Are you really willing to bite that bullet? What if the person was a member of an anti-vaccination group? Or a racist group?
I'm pretty much with Jack in that in principle, I would avoid discriminating on group affiliation / ideology, except when it could be expected to directly affect job performance; I wouldn't hire a member of an anti-vaccination group as a doctor, or a racist as a human resource manager.
Also, someone who brings up "... and as I was saying at the Klu Klux Klan meeting the other day ..." at a job interview probably isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. More generally, mentioning member of a controversial group at a job interview is a sign of lack of social skills (especially the social skill known as "lying"), which would probably impact job performance (again, it depends of the job. Crazy opinions for say graphic artists are not very surprising or very problematic).
I wouldn't hire [...] a racist as a human resource manager.
Nearly all jobs involve interacting with other people, who may be of the race that the racist would have a problem with. Would you be willing to hire a racist for any such job?
Crazy opinions for say graphic artists are not very surprising or very problematic.
What classifies jobs into this group where crazy opinions aren't a big deal?
Let's say you are interviewing a candidate for a job. In casual conversation, the candidate mentions that he is a member of a rather old and prestigious country club. You've never heard the name of the club before.
You look up the country club afterwards, and are surprised by what you read. The club refuses membership to homosexuals. It revokes the membership of couples who use birth control. Leadership positions are reserved to unmarried males.
The candidate is otherwise competent. Under what conditions would you hire him? Would you want a law passed banning hiring discrimination based on country club membership?
(The country club is analogous to a nicer version of the Catholic church. I left out a couple bad things.)
Religious discrimination is illegal in many parts of the world, and I think that's probably a good thing. Still, keeping this at the object level (no meta-rules or veils of ignorance) it seems to me that discriminating against religious people is fine. I'm curious what other people think.