The point about Ms. Richards' posts is that, even she who thinks dick jokes at work are a fireable offense, has made them "at home." You and she are both right (perhaps to different degrees, in my mind) that doing it at the water cooler or a professional conference are inappropriate. Unlike you though, she seems to feel that doing it "at home" (or on her personal Twitter) is OK. You seem to think it would be perfectly acceptable if one day enough people get huffy about that post and she gets fired or otherwise extralegally punished because of it.
We shouldn't conflate government vs. personal liberal behavior. No, the government shouldn't force companies to hire/retain people who have offensive political opinions. But yes, the public and the people in the companies should be more liberal and tolerant of employees who made offensive political statements 3 years ago, in a non-professional context. The only reason it could have any sort of effect on his ability to do that job, is because people might be determined to punish him and would apply leverage like the threat of boycotts against Twitter. Which, yeah, is their right, but does it really solve anything?
I agree her tweets and this ex-Twitter guy's are different in offense-levels, but when you're satisfying the online mobs or PR advisors, our individual opinions don't matter much.
> As if this would be the straw that breaks the camels back and gets people SO riled up over the inequities in our society is laughable. Poor high tech worker! So oppressed.
The same process that would dig up years-old political posts made by privileged white guys, will dig up the evidence of a secret sexual orientation or gender identity, class/ethnic differences, religion, etc. Your "awful history of mistreating one group or another" will continue as long as we tolerate and encourage this sort of prying into people's lives and punishing them for what we found. No "group" can be mistreated if we collectively refused to allow the would-be bullies to categorize people, right?
It shouldn't matter how sympathetic or not we are with today's victim, or whether the type of persecution they're receiving is less severe than what happened in the past. We should always be striving for more equality and less persecution of any kind, right?