stoking hate, I would be strongly inclined to part ways, regardless of whether he was shouting racial slurs at the family that lived next door to his house, or subjecting women he encountered on the street to misogynistic verbal abuse, or shouting from the stands to visiting bullpens at baseball games, “I hope you all get cancer and die!” Hate is poisonous and without value; while most humans feel it welling up at one time or another, and even give into its seductive pull in anomalous moments of stress or fear, every mentally fit adult can avoid routinely stoking, expressing, or abetting hatefulness; and those who fail do grave harm to the fabric of whole societies, disproportionately contributing to a wide range of social ills and human miseries.

What is the person’s relationship to violence?

Firing a perpetrator of violence, like the leftist who shot up the congressional baseball game, or someone who breaks the law by threatening murder, are the easiest calls. The next easiest is the person who stops short of openly calling for violence to stay on the right side of the law, but whose views are inseparable from it. Think of the radical Islamist preacher in Australia that Graeme Wood wrote about in “What ISIS Really Wants”: Even as he avoided legal incitement, he tried to lead new recruits to a brutal terrorist organization and hasten humanity toward apocalyptic battles in which Islamist radicals would rape, oppress, and kill non-Muslims.