Why are politics so bad?

I worked in the backroom at Target for a year and a half. One of the people I worked with frequently was a woman named Joyce. She was a squat lady in her 40's with a shaved head and a deep voice-- she looked obviously like a lesbian, but was actually married with kids. We used to joke that he was probably a stay-at-home, prissy father with a name like Francis or something who spent his time on-line looking for new drapery and scented candles.

One of the niceties about working in a back room is that, even during store open times, you can talk freely about pretty much whatever you want, because the customers can't hear you, provided you're not shouting at the top of your lungs. When you get a group of mostly males in a back room away from people in a real blue collar, physical job where you're lifting heavy boxes, climbing up and down ladders, using hydrolic lifts, your conversations tend to get pretty off-color. There was a guy there named Graham who used to tell the most ridiculously sexist jokes you could imagine, the type where even a tattoed guy with a shaved head and a "macho man" goatee would blush. There was a supervisor that worked in our department who used to refer to women as "broads" and would talk about girls that worked in the store and the hideously detailed things he would do to her if he had the chance. And you know what Joyce would do? She would shake her head with an embarrassed grin, as if saying "Boys will be boys".

My direct supervisor was named Ed, and he was a right-wing Christian Republican with virtually the exact opposite views I had on politics, and we used to get into it all the time with political discussions. Ed was a stubborn guy, just like me, but open minded and rarely got offended at anything I had to say (in fact, he would end lots of discussions by grinningly dismissing me as "just a kid", and once I got older I'd know better-- I would counter that he was an old man realizing his imminent death that made his fear and selfishness vote Republican). But you know who had a problem with it? Joyce. In fact, she told management about us talking about politics, and both Ed and I were next to being written up about it-- politics, management said, were not appropriate workplace discussions.

But let me tell you, nobody I knew ever got so much as a crooked eyebrow from management when it came to the horrendously sexist things the group of us would say. I can't tell you how frustrated it made me that when we were to say filthy things that, in all honesty, should have very well gotten us in deep trouble with, we just got a shrug with a dismissing "Boys will be boys," but whenever we tried to get topical and talk about intelligent things that actually mattered, we would get threatened with write-ups. Really, what sort of thing is politics to get offended by? Obviously politics are personal-- I take my politics very personally-- but it ultimately comes down to opinions, and as long as two people realize that's the beginning and end of it, I mean, I might think less of a person because of their politics, but there are a lot of things a person can do or say that aren't political that might make me think of them as less of a person. Just because politics can change my opinion of a person doesn't mean it in any way affects my working relationship with them. And besides, when you're not even involved with a political discussion, what is there to be offended about? That's like complaining about two men who have a heated discussion about sports, which, if you've ever been around a group of blue collar men, they do a lot, and will say really horrible and personal things about one another because of their thoughts on sports-- I've seen men come to work genuinely depressed because their favorite team lost the previous day, and I've seen them snap at the opposition's supporters when they gloat about a win or a loss. But having been around this, how has that affected me? It doesn't affect me at all, so who gives a shit what one person's opinions are over someone else's?