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The Statehouse News Bureau provides educational, comprehensive coverage of legislation, elections, issues and other activities surrounding the Statehouse to Ohio's public radio and television stations.

ACLU Wants School Employee Accused Of Posting Hateful Message To Keep Job

The ACLU of Ohio is standing up for a Columbus City School employee who posted hateful comments against LGBTQ people and the city’s Pride Festival. Chris Dodds works for the Columbus City school district’s garage. A post from his account used a slur to describe gay people and said they should be “killed or at least relocated.”Elizabeth Burnham with the ACLU of Ohio finds these comments to be vile and hateful, but says Dodds should not lose his job because, in the end, it’s still protected free speech.“What we shouldn’t do is give a power that we own over to the state and say ‘you censor people that we don’t like now’ because what we’ll see inevitable, time and again, is that later on that power that we’ve given away to the state is going to come back and be used against the most vulnerable people.”Burnham believes hateful speech has been on the rise but argues that the answer is not to suppress it but to combat it with more, educational speech. Copyright 2017 The Statehouse News Bureau. To see more, visit The Statehouse News Bureau.

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