Teachers’ aide Jane Wood Allen “has been relieved from duty and is no longer an employee of Forsyth County Schools,” the Georgia district announced on October 3. “Racism and discrimination are not tolerated in our school district.”

The district’s announcement omits specifics (“[a]s this is a personnel matter, the district will provide not further comment”), leaving the casual observer to assume that she must have tried to force a Muslim or Jewish student to eat pork, or perhaps to segregate student water fountains or district buses by race.

In fact, her offense was posting comments on her personal Facebook timeline — comments that many, myself included, find repulsive. She called First Lady Michelle Obama a “gorilla” and asserted that Muslims “have no business in the USA.”

As a libertarian, I’m generally indisposed to defend either government education (I favor complete separation of school and state) or government employees (I favor complete separation of everything else and state as well, which would leave nothing for them to do!).

But the government shouldn’t be allowed to punish people for what they say. There’s a word for that. That word is “censorship.”

The content of Allen’s personal, non-work Facebook profile was and is, quite simply, none of the school district’s business. Firing her is essentially fining her, in the amount of all future wages and retirement benefits she would otherwise have earned, for the “crime” of having opinions the district’s officials disagreed with, and for expressing those opinions on her own time and using her own resources.

In arguing this point with some who disagree, I’ve been asked if I would want a racist teaching my kids. Well, no, I wouldn’t … but that doesn’t mean I get to demand that the government screen job applicants to make sure those applicants agree with me 100%, right down the line, on any and every issue and fire those who don’t.

The government shouldn’t get to fire someone because they find out that her or she is gay or trans rather than heterosexual and cis-gendered.

The government shouldn’t get to fire someone because they find out he or she is an Episcopalian rather than a Baptist.

The government shouldn’t get to fire someone because they find out he or she belongs to a political party other than the one in power.

And the government shouldn’t get to fire Jane Wood Allen for calling the First Lady a “gorilla.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “School District Declares ‘Gorilla’ War on Employee Speech,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 10/06/16
• “School District Declares ‘Gorilla’ War on Employee Speech,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Winnemucca, Nevada News4Nevada, 10/06/16
• “School District Declares ‘Gorilla’ War on Employee Speech,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Key West: The Newspaper, 10/07/16
• “‘Gorilla’ war on employee speech,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Orangeburg, South Carolina Times & Democrat, 10/10/16
• “School district declares ‘gorilla’ war on employee speech,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Newberry, South Carolina Observer, 10/12/16
• “School District Declares ‘Gorilla’ War on Employee Speech,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 10/15/16

I won’t be voting for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in November. I won’t be voting for his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, either. I’m not sure who I’ll vote for, but I’m sure it won’t be either of those two. Still, I try to be fair-minded, and in my opinion Trump doesn’t completely deserve the hits he’s taking over two recent stories.

Story #1: According to Newsweek, one of Trump’s companies (Trump Hotels) violated the US government’s embargo on Cuba in 1998, reimbursing nearly $70,000 in expenses to two consultants who visited the island nation on the company’s behalf without permission from the Office of Foreign Assets Control.

Story #2: According to the New York Times, Trump declared $916 million in losses on his 1995 federal income tax return. Depending on how much he earned in subsequent years, it’s possible that nearly two decades passed before he had to pay income tax again.

If not for one thing, Story #1 would improve my opinion of Trump dramatically. The US embargo on Cuba is an evil law which has helped keep the tyrannical Castro regime in power for half a century. Anyone who violates it is doing a heroic deed, striking a blow for freedom and for the Cuban people.

Unfortunately, Trump is inconsistent on this point. He recently stated an intention to “cancel” the progress US president Barack Obama has made toward opening up relations between the US and Cuba.

Story #2 also has an up side and a down side. I’m all for anyone and everyone avoiding every dime of tax possible, by any means they can find, legal or not. A dollar spent, saved or invested in the private sector is a good thing. A dollar given to the federal government is, at best, a dollar set on fire and flushed down the toilet. More usually, that dollar is used to actively harm the American economy and endanger American freedoms.

Unfortunately, Trump’s tax proposals don’t include repeal of the income tax. They tinker around the edges of the tax system, supposedly resulting in across-the-board cuts, but in a complicated enough way that it’s really hard to tell.

Bottom line: I heartily approve of the two things Trump is alleged to have done. Unfortunately, as a presidential candidate, he resembles Hillary Clinton in one significant respect: They both regard inconvenient laws as applicable only to the little people, not to wealthy and important political figures like themselves.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Two Things That Don’t Really Bother Me About Trump, Two Things That Do,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 10/04/16
• “Two Things That Don’t Really Bother Me About Trump, Two Things That Do,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 10/06/16
• “Two sides to two Trump stories,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Queens Examiner [New York City], 10/18/16
• “Two sides to two Trump stories,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Queens Ledger [New York City], 10/18/16
• “Two sides to two Trump stories,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Forest Hills/Rego Park New York Times, 10/18/16
• “Two sides to two Trump stories,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Greenpoint, New York Star, 10/18/16
• “Two sides to two Trump stories,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Brooklyn, New York Downtown Star, 10/18/16

On September 30, a federal judge threw a new wrench into Wisconsin’s voter ID law, ordering an investigation into whether the state’s Division of Motor Vehicles employees properly implemented measures to ensure availability of identity documents to prospective voters. Those employees seem to caught in the middle, torn between assisting the disproportionately African-American poor in getting “documented” on one hand, and fulfilling Republican politicians’ aims of suppressing black voter turnout on the other. Cue world’s smallest violin.

At one time — as late as the mid-1990s — conservative Republicans claimed to oppose “national ID” schemes and other intrusive government measures. Then they discovered that such schemes could be used to their own political advantage. They’ve been trying to turn the United States in to a variant of the Soviet Union’s old “internal passport” regime ever since, partly in the name of “fighting terrorism” and partly in the name of fighting “voter fraud.”

Both claims are dumb, but the “voter fraud” claim is particularly weird. It wasn’t until the 1980s that all 50 all states even offered photo driver’s licenses, let alone required photo ID to vote. Somehow America managed to elect 40 presidents without everyone showing photos of themselves to bureaucrats on demand. Now for some reason not carrying an unflattering picture of yourself in your wallet is  suddenly an existential threat to the Republic. Or at least to the Republicans.

Is voter fraud common? It’s hard say. For one thing, not all vote fraud is voter fraud. There are lots of ways to fake votes. Only some of those ways involve the retail use of false voter credentials. I’m not going to say that kind of thing never takes place, but by its nature it’s a lot more complicated, burdensome and vulnerable to exposure than other methods. Like, for example, stuffing extra ballots in the box after the polls have closed and attributing those votes to to voters who didn’t actually show up.

The only recent case of voter fraud I personally remember is that of one Todd Akin of St. Louis County, Missouri, who got caught lying about his address in 2011 so that he could continue voting at his old polling place instead of admitting he had moved. He wasn’t African-American, though. He was white. And he was a Republican congressman. For some reason the Republicans I’ve talked about voter fraud with haven’t shown much interest in discussing that particular case. Go figure.

Perhaps instead of constantly seeking out new ways to make voting difficult so that people of color can’t vote for the “wrong” politicians, Republicans should turn back toward the limited government rhetoric they used to at least pretend to believe. But then, they never really did believe it, did they?

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Papers, Please: Polling Place Edition,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 10/01/16
• “Papers, Please: Polling Place Edition,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 10/03/16
• “Papers, Please: Polling Place Edition,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Pahrump Valley, Nevada Times, 10/05/16
• “Papers, Please: Polling Place Edition,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Key West: The Newspaper [Florida], 10/07/16