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Comment by winston_smith | Hacker News Reader

This is a terrible argument. Replace politics with religion to see why.

You can try to be clever by listing ways religion might relate to business, but that doesn't change the fact that businesses generally, and in many ways are legally required to, let people do their jobs regardless of their faith. It works just fine.

Everyone knows it's possible to make things more political. Being apolitical means doing the opposite. It's a very simple concept from kindergarten, "more" and "less".

Drawing some strained connection to politics doesn't magically make it impossible for us to say "try to have less politics at work".

If I followed you around all day complaining that you're not vegan enough, you'd suddenly regain the ability to notice that some things are more political and more related to your job than others.

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I fail to see how this relates. Religion may be pervasive in cultural norms and social mores, but by no means are they as pervasive into everything we do as public policy are.

Yes, it may be hard, or it may be easy, to leave religion out of the workplace. Depending how religious you are, and how pervasive religious practices are in your culture. But it is in a totally different scale as leaving politics out of the workplace, or keeping politics out of the business.

As an example. If you make a strict separation of religion and the workplace, you just made a political decision. An employee who’s religion dictates they prey every morning, and you ask them to do so outside of the workplace, then you are doing politics.

The power dynamics involved in running a business and having workers means that you must make political decisions at some point. It is not like being an atheist because: a) a business is not a person, b) a religious decision usually does not affect people other then you self, and c) often being “apolitical” and not taking a stance, is simply taking a stance with the status quo. Not doing your morning prayer is not this nuanced.

As much as political activists want to think the world revolves around them, it really doesn't.

Saying "but this other thing is vaguely political" (or religious) is no excuse to insist that your company get involved in your pet causes.

> Religion may be pervasive in cultural norms and social mores, but by no means are they as pervasive into everything we do as public policy are.

Not that long ago religion WAS public policy (and depending where you live on the globe it still is; it's a spectrum).

We slowly segregated religion out of the business mattering for everyday life, but that just left a void what got filled by the same social and psychological mechanism that underpins religions.

While I believe it's incorrect to state that the current identity based political climate is just religion in disguise, it does share a hell lot of characteristics to dismiss the ties.

> the fact that businesses generally, and in many ways are legally required to, let people do their jobs regardless of their faith

Businesses take political and religious actions all the time.

Hobby Lobby refused to pay for any health insurance plan that covered contraception because they believed them to be abortifacients and contrary to the christian values of the corporation.

The difference today is that now it is employees rather than owners pushing for a certain stance.

You heard of Hobby Lobby because they promptly got sued for it.

Nobody's claiming that work is completely unrelated to religion or politics. That's just the inverse of the stupid claim that because work sometimes involves those things, we might as well do them as much as we want.

> You heard of Hobby Lobby because they promptly got sued for it.

Hobby Lobby filed the lawsuit that they are famous for. And they won the case? What an ignorant reply.

Fair enough, but beside the point, which is that "businesses ... are legally required to, let people do their jobs regardless of their faith". Hobby Lobby had to wage a very public lawsuit all the way to the supreme court over a single element of their healthcare package, because our country doesn't like companies forcing religious beliefs on us. As it turns out, many of us feel the same way about companies forcing their politics on us.

> Hobby Lobby refused to pay for any health insurance plan that covered contraception because they believed them to be abortifacients and contrary to the christian values of the corporation.

This is rather an argument why not the employer, but the employee should pay for the health coverage. As they say in Germany:

"Wer zahlt, schafft an."

("who pays, commands", where the verb "anschaffen" (which I translate with "command" here) has the undertone of "giving sexual orders to a prostitute that she has to follow")

I'm confused what the point of your comment is. Yes, in America, the employer pays for healthcare.

So the issue that is becoming very apparent to me is that people are doing things like denying science, denying people of human rights, saying that everything that they don’t like is fake and calling it a political stance. That’s what “politics” means now unfortunately.

And we can’t really afford not to be involved in politics if that’s what it has devolved into. This isn’t about whether fiscal conservatism works or some foreign policy. We literally just elected people to the House who believe Trump is a savior combatting a Democratic ring of pedophiles who eat children. These people are showing up with assault rifles at places of business (see: Pizza Gate).

I think the most likely scenario here is that people who are pushing for their startups to take a stance are those who believe in science and human rights, and can’t stand to watch as the rest of the country buys into the madness. Because you can be sure that the people peddling this disinformation are absolutely fine with their businesses having a political stance.

See Koch brothers, Hobby Lobby, Chik Fil A, the police with their thin blue line flags and blue lives matter slogan.

If you want to ban talk about political discussion on economic policy from your business, fine, no one cares. But realistically thats not what this is about.

What do you think Hobby Lobby was about?

I don’t think it was about anything, I know exactly what it was about. Thanks though.

Okay tell me what it was about.

You didn't ask but just to be cheeky: it's about what Kennedy said it was about, the Least Restrictive Means test: forcing a private company to directly fund specific reproductive health care services is more intrusive than simply having the government fund those services itself in the rare cases where it matters, which is what it had done in the past.

(I'm sure Alito thinks it means something else, but Alito is the only genuine nutbag on the court).

That’s what I thought too!

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