I have a similar question with a somewhat lengthy background. I work in a county library in Virginia, recently someone complained about air freshener in the bathroom bothering them and all sorts of documentation about the toxic nature of such chemicals got posted from what appears to be an environmentalist propaganda source, management decided to do some damage control and put out a sheet where people could vote on whether or not they supported banning air freshener as well as to write comments or suggestions.

This put the staff into an uproar, no one wanted to ban air cleaning sprays because the alternative smell is rather disgusting, and proceeded to put a lot of sarcastic remarks on the paper. I was also opposed to the idea, so I wrote on the page that it seemed to me comparable to asking the library staff to refrain from brushing their teeth because someone might think toothpaste was offensive.

Well the sheet got pulled very quickly by management, and of all the comments that were on there they singled mine out as highly offensive and insulting and used it as an example of an inappropriate comment, even though other comments went along the line of "if you ban it I'll bring my own and spray it in there just to annoy people".

I don't feel that this is fair, they wanted our opinions publicly and I simply put down my input. Was I wrong to do this? And if they opt to punish me for it do I have any rights to protect me for writing my honest opinion on a sheet of paper they put out there?

Not appropriate, Alice. You're free to disagree with the poster's conclusions but if you're going to post here, you'll do it civilly.

CBG - looks like this post was split off from the thread I was responding to as I was responding. My post wasn't meant for this thread, but for the troublemaker mechanic.

Yes, this post was a hijack and I removed it from the thread it was initially posted in.

But I'd have said pretty much the same thing to you regardless of who you were talking to.

I apologize I wasn't trying to hijack anything I simply felt it went along the same lines as what you can and cannot say in the workplace, since my employer placed a sheet out for people to comment on and then they selectively labeled responses according to their views.

Don't worry about it. We just have found that it's too complicated for the responders when more than one person is asking questions in the same thread. We ask that you start a new thread no matter how closely related your question seems to be to an existing one.