While you now cannot refuse to hire cross-dressers at your daycare center according to the Supreme Court, firing a woman merely for being related to the “wrong” person may be just fine. That’s the conclusion many are drawing, anyway, after Melissa Rolfe, the stepmother of Atlanta police officer Garrett Rolfe, was fired from her job as a human-resources director.
Rolfe’s former employer, Equity Prime Mortgage LLC, first claimed her termination had to do with social-media posts, according to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. Then the company claimed she “was fired for her actions in the workplace and for violating company policy,” writes the UK’s Sun.
“We value diversity of thought and respect Melissa’s personal views and the views of all employees,” wrote Equity in a statement; “however, when those views create a hostile working environment, we must make difficult decisions to part ways.”
Garrett Rolfe is, of course, the officer charged with murder, a death penalty offense, in what appeared to be the self-defense shooting of 27-year-old ex-convict Rayshard Brooks on June 12.
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As for Equity’s claim about Melissa’s “personal views,” all we’ve seen is a message tweeted by Georgia congressional candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene that she said she received from Rolfe and which reads:
My name is Melissa Rolfe. My son is the Atlanta officer currently in the news. Our family has been completely devastated by all of this nonsense. I have heard how you feel on many topics and agree with you 100 percent. I pray you are victorious. Please keep our family in your thoughts and prayers.
So was Rolfe fired because now, just a tad reminiscent of North Korea, our Left wants to punish even the families of out-of-favor people? Or was she axed because she’s supporting a candidate who dares oppose Black Lives Matter’s agenda? Or is it both?
Of course, there could be something we haven’t heard. Perhaps Rolfe appeared at an office party in blackface, as did Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau or Virginia governor Ralph Northam (who, do note, both still have their jobs). Or maybe she espoused openly bigoted statements, as did “progressive” hero Woodrow Wilson (whose name, do note, still appears on certain buildings). But were she guilty of something more damning than supporting a patriotic candidate, it seems likely we’d have heard about it by now.
Moreover, if Rolfe was fired simply for being Rolfe and not denouncing her stepson, she would just be the latest among dozens of people persecuted for not bowing before terrorist group Black Lives Matter (BLM).
As examples, Vermont school principal Tiffany Riley is currently on leave and is poised to lose her job for politely questioning parts of the BLM narrative, University of Chicago economics professor Harald Uhlig saw the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago cut ties with him after he opined that BLM had “torpedoed itself” by embracing the “hashtag defund the police,” and Sacramento Kings play-by-play announcer Grant Napear lost his job for tweeting “All Lives Matter…Every Single One!”
So what’s going on? When I was in my early 20s decades ago, I defined political correctness thus: “The suppression of Truth for the purposes of promoting a left-wing agenda.” But to be fired back then you actually had to do something such as opine that selective breeding led to blacks being better athletes, as late sportscaster Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder did; or, at least, accurately relate crime statistics broken down by race. Now, however, pc-ness has intensified and been rebranded “cancel culture.”
The goal is still Truth’s suppression, of course. For the Left’s ideology has no basis in Truth and thus can’t withstand scrutiny. The solution?
Ensure it receives no scrutiny.
Persecute anyone who dares question your message and stifle dissent. If only one side can argue, only one side can win.
So it’s not that cancel culture cancels “racism.” Closer to the truth is that a goal is to “#CancelWhitePeople,” as immigrant and New York Times writer Sarah Jeong had been revealed as putting it, after a number of her bigoted tweets (e.g., “White men are bull****”) surfaced in 2018. Oh, the Times defended her and she’s still with the paper.
When discussing cancel culture, it’s common to hear complaints about negating “freedom of speech.” In reality, though, the First Amendment only guarantees protection against government trampling of speech; the private sector is a different matter, and, in fact, society has always had social codes governing speech — as it must.
For example, it wouldn’t shock anyone if a company fired an employee who espoused Nazi or pedophilic ideas; bad morals, bad press, and lost business are realities. Yet while our social speech code once militated against, let’s say, using vulgarity around women and children, we now have cancel culture. This is for a reason:
Our culture has been canceled.
As communist activist Willi Munzenberg put it long ago, “We are going to make the West so corrupt, it stinks.” A fait accompli, we now live in a land of lies — a time in which people “hate what is good,” to quote the Bible.
So the issue isn’t that we have a speech code, but that we have degraded our speech code. It no longer discourages falsehoods. It suppresses Truth — as the lovers of lies try to turn us into a nation reflecting themselves.
Image: designer491/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
