Reasons to kick Peter Thiel off Facebook's board

There's a push to remove Peter Thiel from Facebook's board, and Mark Zuckerberg doesn't care about the threat he poses. Many of the arguments are centered around diversity, which is a tenet Facebook says it deeply values.

The ways Thiel fails to value diversity matter: his beliefs are not just a matter of intellectual debate but a very real threat to my safety. They are particularly transparent during the 2016 election season. I don't support the bigoted, sexist candidate that is Donald Trump like Thiel openly and aggressively does for a host of reasons. One of the most important is that I feel directly threatened by having someone who freely admits to committing sexual assault hold the highest office in my country - I feel especially, intimately endangered as a survivor of sexual assault myself. That's just one of the numerous reasons a Trump presidency would devastating be for women, people of color, LGBTQIA+, and other oppressed groups.

However, Thiel's harmful views on diversity and elections reach much farther than his open, aggressive support of Donald Trump in this election. Thiel believes that women like me should be stripped of their right to vote - not just because of the diversity concern regarding how he clearly doesn't care about women, but because women happen to disagree with his political views and actually hold the power to prevent the outcome he desires. The voter suppression he espouses directly eliminates free speech, something Facebook claims to be incredibly important.

Kick Peter Thiel off Facebook's board. Kick him off because he discourages diversity. Kick him off because people like me don't feel safe with him on it. Kick him off because he doesn't believe in free speech.