I agree with the majority of you in the ideology that what happens in your personal life should not be able to be regulated by your employer, provided you are:
1) not openly doing anything which would display your employer in a negative light (i.e. going to a bar in uniform, being a raving drunk and verbally justifying it by stating you are a public servant of xxx department, etc.), or
2) doing anything illegal.
In this particular instance it would appear as if the accused screwed himself by identifying himself in the profile which contained said pictures as a FF for the city of Austin. Aside from that, what you do in your personal life barring the two stipulations I outlined above, should have no bearing on your professional life. All the same, hypothetically speaking of course, if a patient I treated previously happened to see me while I was off-duty wearing plain-clothes minding my own business in a casino, bar, strip club, etc. and reported it to my employer for a lack of morality based on their opinion (not that I really think they have room to speak since they were there themselves) I really don't see how it is any of my employer's business. The same holds true if I were out enjoying a few drinks at a bar, and brought a woman home who I happened to meet out. Someone else who happened to know I were a public servant could view that as a rather unsavory choice, but so long as I were not violating the two stipulations above, it shouldn't be held against me.
A similar yet different scenario occurred here in NJ with the state police. Read
this article. I don't know all of the exact details or privvied information but in this case, if the young woman was truly raped then they all deserve to lose their tin, go to jail, and burn in hell. But, if the truth is that the 7 officers just happened to be partaking in a consensual intimate encounter which happened to include 7 men and 1 female then that's their business. The one detail which puts them under fire (aside from the rape / not rape controversy) is that the officers allegedly flashed their tin upon entry to the Trenton nightclub to circumvent the cover charge, and then engaged in such activities.
I may not condone any of the aforementioned scenarios, but there has to be a separation somewhere. If it has nothing to do with your employer or job function, then it is nobodies business but your own. :wacko:
