So at work, I have two support engineers/trainers who are declining to train a client of ours who happens to be on the discredited SPLC hate group list. One is flatly stating that he won’t work with them because of that, the other is hemming and hawing and saying he doesn’t feel competent to train on the subject they want trained on, but I know it’s the same problem at base.
What neither of them seem to realize is that this is EXACTLY what the Christian baker and Christian photographer were getting at when they refused to bake a wedding cake and do a wedding photography package for LGBT couples. And then got their asses sued off for it and were forced to do it anyway. Goose, meet gander — you can’t have it just the one way, it has to work both ways or it doesn’t work.
Another support person who also trains from time to time (but who lives on the other side of the world, so generally he doesn’t train American customers due to time zone differences) wrote me to ask what I thought about this, as he’s being asked to do that training now that the other two have declined.
I said that we had a lot of clients whose political and religious views clashed with mine, but that didn’t make any difference, because in business, you have to work with the cards you’re dealt. I didn’t sell the product to any of those clients, but I work for the company and if I expect to continue doing so, it’s my job to work with clients regardless of their religi-poli stance.
I also pointed out that it’s the law in this country that we don’t have any choice but to do so, unless we want to have our asses sued off. We did, after all, not have any trouble selling them our very expensive software. That the group in question is a bunch of lawyers who aren’t afraid to take legal action makes it even more ridiculous that we’d refuse on any grounds to provide training for the product they purchased, even if we really had a good reason (like we stopped doing training altogether).
It’s going to be interesting to see how this turns out. Thankfully, I don’t run the training department.