Suddenly your boss tells you that you must either vote for a certain candidate, or you will be fired. Can he or she do that? Let me clarify, can he or she do that in America? Ok, let me clarify it one more time. You are a citizen of the United States of America, and you work for a company that sells tires, and your boss tells you to vote for a certain candidate for governor in the upcoming election or you will be fired. Can your boss do that?
Before we answer that, let me ask a related question: If I as the owner of a company did that to an employee, what kind of reaction might I expect? I would expect that nearly everyone would immediately and unconditionally characterize what I had done as both outrageous and un-American. I would further expect that most would say that this was a clear violation of our most basic rights guaranteed by the Constitution.
Back to the original question. Can your boss do that? Sadly, it seems that in most states (including California) that indeed your boss can do that, at least in terms of legally being allowed to do that. That was shocking to me, as I only recently came to know this through a discussion with one of my sons! I always thought that basic liberties like that, and related things such as free speech, were guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In the details however, free speech is only guaranteed with respect to the government being prohibited from blocking it. Similarly only certain classes of rights are protected by employment laws with respect to race, gender, religion, age, and sexual orientation, while others such as political affiliation are not legally protected unless a local or state law for the particular location applies.
Back to the original question one more time then. Can your boss do that? Legally he or she probably can, but that doesn’t make it right. We all can see something that is clearly and blatantly wrong without needing an expert to analyze it for us. As a Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said in 1964 when asked for the legal definition of obscenity: “I know it when I see it.”
Un-American doesn’t mean whether something is legal or not. American or un-American has to do with the basic freedoms we all believe in. We know it when we see it.