Story highlights Marc Randazza: A Google employee's opinion that diversity initiatives should focus less on race and gender prompted outrage

By trying to punish or silence him, we are destroying the marketplace of ideas in which open debate allows us to advance, he writes

Marc J. Randazza is a First Amendment attorney and managing partner of the Randazza Legal Group. Follow him on Twitter: @marcorandazza, and read his academic publications here. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) Over the weekend, a Google employee wrote what has been described as a 10-page "manifesto against diversity." Boiling down 10 pages into a short column, and then commenting on it, is impossible.

But, the long and the short of his opinion seems to be that women are underrepresented in tech because of psychological differences between women and men, not because of bias, and women are underrepresented in the top tiers of leadership because of their own preferences, not discrimination. Ultimately, he believes that "diversity" initiatives should focus more on ideological diversity, and less on immutable characteristics like race and gender.

Cue the outrage and applause machines -- depending on which political tribe you belong to. Of course, the outrage machine is calling for him to be tracked down and fired. I take the opposite view, but not because I agree with him. In fact, I mostly disagree with him, though I think he makes some good arguments -- but that is beside the point. I categorically oppose the notion that if you have an opinion that deviates too far from that which is considered to be "politically correct," then the appropriate punishment is that you should lose your job -- and preferably not be hired anywhere else, either.

Marc Randazza

Some are tempted to call this a "First Amendment" issue. Let me be clear, it is not. The government is not involved, and thus this is not a violation of anyone's constitutional rights. But, one of the pillars that holds up our First Amendment is the "marketplace of ideas" theory -- that ideas should compete in the free market, and that through wide-open and robust debate, we will advance.

In ideology-driven authoritarian regimes, locking someone out of the labor market because you don't like their ideas is a common approach. Behind the Iron Curtain, for instance, if you weren't sufficiently Marxist, it didn't necessarily mean a trip to the gulag. You would just find that you were out of a job. Of course, the blowback against this Google employee is not top-down authoritarianism or orthodoxy enforced by the state. No, in America when you violate the PC code of conduct, a small cadre of people will dust off the outrage machine -- and millions of people will fuel it.

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