White supremacy doesn't pay

Free speech is a great thing. But your right to speak freely doesn't protect you from the realities of the workplace -- especially if you're on the public payroll.

Seems a part-time prosecutor in upstate New York was fired after he participated in the white-supremacist American Renaissance gathering last weekend in Herndon, Va.

I'm not so sure it was his mere attendance that prompted the firing. One has to suspect it has more to do with him being quoted in the Washington Post story on the event:

Conference participant Michael Regan, an assistant district attorney in New York's Allegany County, said U.S. policies on immigration, trade and "demographics" have put the country on the wrong path. "You can see European Christian Americans are an endangered species," he said, asserting that the accurate description of conference participants is "white preservationists" rather than "white supremacists."

The comment from his bosses:

Allegany County District Attorney Terrence Parker said Regan's "recent activities will continue to significantly disrupt and impair his effectiveness as an assistant district attorney and the operations of the entire district attorney's office."

... "Those kinds of comments are absolutely inappropriate for a public official," said Joel Levy, regional director for the Anti-Defamation League, which characterizes the [New Century] foundation's ideology as "intellectualized, pseudoscientific white supremacy."

Public officials have to be able to deal with all sectors of the public, including nonwhites, and the presence of a DA like Regan would have cast a pall over the office where he worked.

The larger question, I suppose, is how many others there are who think like Regan but don't commit their opinions to the pages of the Washington Post.

[Hat tip to Ignorant Hussy.]