Asking Google about ‘inquisition forfeit property’ leads me to people talking about it but I don’t know how to determine quickly whether it’s obviously correct or such baseless lies that of course Madden didn’t deign to refute it or what.

Incidentally, at this view from 30,000 feet, the Star Chamber looks rather similar, so while this has been framed as a question about Catholicism, this may be a question about increasingly absolute monarchy in the period.

OTOH, if it is considered a question about tolerance in strongly Catholic countries, I’ve run across various historical anecdotes involving dissenters variously fleeing to Switzerland, Holland, England, and arguably France, but I don’t seem to remember any fleeing to Spain. If e.g. fugitive Bible translators knew that fleeing to Spain would be a fatal mistake, then it seems to me that the government — though perhaps not specifically the Inquisition — was repressing dissent rather more vigorously than ours.

It certainly wasn’t safe to have a Jewish employee throughout the time of the Spanish Inquisition, but that has more to do with the Alhambra Decree of 1492 which expelled all Jews from Spain. Not sure about the others.

It seems to me that Joyent is analogous not to an inquisitor, but to a vintner or ship captain who promptly fires anyone who is clearly and stubbornly heretical. Does anyone have evidence that throughout the existence of the Spanish Inquisition it was safe and ordinary for an ordinary vintner or ship captain to express willingness to keep e.g. stiffnecked Muslim, Jewish, or Protestant employees? I don’t know for certain one way or the other — the few bits and pieces I know about the Inquisition have to do with going after the very powerful, not people running enterprises of 80 employees, and I know enough to be cautious about whether politically charged morality tales are literally true. But I know as a general rule, not so much specifically in Spain but in various places in Europe, it was not an entirely safe era for disagreeing with local authorities about issues like whether the Pope was holy or was more likely the anti-Christ.

(Possibly I’m misunderstanding the analogy; e.g., maybe it is arguing that refusal to use gender-neutral pronouns is a triviality compared to, e.g., being a stiffnecked religious nonbeliever who refused to participate in the official religious rituals, so the point would be perhaps that Joyent has a higher bar for its employees than the Inquisition had for its subjects?)

And why?

Quick historical recap: a thousand years ago Spain was invaded by southern Muslims, five hundred years ago the Spanish finish the Reconquista where they drive the Muslims out, and about that same time, the Spanish set up their Inquisition partly to make sure that doesn’t happen again.
One of the reasons for it happening in the first place was Jews, Muslims and other outsiders posing as Christians to get inside Christian Spain and open the gates to invaders, so the Spanish Inquisition was to keep particular watch for fake Christians, such as recent converts and crypto-unbelievers who didn’t live out the faith that they so loudly and publicly professed.
And so, a man who puts on the affectation of a workplace pseudo-priest, without either doing his work or studying to become a real priest, looks likely to be an unbeliever who is trying to fit in and Doing It Wrong.

I’m reminded here of a passage in Chesterton’s Thursday, where the villain tells of posing as a bishop and crying ‘Down! down! presumptuous human reason!’ whereupon he is quickly revealed to be a fake, because real bishops don’t say that. (I’m told there’s a similar theme in the Father Brown books, but I haven’t read those yet.)

A former vice president of the company I used to work for said he could destroy our company easier from the inside than the outside. Very true. He used to work for the competitor and when he came to work for us, it only took about 5 years after he became president.

“This is what the Democratic Party has come to: so unable to face criticism, whether from left or right, that they stifle opposing voices.”

“Anyone familiar with me and my work knows I’m not racist. My criticisms of the president are unrelated to his race, and to say otherwise in the absence of evidence is disgusting.”

And then he goes on to prove his progressive, anti-racist bona-fides. Too late, Rall!

But if one side has a superweapon, it’s impossible to argue for the other. If the threshold starts at forty, and one doctor says “But we can’t be the sorts of monsters who would refuse a potential cancer patient live-saving surgery!”, and this argument is a deeply-ingrained part of medical culture and the other doctors don’t want to be tarred as cancer-sympathizers, then the threshold goes to 30. Then another doctor brings up the same argument, and the threshold goes to 20. Soon the threshold is at zero and they’re referring rashes and hay fever for surgery and no one can protest because they don’t want to look Pro-Cancer.

If it is impossible to ever say “You know, the social justice people make some good points, but on this issue here they’ve gone too far,” then the threshold on all of those questions above just keeps inching downward until it hits zero.