Hostile environments and the religious employee -Reply

[Michael McConnell]

Eugene says that workplace speech should not be punished
even if it could be proved that it was uttered for the
express purpose of driving a person out of the workplace,
on the basis of invidiously discriminatory animus.  My
intuition is the opposite: that specific intent is a proper
place to draw the line. But I am not sure about this. I
would like to ask Eugene whether his position is driven by
the fear that imperfect decisionmakers (juries, equal
employment bureaucrats, etc.) will make distorted or
mistaken judgments about the difficult-to-prove-or-disprove
element of specific intent, or whether he thinks this
position is right *in principle*--that is, independent of
institutional considerations.


-- Michael McConnell (U of Utah)