The ex-Google employee who was fired from the company after writing a sexist memo is now defending his actions, saying he didn't mean to offend anyone, and that his firing and subsequent ostracizing is all because of his conservative views.
In a video interview with Business Insider, James Damore claimed that he was trying to "fix" the culture at Google when he wrote a memo that, among other things, talked about how women were scientifically and biologically less desirable for certain jobs.
"I was simply trying to fix the culture in many ways. And really help a lot of people who are currently marginalized at Google by pointing out these huge biases we have in this monolithic culture where anyone with a dissenting view can't even express themselves. Really, it's like being gay in the 1950s. These conservatives have to stay in the closet and have to mask who they really are. And that's a huge problem because there's an open discrimination against anyone who comes out of the closet as a conservative."
Ignoring the fact that Damore responded like this, defending his conservative views, when asked about women feeling attacked by his memo, his analogy has several glaring issues. First of all, being gay or a member of the LGBTQ community is nothing like having a "dissenting view." You got fired for writing an inflammatory, ill-intended note to your coworkers. Anyone would get fired for that. Twitters users were quick to wave the facts at Damore, reminding him that electroshock therapy was a thing that happened to gay people in the '50s, and so was murder.
Unfortunately it's not unusual for people like Damore to do more damage when they try to clarify what they meant when it was so obviously problematic the first time. Just look at Donald Trump's string of responses to the Charlottesville protests. Watch the full Business Insider interview, here.
