>“It’s clear that Brendan cannot lead Mozilla in this setting,” said Baker, who added that she would not and could not speak for Eich. “The ability to lead — particularly for the CEO — is fundamental to the role and that is not possible here.”
The most damning aspect of this was their a) inability to predict this would be an issue and b) their inability to deal with it once it did.
All he had to do was lie and say "I understand how my activities can be seen as divisive and wrong and inconsistent with my commitment to upholding the diverse values underpinning the Mozilla community and I apologize for my behaviour at the time. I will do everything in my power to make up for it and I hope the community can judge me based me on my record from this point onwards".
Then, find ways to anonymously engage in whatever political causes he supports, or wait till he's no longer CEO.
The tone deafness of his last interview was kind of the last straw.
It speaks a lot to his integrity that he didn't. Would you rather have a CEO who says one thing in public and then goes and does another thing surreptitiously, or one who stands up for his beliefs even when they're unpopular?
I don't think 'integrity' in the face of an opinion that is becoming more and more unacceptable to hold in our culture is a good thing. Changing your views, and admitting you were wrong is the best thing you can do.
This line of reasoning is very troubling to me, because 20 years ago it was pretty much unacceptable in the U.S. to hold the opinion that gays were entitled to full legal rights, let alone the ability to marry. That changed only because some very courageous people stuck their neck out, weathered all the flack and negative personal repercussions towards themselves, and gradually made the point of "Why not?"
I fully support gay marriage and I personally think Brendan is on the wrong side of this issue, but I also fully support the right of people to hold their own opinions, even when other people find them unpopular. If they weren't allowed to hold unpopular opinions, then pretty much all the social progress we made in the last century - racial equality, feminism, gay rights, etc. - would never have happened.
There's two sides to that -- the first is that, yes, he absolutely has the right to hold any opinion he wants to, no matter how noxious I or others may find them. To paraphrase Hall on Voltaire, I'll defend to the death their right to be assholes. (Full disclosure: pro- gay marriage, anti-Prop 8, not a CA resident, so doesn't really affect me.)
On the other hand, there's no absolute right to be a public-facing CEO, and it's not unreasonable for the public to name-and-shame companies for their stances on public issues and the people they choose as corporate leaders.
In some cases, this means right-wing activists boycotting and gay-marriage advocates praising Target for same-sex wedding registry ads; in others, it's blue-staters deciding not to eat at Chik-Fil-A for its right-wing political donations, and red-staters buying that 24-piece combo for the exact same reason. Personally, I do think that Eich did all the right things as far as policy and PR goes, and I'm actually a bit sorry that he's stepping down.
I think that the real sin here was not his political donations, it was the fact that he and MoCo didn't make at least cursory efforts to wargame out the possible PR issues that they ran into, which meant they were unprepared to deal with the firestorms.
It's obvious that a significant number of board members weren't happy with Eich's promotion on strategic grounds, and the Prop 8 issue was just the icing on the big poisonous cake of bad publicity. Generally speaking, if you're the CEO, the company should be in the news, not you, and Eich was getting hammered left and right.
To piggyback, there's an additional difference between being a public-facing CEO of, say, McDonald's, Exxon or Apple, and being the public-facing CEO of a non-profit which exists due to the donations of primarily liberal and libertarian internet people. The prior case might cost them a little revenue due to boycotts but if the person's effective, you can make a case for 'private views' and 'shareholder value'. When your whole company is an activist platform, it's a bit harder to say that political positions of the CEO don't matter.
On the topic of being an "activist platform", I strongly suggest you read <http://incisive.nu/2014/thinking-about-mozilla/>, and in particular the paragraph starting "Several of my colleagues have called for Brendan’s resignation. I have not done so ..."
> When your whole company is an activist platform, it's a bit harder to say that political positions of the CEO don't matter.
I see the point that it's different for a non-profit than it might be for a for-profit, but I'd also think differences in primary focus matter too.
If I was looking at the conversation over the last week as a representative, I'd suppose that Mozilla is more of an LGBT standard-bearer than an open-web advocacy group.
One could argue that's a ridiculously narrow window to focus on, and that's probably correct, but it's no more narrow a focus than that turned on Eich's donations vs the whole of his behavior and what he had to offer as CEO.
The Mozilla Foundation is funded by donations and "search royalties". Since 2005, the vast majority of funds have come from Google Inc....Mozilla Corporation [is] "a taxable subsidiary that serves the non-profit, public benefit goals of its parent, the Mozilla Foundation"
This is a terrific comment, and I couldn't agree more -- regardless of Eich's personal views and how they made people feel, the fact that he and Mozilla didn't have statements, interviews, and a PR plan in place for something so obvious is reason enough that he shouldn't be CEO. End of story.
That's exactly what I'm saying, that these preparations should have been made prior the announcement. His consideration for and acceptance of the role happened prior to the announcement, presumably. This should have been a part of whatever transition plan they had in place.
They knew about his donation two years before he became CEO. It's not like it was discovered 5 minutes after his appointment - they had plenty of warning that this might be a PR shitstorm. There's no excuse for them to be this unprepared.
> It's obvious that a significant number of board members weren't happy
I'm aware of one board member that's true for. Note that the Wall Street Journal blog post that everyone has been quoting on the board member issue pretty much just got the story wrong. Two of the board members had been meaning to move on to other things for a while and just stuck it out to the end of the CEO search, since that's one of the board's key functions.
> It's obvious that a significant number of board members weren't happy with Eich's promotion on strategic grounds
How is it obvious? The board appoints the CEO. It's true that several board members left shortly after the appointment, and some outsiders have claimed that it was in protest, but I've not seen any confirmation of that. At least some of the ones leaving must have approved, because the remaining board members, I believe, do not have a majority.
I've seen other claims that these people had already planned to leave, and were just staying around to finish the CEO search. Some evidence for this is the fact that the people who left also announced their next major engagements. People who quite on short notice in protest generally don't know where they are going next.
I'm in 100% agreement. Moreover, I think that this was made worse by the fact that not only was there no pre-planning to address the PR issues, which they had to know about (and if they didn't when this already came up, the entire board needs to go, period, b/c that's just amateur hour), Eich's refusal to even explain his position made it hard to not see him as a hate-monger.
If he had defended or explained his position on the basis of religious beliefs -- this might not have ended any differently, but it would at least give the community context for why he feels the way he feels. Not having that context and his outright refusal to elaborate on it, only made it worse.
This is exactly how opinion worked in East Germany. You didn't have to be a communist, but if you weren't you would never work again.
We have the exact same protection for political expression as East Germany. That's freedom? "The Lives of Others" was a warning, not an instruction manual.
Eich has been with Mozilla since the very beginning, and before that he worked at Netscape, writing the first implementation of JavaScript among others. There was some uproar when his Prop 8 donation was revealed in 2012, but no noticeable calls for him to be fired as a Mozilla employee.
But it's obviously a totally different case when you become the CEO. You are meant to be the highest public-facing representative of the corporation. It was publicly known that Eich holds very conflicting views to what many consider a basic civil right, and per his interviews seems to still hold. I can fully understand how this is an impossible equation with leading a company that claims to be committed to equality and inclusiveness.
Do not confuse freedom of speech with lack of public accountability.
I would hope he would be able to maintain a good position there, he seemed to be a very valuable fellow to have onboard - he did create JavaScript (for better or for worse, but still - 10 days to create a language is insane). And as the CTO he cherry-picked Rust as a project worthy of devoting resources to – something I am extremely grateful for. I'm sure has done a great deal of other good things at Mozilla too – those are the just the ones I am most familiar with.
That's not to say I wasn't uncomfortable about the CEO appointment though.
EXACTLY. Especially if that company has an ethos that runs counter to those views. There are plenty of companies -- even tech companies -- where Eich's position wouldn't be an issue. Mozilla is not one of those companies.
And just who decides that?
As a Mozilla community member and employee with an ethos that runs counter to Brendan Eich's view, I was willing to give him a chance as a CEO.
You have confused the right of free association with government oppression. OKCupid has a right to not be associated with Firefox. That's rather the opposite of what the Stasi did to dissidents in East Germany.
You have confused the general concept of oppression with government oppression. There are no laws specifically against black people in America, but our society nonetheless still has some big issues around race.
The government derives its authority from the people. If the people go right ahead and oppress you themselves instead of going through government processes, you aren't any less oppressed.
Then I oppress people all the time. I oppress students of mine who cheat during tests. I oppress people who talk too loudly when I ask them to be a bit quieter. I oppress the guy who almost ran me over last week when he quickly drove across the sidewalk to park and I yelled at him.
All those who participate in a boycott are of course also oppressive. So are those on strike.
Do you really think this is the exact same as East Germany?
It's tough to bear, but we do allow private clubs to discriminate on the basis of race. That's part of what freedom of association means in the US. (For that matter, in most states, if I am a business owner and I have two employees, then I'm still allowed to discriminate in the workplace on the basis of race, religion, etc.)
Your point can be valid, if there is widespread inability to get work when publicly holding a minority viewpoint. That does not seem to be the case here. All evidence is that Mozilla would have been able to continue in some fashion with Eich as CEO, and that Eich could easily get work elsewhere.
> Then I oppress people all the time. I oppress students of mine who cheat during tests. I oppress people who talk too loudly when I ask them to be a bit quieter. I oppress the guy who almost ran me over last week when he quickly drove across the sidewalk to park and I yelled at him.
If you mean you form an angry Internet mob to try and force someone's employer to fire them just because they talk too loudly, you're crazy. If not, I don't think you're making a fair comparison here.
> Do you really think this is the exact same as East Germany?
No, I think it has much more in common with the Red Scare in 1950s America. "This guy holds a political opinion that would abridge my liberty if it took over the country. Let's get him fired."
> Your point can be valid, if there is widespread inability to get work when publicly holding a minority viewpoint.
The fact that these people aren't consistent in trying to get Prop. 8 supporters fired doesn't change the fact that, if they were consistent, "there is widespread inability to get work when publicly holding a minority viewpoint" would probably be the case. The lack of consistency in putting their beliefs into practice doesn't really make me like the philosophy of personally targeting your political enemies any better.
You tell me how an "angry mob" is different than a boycott or picketing, then I'll let you know if I mean to "form an angry internet mob". I support that people organize and participate in boycotts and pickets. I think they are part of protected free speech in the US. Do you?
> "I don't want to do business with a company which has Eich as a CEO" is rather not the same as the Stasi. It's closer to US sentiment during the Red Scare of "I won't do business with any company which employes a member of the Communist Party." (The US still has a number of anti-Communist laws still on the books that I consider reprehensible.)
(I then point out a couple things which I think are even closer.)
Even then, there was several decades of government involvement, from state representatives to Congress and the president. That's not the case here. And without that high-level government involvement, we likely wouldn't have had the Hollywood blacklist and laws to prevent Communists and leftists from being able to work.
As to your consistency point, you propose that the issue is "trying to get [all] Prop. 8 supporters fired". You haven't shown that to be true. It could be limited mostly to non-profit organizations which promote community development and "doing good." (Mozilla.org says "Doing good is part of our code".)
Nor might have you shown it's a universal goal. As Sarah Silverman once said "If we can send a person to the moon, we can send someone with AIDS to the moon, and then someday we can send everybody with AIDS to the moon." Clearly a partial goal is acceptable even if a universal goal isn't.
There are also strategic goals. If I boycotted apartheid South Africa am I inconsistent for not boycotting other countries with deep racial, religious, and caste segregation? Perhaps. Or perhaps I realize that South Africa is a special case where a boycott might work.
The East Germany comparison made sense and your comment about capitalism also made sense. Mozilla itself might very well have simply made a reasonable business decision. Many comments in this thread, though, say that it's fine to have an unpopular opinion as long as you don't mind the consequences. It's fine for the people who disagree with you to punish you for having your opinion. That certainly invites the comparison with East Germany.
"I don't want to do business with a company which has Eich as a CEO" is rather not the same as the Stasi. It's closer to US sentiment during the Red Scare of "I won't do business with any company which employes a member of the Communist Party." (The US still has a number of anti-Communist laws still on the books that I consider reprehensible.)
Or even closer to people in Northern Ireland still who will choose or avoid a Catholic/Protestant-owned store because of strong Unionist/Nationalist beliefs, even when the store itself has no basis.
Or a boycott on a chain of stores in the US where the owner contributes to anti-immigration policies, even when the chain itself has taken no political stance.
These later ones fall squarely under a right of free association. The East Germany comparison does not. That's why this comparison is malarkey.
I'm curious why you think the East German and US situations during the Cold War were all so different from the perspective of what the comparison was talking about.
With the Red Scare (which started decades before the Cold War), the government was involved early on, and at a high level. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Red_Scare for some of the details of what happened in the 1920s. Senator McCarthy of course used the bully pulpit to push anti-communist policies. The House Un-American Activities Committee played a key role in starting the Hollywood blacklist.
Of course there were certainly non-government pressures as well. People were anti-bolshevik and worried that the US would be overthrown just like Russia was. Others saw anti-Communism as a way to frighten people, and use that freight as a way to gain power. But without the government we wouldn't have had laws like the Taft–Hartley Act, which for 18 years prohibited union leaders from being members of the Communist Party. The Communist Control Act of 1954 is still on the books.
With Eich there's absolutely no government involvement, and the opposition is based on the right of association. Some Mozilla employees, some volunteers, some citizens, and some organizations don't want to associate themselves with Mozilla.
With East Germany, the police wanted to be involved in the actions of dissenters, and had the power to do so. With the Red Scares, the US government also used their power to force others to not associate with Communists. But with Eich .. what power do the dissenters have other than their right of free association?
It's a public perception and media job. Being popular is literally the job description. We're not talking about some poor persecuted office worker who just happens to hold unpopular views and now can't hold a job anymore.
Mel Gibson ruined his career with unpopular statements, Tom Cruise nearly did, and nobody started talking about the Stasi then. The Stasi comment was completely uncalled for itself, a Godwin rejoinder was begging to be made.
> "Many comments in this thread, though, say that it's fine to have an unpopular opinion as long as you don't mind the consequences. It's fine for the people who disagree with you to punish you for having your opinion. That certainly invites the comparison with East Germany."
Eich went beyond merely having and expressing an unpopular opinion. He took action to support the effort to have his opinion forced upon others by the government. He couldn't restrain himself to respectful disagreement, and that's why he's suffering more severe consequences.
For a long time, "equal rights" for gay people was an unpopular opinion. Through action, gay rights have been forced upon others by the government. Why didn't gay people just restrain themselves to respectful disagreement?
You are advocating a double standard. Why is it ok for people to support "gay rights" being forced upon others by the government, but not ok for people to support traditional marriage values being forced upon others by the government? In either case, there are people who do not want the government to force those opinions upon them. So, if the majority is going one way, you're saying the minority should do nothing other than "respectfully disagree"?
The East Germany comparison is actually quite appropriate here.
That's not analogous. Brendan Eich materially supported a current threat to freedom. A few decades ago it would be as if you were writing checks to an anti-miscegenation organization. At time, plenty of people would have said "What's the big deal? It's a valid opinion." and yet it is just as clear that's wrong.
Plenty of people on this forum have radical political philosophies, ranging from anarcho-capitalist to communist. Some of them are probably far more radical than Brendan Eich, who might be utterly mild in his politics otherwise. And yet because they are not speaking out against individual rights, all these bomb-throwing radicals coexist.
I'm commenting on this thread because it's the only one I can comment on.
Whether or not it's appropriate for the duplicates of a controversial thread to be deleted, you've effectively squashed all productive conversation on a massive, contemporary topic.
You would have an excellent point if the conversation were productive, but it's the opposite of productive. Nor has it been "squashed".
Such conversations predictably and egregiously violate all of Hacker News' values, especially those of intellectual substance and personal civility. Pinpoint interventions, like I've been making in less inflamed threads, have no hope of working on these, so we have to do something else. Doing nothing is not an option; neither is killing discussions outright on subjects that are, after all, on topic for HN.
If the community were capable of discussing this kind of subject maturely, we wouldn't think of intervening. But it's been so painfully clear for so long that that isn't so, that in my view the thing we can perhaps be faulted for is taking so long to deal with it. That's a measure of how reluctant we are to intervene.
My opinion is that it should have been all contained to the first big thread, which should have been moderated such that it stayed on the front page.
This is a major topic, with major ramifications for tech, and it's going to be discussed.
True, most of the discussion isn't productive, but it's still better to let it happen, and to focus it all in one place instead of it being scattered around.
My opinion is not all that far from your opinion. When that thread fell very low in rank, I lightened its penalty for that reason. There's no fine-grained control over rank, so it's a bit hard to calibrate.
Nobody's going to stop discussion from happening, but discussion that repeatedly, predictably violates HN values can't be handled the same way as isolated comments. If I try to respond everywhere that the HN guidelines are violated in those threads... well, it's impossible. I actually tried in one place, and someone immediately asked "why here?"... which was such a good point that I just deleted it. (Edit: oh yeah, it was this very thread!)
Yeah, it was me, the same person in both instances. :-)
I agree it's it a tough call. There's a ton of inflammatory comments on both sides of the issue, and it's both predictable and impossible to moderate on a practical level.
Often I get annoyed at the obvious flamebait political stories on the front page. They usually have a lot of back and forth that's just people talking their side, saying nothing that we haven't all heard before. Not much plus to offset the minus of the flamewar.
This one felt different, though, since it's one of the biggest people in tech and one of the biggest companies. And I personally feel it will have ramifications for years to come in the tech business world.
I don't know. What can you do when a topic really does merit discussion on HN, but most of it will be a flamewar?
Maybe fencing it all in one place is the best of no perfect choices...
This one felt different, though, since it's one of the biggest people in tech and one of the biggest companies
Yes. That's what I didn't get at first, and needed feedback in order to see. It seems obvious now, of course. But I'm not really reading the stories or threads for content—I'm thinking about the site, and don't have the time and/or the brain cells to do that as well as process the news itself the way I used to. This is a bummer—especially when the "news" involves kdb+ or a new paper on JIT compilation—but it's ok, as long as we can actually make HN better. In this case, though, it caused me to miss something that actually mattered for HN. Dang, as we say!
Nobodies' right to have different viewpoints is being taken away. Nobodies' right to donate to political causes is being taken away.
The only people in this entire story that were/are trying to take away the rights of others were the people who pushed for Prop 8. The right to support legislation like Prop 8 remains intact. The right to not be criticized by others for doing so has never existed in the first place. There is no "right to not be criticized".
[Edit] The voting swings on this comment indicate to me that it is controversial, so I will attempt clear some things up:
* Whether or not you believe that same sex couples should be allowed to marry, the fact is that before Prop 8 they did have the right to marry.
* The purpose of Prop 8 was to remove this right, because the supporters of Prop 8 felt that it should not be a right.
* After this entire series of events, Brendan remains free to donate to similar political causes in the future. He remains free to publicly hold these beliefs. He remains free to be a CEO.
* The general public remains free to criticize Brendan for anything that they please.
* The rest of the general public remains free to criticize those criticizing Brendan for his political beliefs.
I think you're dismissing what has happened too lightly. The real issue here is mob mentality, and you're underestimating the ways in which it can be dangerous and insidious.
People aren't taking this seriously because in this case they disagree with Eich's opinion, so they feel it's all okay. They're letting that blind them.
What if Eich actually had the "right" opinion? And this is hypothetical at this point--I'm not talking about gay rights anymore. Suppose you are an oracle and you know that the mob was wrong rather than right and Eich was right rather than wrong. Don't fool yourself into thinking that things would be different. They wouldn't, and this has caused extraordinary difficulty in righting many wrongs of the past, including slavery. It can severely impede the democratic process because people are afraid to hold dissenting opinions--not due to legal ramifications, but social ones.
Regardless of who I think is right, I am pointing out that contrary to popular narrative, no rights have been removed from Eich.
There are and have been plenty of movements to boycott companies that I am certain are misguided. "One Million Moms" is an example of a group that organizes pushback on companies that I feel is wrong.
Even in those cases, it is their right. If they had been putting pressure on Eich to step down because he supported same-sex marriage, I would maintain that no rights were being removed from Eich.
Slavery seems a poor example, since the people with the "wrong" opinion were already rich and powerful, and the people with the "right" one were... well, slaves. A large part of this Eich fiasco has been rejection of giving power to someone who's already used it to "wrong" ends.
What are you proposing? That we shouldn't object to injustices, on the off chance we're wrong and too many people agree with us?
We can all only do what we think is best. Eich thought he was making the world a better place by trying to block gay marriage. It seems the world disagrees.
> Slavery seems a poor example, since the people with the "wrong" opinion were already rich and powerful, and the people with the "right" one were... well, slaves
Actually there were a small number of rich and powerful people with the "right" opinions. They could hardly voice those opinions or they'd risk losing all that power and, as a consequence, wealth.
The whole point is that the people who had the power to do something about it didn't do anything for a very long time, for the most part, because it would ruin their reputation, at best.
> What are you proposing? That we shouldn't object to injustices, on the off chance we're wrong and too many people agree with us?
Yes and no. You conveniently phrased this as a loaded question, making it hard for me to respond.
No, we shouldn't ignore injustices. But yes, we should be tolerant of certain things to a certain degree. But it turns out we already have a centuries-old system that allows us to do this without resorting to public shaming and near vigilante tactics. I'm suggesting we just use that system rather than trying to scare people into sharing our opinions.
> It seems the world disagrees.
You're jumping the gun. It's entirely possible that many (or even most) people who are against gay marriage don't even know who Brendan Eich is.
I still can't imagine how you expect this to ever have gone. "Well, those other people are fighting to take away something important to us, so I guess we'll just quietly smile and nod"? I hardly expect anyone whose way of life is at stake to go peacefully, no matter how wrong that way of life may be.
Not so fast. Rabbling at a village gathering is surely the most ancient form of protest. :)
But you're dropping a lot of context here. This wasn't just some dude with some job holding some opinion. He acted to enforce his opinion on others, then became CEO of a company whose entire schtick is to not do that sort of thing.
That nobody has come out in support of Eich's opinion is exactly why he's unfit to be CEO: Mozilla believes in some things, the people who care deeply about Mozilla also believe in those things, and Eich actively opposed those things. He represents the company, and he has a known history of acting against what the company is supposed to stand for.
If it turned out Ballmer had donated to prop 8, would there be nearly this outrage? I seriously doubt it; I would still call him something uncomplimentary on Twitter, but it's not like I have any existing philosophical expectations of either him or Microsoft. People called Eich a dick two years ago, but nobody expected him to quit his job.
I'll tell you what we should do. We shouldn't give those rights to gay people and we should take away those rights from straight people as well. The status quo is a clear discrimination of people who choose not to marry, but may have others in their lives where it would be mutually beneficial to opt into an agreement where they share some of those rights/benefits.
Each one of the rights currently afforded to people in a marriage or civil union should be split up and any two people for whatever reason should be able to opt into some, none or all of those rights.
I'm hoping that one day those pushing for additional rights afforded only to married people, straight or gay, get the exact same treatment that Eich did here.
Marriage shouldn't even be within the purview of the government, only religions.
I see this arguement crop up a lot and I feel like this is largely a semantics issue. "Marriage" as a union under some God and "Marriage" as a package of some 1000+ legal contracts hold the same name for historical reasons (dynamics of the Church in European power structure mostly). When gay mariage is brought up I feel like people just see the religious side and ocasionally the tax breaks and fail to completely grasp the issue. What they gay community wants is to have the easy contract that handles the passing of estates, the combination of insurance, citizenship issues, adoption preferences, etc. Currently we lack the infrastructure to affordably deliver "a la carte" packages; it's the same reason everyone gets the same TOS when installing a particular piece of software. It is not particularly realistic to say that a particular group be denied rights because the infrastructure for delivery isn't ideal.
It's only not realistic because everyone uses this exact same argument every time someone brings this up. We could move slowly towards the correct solution by acknowledging how incorrect the current situation is and fixing it little by little.
Why can't I have an easy way to pass on my estate to someone with all the same tax benefits without having to have sexual relations with that person? Why can't I get insurance options that can be extended to those I cohabitate with regardless of the nature of the relationship beyond the fact that we live together. Why are there not citizen affordances for other relationships such as extending rights to siblings as well? I'm talking exactly about all those same rights the gay community wants. Just like there is no reason many of those rights should be restricted to straight people, there is also no reason that many of those rights should be restricted to two people in a long-term sexual relationship. There's also no reason why we shouldn't be able to pick and choose which rights and obligations we want to opt into or which rights we may want to share with person A and which rights we may want to share with person B.
There is absolutely no reason in this day and age that we can't switch over to a la carte packages over 10-20 years. All you need to do is start offering those options on each of those rights individually and to let all the rights for married couples expire and for those that don't expire, you can work on sunsetting them once a suitable a la carte solution is available.
I understand that argument--and you're not completely wrong--but a) that would require a massive overhaul of our legal system. The whole impetus behind this is that by not being able to be married, LGBT citizens are denied literally thousands of legal rights. That would be a big project. b) Good luck getting our uber-religious society to do so. c) Whether the system is flawed or not, keeping a class of people out of it is certainly not OK.
Oh, I definitely agree that discriminating against a group based on their sexual preference is abhorrent, but I also resent this discussion to some degree because it completely takes away attention from the discussion we should be having and it further legitimizes marriage as something the government should even have involvement in.
For example, if I want to jointly own a home (and only a home with no other possessions jointly shared) with someone, we would not receive a total $500k capital gains exemption on the sale of the home after 5+ years of ownership. Only married people filing taxes jointly get this right. Instead, me and the other person would only be allowed a $250k exemption. How can such a situation possibly be fair? The correct abstraction would have been to allow up to $250k capital gains exemption for each individual on the deed. [0]
At the end of the day, we should be designing laws the way we design software. Strong separation of concerns should be a design goal when drafting legislation.
You do NOT have the right to judge anyone based on "race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty"
You violated Brendan Eich's human rights, it's that simple. Bigot.
Per Article 2 of the UDHR, "political opinions" are a protected class (to use the American terminology).
However, "the right to not be judged or criticized by fellow citizens" is not a right that is outlined by the UDHR. Not as I am reading it anyway. Specifically which article and section details the right that you think Eich is being deprived of?
I'm confused. How the heck did I violate Brendan Eichs human rights? My comment about privileges pertains to the benefits granted to married couples, straight or gay. Marriage rights don't exist, married couples aren't entitled to tax breaks, spousal benefits, etc. those are all privileges that can be repealed by the stroke of a pen and therefore are not rights.
It seems like most are ok with harassment and discrimination against Eich simply citing exercise of free speech. But if one-tenth of what happened to Eich had happened to someone with different sexuality or female, people would cry harassment and discrimination. Why is it ok for Eich to get huge backlashes, harassments and character assassination? I fully support same sex marriage, but I feel like treating Eich like this was too far.
If it weren't for double standards, most people wouldn't have any standards at all.
All you have to do is look at all the public figures who express views, and act on them in much more thorough ways, who get a free pass. Look at the all the famous Hollywood types with very sketchy behaviors in their backgrounds. Look at politicians as well, where it's even easier to find skeletons. Eich has been held to a standard that a whole lot of people in public life, CEOs, politicians, movie stars, sports heroes, would not live up to. Do we now move on to all of them?
The biggest problem I have with this situation is not that it happened to Eich, but that the mob has been so selective. There are plenty of people in the public life who have done far more than donate $1000 to a state referendum that, let's not forget, was popular enough to pass in one of the most liberal states in the Union, but haven't been hounded out their jobs for it.
All the folks celebrating that a moral victory has been won with Mozilla ought to consider what happens if this considerable power is put to an evil use, or a use for which they personally find objectionable. Don't think it can't happen. 100 years ago, Fascism was the big thing because it allowed the leaders to Get Things Done, and in fact, many good things were done in that era by dictators with tremendous power to make sweeping changes. But some other stuff happened, too.
Of course, I'm speaking in a political climate where I heard many people state in 2009 that they wished President Obama weren't limited by the Constitution so he could _really_ fix things. I've never heard such a frightening thought from an American in my life, yet I heard it from a number of people back when the President was elected. That isn't a political thing either, because it would scare me equally no matter who the person was talking about. Sure, I don't like President Obama, but I wouldn't want that kind of power in the hands of someone who was the combined reincarnation of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Gandhi, Winston Churchill, and the Buddha himself either.
If we are living in a country where people are that ignorant of history and of human nature, then this society isn't long for the world anyway.
Maybe the tide is changing and this the start of a new era of populist activism. I guess you have nothing to worry about as long as you hold popular opinions... and, of course, those _never_ change.
Mob rule is a powerful thing and genies never go back in the bottle after they've been let out.
Free speech does not mean, and has never meant, freedom from social consequence. The Constitution does not say that you can do and say whatever you want and other people can't have opinions about it.
Eich paid good money in an attempt to restrict how people in Mozilla's home state live their lives — some of them even Mozilla employees. He expressed no regret for doing so, then became CEO of Mozilla, a company that virtually defines itself by freedom and inclusion.
There were myriad ways he could've attempted to resolve this, and he did precisely none of them. That he would rather give up the job entirely speaks volumes about what he finds important.
He still has the right to be a CEO. He does not now, and never had, the right to not be asked to step down. He does not now, and never had, the right to be respected as a CEO.
What does it mean to have a right that you can be effectively prevented from exercising? What is the difference between a right that one is not allowed to exercise and a right one doesn't have?
Eich was not legally barred from being CEO. He could have chosen not to step down. He could choose to start his own company to be CEO of. He could be CEO of another company.
He will not be barred by the government from doing all of those things. He is not being prevented from exercising his right to be a CEO. He was asked to step down by many people, as is their right, and he did.
He's still allowed to be CEO of Mozilla. (Calling a specific job posting a "right" seems a stretch — do I have the right to be CEO of Mozilla? Where are the complaints that I'm being effectively prevented from exercising that right?)
Nothing and nobody forced him to resign. He could've weathered the storm and risked Mozilla's most valuable asset, its goodwill, over his beliefs. It would've been a terrible thing to do to the company and made him a terrible CEO, but nothing stood in his way.
Claiming that someone's rights were violated because he voluntarily quit his job is patently absurd.
Then social forces were preventing him from doing his job — which has a large social component. Does he have the right to not be fired for being an inadequate employee, too?
If Mozilla changed their mind and asked him to be CEO again he could. If another company asked him he could. Just because no one wants you to be CEO does not mean you don't have the right to be.
Would everyone please use "privilege" and not "right"? The legal benefits of a government recognized marriage are privileges, not rights. Government can grant privileges not rights.
I understand the demand for equal treatment doesn't change though.
Marriage is both legal and social, and the two are heavily intertwined (hence the religious objections). The recognition itself is, arguably, a right. The argument is then that the government should respect the right, not "grant" it.
"While an intolerant sect does not itself have title to complain of intolerance, its freedom should be restricted only when the tolerant sincerely and with reason believe that their own security and that of the institutions of liberty are in danger." - John Rawls.
Intolerance toward Prop 8 supporters is appropriate due to the threat to liberty that the restriction of same sex marriage creates.
There is no need to be tolerant of someone who threatens your security and liberty.
This was never about security or liberty (although it's a bit like the Monty Python sketch - "We're being oppressed, we're being oppressed! We really are!".)
I'm not saying there isn't discrimination against homosexuals in other areas, but this wasn't it.
This was basically a semantic debate about marriages versus civil unions.
A majority of Californians (Eich included) took the viewpoint that marriage was a traditional institution, and if people had a new style of relationship, they should have a new term for it, even if it had the same privileges (not rights - government's can't grant rights).
However, another group said no, we want to use the same word for it (I assume for ideological reasons, as opposed to purely utilitarian ones).
So no, please don't hoist the whole "WE'RE BEING OPPRESSED" flag - it doesn't help your case
That's incorrect. Prop 8 stripped all marriage rights. Most of those rights were restored by the time it got to the CA Supreme Court, but only because the CA Supremes said that Prop 8 was, legally, horseshit, but that to honor the will of the people they would let Prop 8 have the term "marriage". They're very clear about that in their decision.
The point of Prop 8 was to prevent gay marriage, and all the privileges that marriage includes. That is, to strip a civil right from gay people.
For thousands of years, we've had the concept of "marriage" and "families", and (more or less) monogamous relationships.
Central to this has been the idea of a man and a woman procreating, and raising children.
Now, perhaps we'll evolve away from that - maybe we'll simply clone people.
Or perhaps we'll have special breeder castes, and we'll raise the children away from their (biological) parents in learning centres.
Or perhaps the idea of having children will seem antiquated, and we'll just die away as a species.
Who knows.
But this (large scale homosexual relationships in society) is most definitely a new thing - and procreation, and nuclear families have no place in it.
Hence this whole ideological fight over whether to call it "marriage" (with all the associated ideas of families and raising children) or something else entirely.
Don't support welfare? You're against poor people.
Support welfare? You're against the working man.
You're pro-choice? You're against babies.
You're pro-life? You're against women.
> this line of reasoning is very troubling to me ..
This entire affair is troubling. This individual's livelihood was affected because of his socio-political views and activities. Your 2nd paragraph correctly underlines the more important issue.
What if had been donating to the KKK instead? Do you think he could accurately represent his employees of color?
Or for a less cut-and-dry example: If he had donated to Pro-Life organizations, would you expect him to be accepted as CEO of Planned Parenthood?
Your socio-political views and activities have consequences. If you believe strongly enough in them, you will weather them. His views and activities certainly had consequences for a lot of California families.
If I walked into my office tomorrow and told people that I think women aren't humans, abused some racial minorities, my livelihood would be affected because of my socio-political views.
I very much disagree with the KKK, but I believe in a society where they have the right to think whatever they want about non-white people, without getting harmed.
Can we have some perspective here? His livelihood has been at no point under threat. Unless you have some evidence that the CEO job was somehow keeping him from the poorhouse, this is just a ridiculous term to use here.
He still works for Mozilla (as far as I can tell) and he almost certainly still has a significant say in how it's run through the shares he almost certainly has (I can't find any specifics on it in a cursory search, but it would be astounding if it were not so).
But when he made that donation, he was tying himself to a cause. As an officer of a company he is a face of that company. This is true in all companies and for all causes, and it was his choice to make the donation and the company's choice to appoint him to a position where that donation would reflect poorly on them.
I'll grant you I was misinformed on the latter, but can you point to some source on him not working for Mozilla at all anymore? Nothing I can see says anything but that he stepped down from the CEO role and his board position on the Foundation (which would be where he could still have a say in the running of Mozilla, I don't think it was the goal of the boycott to have him leave the Foundation board so it seems a little excessive to me).
That is a shame if so, as his technical contributions are still clearly valuable.
Would you expect his views not to have consequences? I will gladly stand up for his right to hold opinions I disagree with, but the right to an opinion is not a shield from the consequences of those views. The board had just as much right to hold the opposite opinion and how they want the culture and outward face of their company to look like.
Where have you been living the past, I don't know, all your life. Many socio-political views are untenable and would affect your livelihood negatively if they are known publicly. The only thing that changed is that being against gay-marriage specifically, and gay-rights generally, is now seen in the same light(at least in certain parts of the country). Brendan Eich found himself on the wrong side of history before he even realized this. Too many trips to Indonesia maybe?
He was not stamping out widgets in a factory. He was supposed to be leading a diverse group of hackers and technologists at a bastion of future-looking/open culture.
This is just moral relativism and reductionist analysis. It's easy to frame problems in a light where it's impossible to make an objective judgment. This is like saying that violence is wrong. Sure, in the abstract, but in practice there's an objective difference between the use of violence for oppression, personal gain, and domination and the use of violence as self-defense.
Let's go to first principles here. Which, for America at least, come down to equality and liberty. Principles enshrined in the founding documents of this country. Oppressing people because of their sexual orientation is not a neutral proposition in regards to those principles, it is very much an exception to the principles of equality and liberty.
The two scenarios you describe are NOT and have never been symmetrical.
Your reasoning here is very similar to the rationale for oppressing Communist sympathizers during the Red Scare. They were opposed to the democratic principles of America and we ostracized them for it, and I'd thought the lesson we took from it was that we were very much in the wrong. I fully support gay rights, but I have trouble embracing what feels like a new form of McCarthyism (just s/Communist/homophobe/).
Hardly. There's an enormous difference between publicly ostracizing someone for holding beliefs or a political position that you disagree with and oppression. But there's leagues of distance between using speech and private choices (like whom to do business with) on the one hand and using the machinery of the government to deny people rights and to harass them at every turn.
For example, the KKK is horrendously ostracized in this country. And I think that's OK. But while they might be ostracized, KKK members still enjoy their rights, they still have the opportunity for free speech. And I think that's important too. I wouldn't equate the ostracization of open racism with McCarthyism and I don't think most folks would either.
The lesson from the McCarthyism scare isn't that ostracizing people for their beliefs is wrong. That's a valuable, even essential, function of society and an important aspect of free expression. Although we should definitely be careful in its use. The lesson is that hounding people for mostly private activities or activities in their past is wrong, and conducting public witch-hunts using the power of the government where the flimsiest of evidence is allowed to decide someone's fate is also wrong.
I had a longer response, but I'll try to condense it down. I understand what you're saying, and as a supporter of free speech (which includes unpopular speech), I generally agree with your point. Still, I can't quite see the parallels between the two scenarios.
This isn't a situation where he's sticking his neck out and weathering flack of negative personal repercussions to achieve a point, at least, not yet. If Brendan wants to use this experience to further voice his support against gay marriage, he can certainly do that.
But thus far, Brendan has gone out of his way to NOT discuss the unpopular opinion he holds -- he hasn't even explained why he feels the way he feels.
It's sort of hard to draw an analogy between someone who stuck their neck out and said "not supporting LGBT rights is wrong and bigoted and I'm going to talk about it, even if it means losing my job. And I'm going to continue talking about it until things change." and someone who says "yes, I have to confirm I gave money to this cause b/c it's public record, but I refuse to explain or defend my position, stop asking me about it, it doesn't matter."
Indeed, Brendan has actually gone to extreme lengths to not use his right to freedom of speech. Just look at all this "I prefer not to talk about my beliefs"[1][2]. With the CNET piece, the reporter was very kind, open and professional with him. He handed Eich the forum to come out with his views on a silver plate lined with silk. But Brendan chose not to use it, instead going for the "my private opinions as CEO are irrelevant". Well clearly, they aren't.
It's not about freedom of speech, but actually holding you accountable for what you say, which is a great thing.
> He handed Eich the forum to come out with his views on a silver plate lined with silk.
Can you envision any scenario where he would be able to express his views that wouldn't have angered the mob even more, without modifying his views to be those of the mob?
> It's not about freedom of speech, but actually holding you accountable for what you say, which is a great thing.
For this, pg's "What You Can't Say" essay cuts both ways:
"The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true."
Sure, he could easily have said, "My religion, of which I am a sincere believer, doesn't permit gay marriage. I mistakenly supported Prop 8 because I hadn't thought things through, and in the 6 years since I have come to realize that gay people deserve the same civil rights straight people do. I now see that religion is a private matter, and freedom of religion means that my church's views aren't a good basis for legislation."
And if he had said this in a blog post at any before becoming CEO, he could have skated through this easily.
On the other hand, if he still believes gay people to be inferior and not deserving of full civil rights, then yes, people could have reasonably questioned how he could be the boss of some of them.
Brendan Eich gave $1000 to support the following text to be amended to the CA constitution:
Sec. 7.5. Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.
You take that to mean he supported this being amended to the constitution:
Gay people are inferior and not deserving of full civil rights.
Which is a wonderfully built straw man, but not at all likely to be an idea that Eich would ever espouse. I don't know Eich, but his public record doesn't seem to support the supposition that he thinks anyone is inferior or that anyone should be denied civil rights.
If you really want to attack his ideas, attack their best interpretation, not their worst.
The goal and practical effect of Prop 8 was to keep gay people from equal treatment under the law. In particular, to strip them of the ability to marry.
We have no idea what Eich's ideas are, because he has refused to say. But I can and will judge him by his actions. And no, I don't believe that's a straw man. I don't believe it's possible to have a rational and consistent view that includes both the 14th amendment (explicitly naming equality before the law as a civil right) and using the power of the law to keep gay couples from marrying like any other couple.
> If they weren't allowed to hold unpopular opinions, then pretty much all the social progress we made in the last century - racial equality, feminism, gay rights, etc. - would never have happened.
Back in the day, they weren't allowed to hold unpopular opinions. The history of civil rights is a story of many people going to jail for their beliefs, and then being force-fed when they performed hunger strikes and being lynched by roving mobs. The righteousness of their ideas became apparent because they clung to those beliefs and refused to budge until physical force moved them, and because they never renounced their beliefs despite the torment of their oppressors. To paraphrase Ghandi "You can kill me if you want, and you will have my dead body. But you will not have my obedience."
I'd argue that the stakes are not nearly as high here. We're not talking about sending Brendan Eich to jail. He is free to move about the world and continue making boatloads of cash at whatever firm is willing to hire the foremost JS expert on the planet. We just don't want him running this particular organization.
Holding an unpopular opinion that is all about increasing fairness and equality (racial equality, feminism, gay rights, etc.) is completely different than holding one that is about decreasing fairness and equality.
We cannot compare Eich's position of denying a freedom to some people to those of the people who stood for racial equality and feminism.
AFAIK, Eich donated $1000 to an organization that put the following amendment into the CA constitution:
"Sec. 7.5. Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."
That's not "denying a freedom", that's defining a population who will receive certain benefits. It's a normal part of democracy. Just like when a government body defines "poverty line" to mean $XXX income, for the purposes of excluding the (very real, legal and financial) benefit from some of the population, we don't call it denying "rich people's freedom" to food stamps.
Now, whether we should distribute food stamps or whether there should be benefits for married couples is another argument, but merely expressing an opinion on the definition is certainly not the same as denying someone an essential liberty.
Defining marriage as being between a man and woman isn't like giving food stamps to poor people.
The bottom line for me is that America is supposed to be a place of freedom and equality. If we're going to say that a man and woman can get married, then we have to say that two men or two women can also get married (assuming consenting adults, etc.).
Food stamps are different. They're about helping out people who are struggling to survive (at least that's the idea. Don't want to turn this into an argument about food stamps).
> Defining marriage as being between a man and woman isn't like giving food stamps to poor people.
I think you missed what I was trying to say, sorry I wasn't more clear.
> The bottom line for me is that America is supposed to be a place of freedom and equality.
Freedom, yes. Equality? That's tougher to quantify. America certainly has a notion of "inalienable rights", but is Marriage one of them? It doesn't seem so, because if you want to "marry" a 5-year-old, we don't call that a marriage. And we don't call polygamous relationships marriages, at least not for state purposes.
I'm claiming that the Prop 8 campaign is not a civil rights issue, because there are no "fundamental rights" being violated. There's nothing in the constitution that guarantees your right to be married.
Furthermore, the only actual harm that you can claim to have been done to you as a result of Prop8 is a denial of certain financial benefits. That's where the food stamp argument comes in. I'm not equivocating the two situations in a moral sense. I'm merely pointing out that we allow discrimination which we've deemed to be morally neutral for the purposes of allowing access to government benefits.
> If we're going to say that a man and woman can get married, then we have to say that two men or two women can also get married
You could also say that it was pretty much unacceptable to support women's suffrage or be against slavery in certain times and places.
But, the thing is, these ideas have trajectories. The idea that slavery is wrong or women should have the right to vote never got less accepted over time.
> The idea that slavery is wrong or women should have the right to vote never got less accepted over time.
This cannot be the case, because those ideas have not existed since the beginning of time. They had an origin and therefore an upward trajectory towards their reification in law.
With a scant few matriarchal societies aside, most of human history is absolutely dominated by men making other men and women subservient to them. That's the story of humanity.
This is very wrong. Various cultures have had different systems of slavery - some better, some worse - and vastly different views of women's civil rights or participation in society.
I don't think so. I think that the societies that practiced slavery were always amenable to the practice. The societies themselves just grew and spread.
For example: Iran's official policy went from being progressive to oppressive, but it was a result of the Islamists moving into power in the 70s. They didn't just suddenly convince everybody that "hey we should oppress women". All of those people were there, and had been there for a long time. They just weren't in power.
To pick a glaring example, what about American slavery? Do you think there was an unbroken line of racist slavers from the dawn of time right through to Eli Whitney's cotton gin? The fact is, slavery was made much worse because of the economic situation after the invention of the cotton gin.
It's not as if Americans were abolitionists until the cotton gin was invented. The justification of slavery was already there. The institution of slavery grew due to the cotton industry, but those people already had the justification they needed. They knew the Bible didn't condemn slavery and they had God on their side. Abolition spread in spite of the economic demand for slavery.
The two aren't the same. On one hand, you have powerful white guys who sometimes don't get the exact CEO crown they want. (Aww...)
On the other, you have oppressed people who face horrors. Social movements who challenge the powerful. If you're black in the US, you're vulnerable to incarceration in the country which is the world's biggest jailer. If you're a woman, you're a target of violence and subordination. If you're not entirely heterosexual, you get abuse and humiliation heaped on you.
You mention history; would you compare Turing's fate to Eich's?
Anyway, nonprofits like Mozilla have serious problems if they're so top-down that your ability to contribute is limited by your distance to the CEO crown.
Eich has the right to make whatever donations he wants. He also has the right to hold whatever beliefs he wants. What he doesn't have is the freedom from consequences of performing those actions and holding those beliefs.
Which part is troubling to you then? Eich has every right to hold his beliefs, and Mozilla has every right to ask for his resignation when they believe his beliefs run too contrary to their own.
The difference is that the people who stuck their neck out for racial equality, gay rights and women's rights were objectively right, but Brendan Eich is objectively wrong. And that matters.
There is no such thing. I agree with them, and under various moral philosophies I could make convincing arguments that they're right, but you're off the rails.
Or, if you've really found an objective measure of right and wrong that isn't based on a subjective positing of objectivity, you've upended an entire field of study, have a very rewarding future and are totally set for life. You'll just have to forgive us for not waiting with baited breath.
but it's downright _scary_ how people get so _zealous_
once they firmly believe they are "objectively right".
i don't know if i'm happy or sad this tendency has been
adopted by the leftwingers. of course it will help them
to battle the rightwingers (who always felt "righteous"),
and let me be crystal clear i want the rightwing crushed,
but i can't help but think that something has been lost.
i'm unsure you can _beat_ intolerance _with_ intolerance.
-bowerbird
p.s. go ahead and downvote this; it will prove my point.
That argument means that, back in the days when homosexuality was culturally wrong, anyone who thought that it was OK should have changed their view to match the culture.
That is, your idea that social consensus determines right and wrong is really dangerous. We have historical examples where it proved to be a terrible guide to morality.
Your idea that human rights are about social consensus is really dangerous. The argument that homosexuality is acceptable is not based on cultural attitudes, it's based on science and ethics.
Why don't you let Brendan Eich play the victim and feel sorry for himself, he doesn't need any of your help.
Not sure exactly what the other fellow is talking about, but science is definitely relevant here. If you read the recent decision in the Michigan Marriage Amendment case:
The basic question was: is there a rational basis to deny gay couples the same right straight couples have? One of the offered reasons for preventing gay marriage is that it was worse for children. That being a factual question, social science research was relevant. The short version: the judge, like other judges, found that the evidence offered favored the "gay people are just fine" side of things.
Indeed, what is better for children is a factual question, and the answer is not surprising at all. Of course gay parents don't matter, because parents don't matter. If you do literature search on the matter you will find long term effect of parenting to children outcome is (not statistically distinct from) zero when you substract genetic component.
The two sides of opinion are not "the majority opinion" and "people too stubborn to admit they're wrong".
It was once unacceptable to hold the opinion that different races were equal, and more recently it was unacceptable to hold the opinion that different genders were equal.
I don't think 'integrity' in the face of an opinion that is becoming more and more unacceptable to hold in our culture is a good thing.
"Unacceptable"? Really? I don't get this mindset. The core premise of a free and open society is that you can hold any opinion you want, no matter how unpopular or "unacceptable".
Personally, I absolutely value this kind of integrity. An individual should stand firm to their principles and stand by them, regardless of what "society" or "out culture" think.
Of course, there may be consequences (economic, or whatever) as a result of having that opinion, at least if you're vocal about it. But to suggest that one should change one's views to simply fit the majority, is one of the most disturbing things I could imagine.
I think the people wishing he had changed his mind would have liked it to be because of some dialogue or epiphany he had, rather than just conforming so he can get an impressive title. That's absurd, though. Amidst this PR crisis there's no way he could have changed his opinion in earnest. He could have changed his mind before all this, but if that were the case he should have blogged about it or something long ago.
So I think I agree with you. If he had come out and said he had changed his mind, it would have been a small victory for gay rights at the expense of his own integrity.
becoming more and more unacceptable to hold in our culture is a good thing.
So it isn't accepted by everyone yet. So why should he or me or you ever change opinion because majority says so?
If majority says so, what's the point of minority opinion? You don't have to agree that gay deserve equality, but once the law is written, you have to accept that the gay is protected under the law.
Until all the states accepts to give marriage equality to all, the expectation of everyone to accept is hard. You don't have to agree with my disagreement in order to accept that we can agree to disagree.
Therein lies the problem. He clearly does not think he is wrong. If he made an apology it would only be for show.
Lying to appease the masses in this scenario would be no different than is he had the inverse opinion (not discriminating against gays and then telling everyone you do).
>Changing your views, and admitting you were wrong is the best thing you can do.
Dude, what?
What if he doesn't feel it was wrong? Furthermore, who the fuck cares what he believes and what he spends his money on in his own PRIVATE time? That's COMPLETELY outside of his job at the Mozilla foundation which he's been working at just fine for 15 fucking years.
If the view is that some of the people you will soon be boss of are not deserving of the same civil rights as everybody else, then that is entirely relevant to his job. Because those employees would have a reasonable fear of discriminatory treatment.
...but they haven't had a fear of discriminatory treatment since he's...a fucking founder of mozilla and worked at the company for 15 years and lead many projects.
If there was a fear of discriminatory treatment, we would've heard about it much sooner.
He helped strip a civil right from gay people. That's discriminatory treatment. More evidence is not needed for people to have a reasonable fear of further discrimination.
"We haven't detected X, ergo X doesn't exist" is an obviously false notion. It's false even in the same situation, but it's even more obviously wrong in a different one. As CTO, he would have had a hard time making a bigoted technical decision. But as CEO, he's in charge of all sorts of stuff where a subtle bias could be expressed, and there's no longer an executive above him who could hold him accountable.
He donated money for a campaign that he believed in. You might believe that was discriminatory, he did not. Ultimately its up to the law to decide that. He gave money for a caused he believed in, even if that cause was wrong.
But contrary to what you're trying to link it to, that does not affect his professional life or the way he managed mozilla up until this point. There's simply no evidence of it. There's no logical fallacy. There's just no evidence that he's done anything discriminatory. No angry anonymous mozilla blog posts about brendan. No company leaks. nothing.
Saying that because he's CEO and in charge and doesn't have someone to hold him accountable so he can do whatever he wants...outlines your ignorance of company structure and...office politics. Sure, a CEO can call the shots, but Brendan had been in charge of many things at Mozilla for a long time and could've realistically gotten rid of people or shuffled them around whenever he wanted to. But he didn't.
Could he have been secretly scheming to get rid of "the company gays" at Mozilla for 15 years and only now finally realized his master plan that he was CEO? I honestly, seriously, doubt it.
The fact that you cannot, and will not separate personal life from business is what truly worries me. Many people are cooperative and productive despite having different beliefs and backgrounds. Sometimes they can offer insight from a different perspective and sometimes they can be a hindrance. This is a core prospect of working with a group of people, and it is a great advantage. Brendan has shown that he wasn't a hindrance the 15 years he was at Mozilla, and he's given back a lot to the open source community.
On an off note, and I am not implying that you are doing this at all, surrounding yourself by a group of people that hold the same mindset is bad. It creates an echo chamber and allows for really terrible ideas to flourish.
I love that he is entitled to his views, but nobody else is.
I'm not accusing him of secretly scheming. I am saying that helping to strip marriage rights from gay people -- which is indisputably what his donation did -- is reasonable cause for employees and partners to suspect anti-gay animus.
It's up to each individual to judge his actions. If you would like to give him one scorecard titled "at work" and one titled "not at work" and believe them unrelated, great. Then you can make your judgments about working at Mozilla on that basis. But that is a very particular view. You don't get to decide that for everybody. Me, I think that people are unitary individuals, and their beliefs don't change depending on what building they've walked into.
Note that phillmv is not suggesting changing views, but just lying about changing them. Changing views can be done with integrity. Not changing them can also be done with integrity. Simply lying about what your views are, on the other hand really can't.
It speaks to the fact that he really, truly feels that way... which is a big problem. Sticking to your beliefs is not a virtue if your beliefs are reprehensible.
I'd rather someone who acts like Carter on the issue of abortion. Someone who unapologetically states their opinion, states publicly why they hold that opinion, and then follows it up with why the role they are promising to uphold requires that they put that opinion to one side and represent the beliefs of the people they are leading instead.
You can only do this successfully if you are prepared to discuss the reasons for your opinions in public. Eich isn't.
He didn't stand up for his beliefs. He dodged all questions about them, hid behind Indonesia (?!), professed his love of inclusion and free expression, and expressed zero regret for having donated.
If he'd at least come out and said "yes, I oppose gay marriage, but I have no intention of involving that with Mozilla" then I would still not be thrilled but I would respect him more. As it stands, I know he won't talk about what he believes publicly, but he will merrily support it privately.
It speaks to his integrity as a hateful bigot that he didn't have the human decency to change his beliefs based on the fact that he was completely incapable of coming up with a valid justification for them, and refused to justify himself or apologize for what he did. And no, his non-apology apology was not an apology.
The only people who can combine being anti gay marriage and integrity are those who are willing to openly admit they hate gay people.
Anybody with an ounce of integrity couldn't claim with straight face that gay marriage negatively affects their personal or religious beliefs and freedoms.
Not standing up for their beliefs but surreptitiously acting on them anyway is exactly what people like Eich do.
I think this showed Eich is insufficiently dedicated to Mozilla's mission. If Eich believed he can help Mozilla's mission by being a CEO (otherwise, why bother?), is lying about an issue more important than how much you could help Mozilla's mission? Utilitarian 101.
On the other hand, Eich probably didn't make such utilitarian calculation, and followed "do not lie" deontology instead. Pity.
Sure, not lying is great, it builds trust, yada yada.
On the other hand, imagine you have two choices. You can either lie, or Google Chrome achieves 90% market share, all of web runs on Pepper, and there is no more open web. (Let's call this world "Google Earth".) Mozilla's mission is to prevent such world, right? Do you seriously think not lying is the right thing to do in this case?
Now imagine you have choices of lying and making Google Earth 10% more likely.
Now imagine you have choices of lying and making Google Earth 1% more likely.
How much Google Earth worth is not lying? Eich probably believed him being CEO is worth some reduction in probability of Google Earth. I would be surprised "not lying" has more utility than such probability reduction. I conclude he didn't decide not to lie because of utilitarian calculation.
Perhaps we're referring to different organizations here, but I've reviewed Mozilla's mission statement and efforts and it doesn't appear their task has any connection to preventing "Google Earth", as you describe it.
I do not believe that lying to advance your goals is a praise-worthy trait. Advocating for conscious deception in service to an end is quite the slippery slope.
It's very hard to lead when you always say what's convenient rather than what you actually believe. I know executives like that - every word out of their mouth is a sales pitch - and their people don't trust them, the rest of the company doesn't trust them, and the public at large doesn't trust them.
It's certainly always possible to change what you believe, and that's a lot more ethical than lying about what you believe. Of course, Brendan is a failure as a CEO and a decent human being because he REFUSED to change what he believed.
It's ironic that bigots of Brendan's ilk strongly believe that it's possible for gays to change their sexual preference, while they continue to cling to what they believe in the face of all the facts that prove them wrong.
I "like" how it didn't even occur to you that having a person who is known for integrity and honesty might be a positive.
The collateral damage of advocating a world with more liars (which is what you are doing) is gigantic, because you are now forcing everybody to waste (more) mental energy on trying to discern truth from lie.
I would have considered him a worse person if he'd done that. I disagree with his opinions on marriage, but he has the right to have those opinions, and to provide support for causes he believes in.
I'm not shocked the he is stepping down, or that others in the organization appear to have applied substantial pressure on him to do so, but it makes me sad. Their statements about supporting freedom of speech are hollow: the community has pressured him to step down because he expressed an opinion not held by the majority.
The majority that voted. Those in favor were more likely to go out and vote than those opposed. Many of the opinion polls showed that more people were opposed, but clearly not enough of them actually went to the ballot.
Either way, I'm confident that the same measure today would have a snowball's chance in hell of passage.
That's the way democracy works, though. If about 320,000 more conservative voters had turned out to vote in several swing states in 2012, we'd have a different President in the White House.
That doesn't mean Romney should have won, though. It's the people who turn out to vote who get to decide. If you don't care enough to vote, tough beans!
I don't think anyone is disagreeing with that. The point being made is that the people who come to vote are the ones who make the decisions. If people are being prevented from casting their votes, that is a serious problem, but if people choose not to exercise their right to vote then whatever vote they would have cast doesn't count towards the outcome.
Saying that a vote would have gone differently if more people on the losing side voted is obvious. It's also not constructive, except in the context of wishing more people would participate in the political process in the future. Amusingly (or perhaps not), the fervor against Brendan Eich is based in large part around his participation in that process.
I agree that in practice elections are won by those who manage to cast their ballots, but I disagree with the notion that this is not a defect but rather how democracy ought to work.
I'm all for the option to not vote, but I want it to be a choice. I think the current setup provides the wrong incentives: it encourages politicians to care about how they can rouse up enough to come to the polls or demoralize enough to keep away, in addition to or at the expense of reaching out to all constituents. We can change this either through cultural or legal means, but the legal way is faster and not demonstrably harmful.
Greater participation is far from a panacea, of course. It may even introduce its own particular ills (e.g. takes longer to change the status quo). But I hardly think it would make no difference at all. That's why I pointed to other democracies with better voting records, to show that overall democracy isn't harmed by more voting.
So you're saying it was wrong for the Supreme Court to strike down bans on mixed race marriages because at the time an overwhelming majority of Americans were against it?
Why do you think human rights should be put up for a vote? Are you against mixed race marriage because it was so unpopular at the time the "activist court" struck it down?
That is the case in an ideal world, where we receive some blessed words inscribed upon our souls and also a way to read them.
Since we don't live in that ideal world, our only option is to designate some body to decide what are rights and what are not. Whether that body is a king or a judge or a council of judges or a legislative body or the full populace (or some combination of the above) is an important and worthwhile discussion, but in the end we do need to designate some entity to decide what the rights are.
Except the population votes for the people who pick the members of that entity.
We've added a few hops, and hopefully increased the average intelligence of the people who get to decide on rights, but they still end up there based on the population's vote.
Is marriage a civil right, or even a fundamental human right? On closer examination, the answer appears to be NO.
The campaign for gay marriage, branded as marriage equality, actually leaves many people behind.
Brothers can't marry sisters, mothers can't marry sons (nice way to avoid inheritance tax!), men and women can't join in a polygamous marriage even though there is a long history of polygamy in many cultures around the world.
It's quite ironic that the campaign for marriage equality is itself highly discriminatory.
(which I've never understood why it wasn't spelled "beastiality")
I guess the rationale for specifically bestowing marital rights on same-sex (but non-related) spouses is that there's a significant number of them.
Polygamy, too, there might be a lot of that somewhere in the world, possibly Africa, obscure corners of Utah, certainly pre-modern China when it was normal for a wealthy land owner to have several wives, etc. I suspect it won't be long before polygamy is legalized. Maybe a couple of decades at most.
No, it doesn't: Californians passed a proposition that violated people's rights. The courts, playing their proper role in our system, said, "Nope, you can't do that." That's what happened; that's reality.
The courts played the role that the majority allowed them to play, just like they did for the hundreds of years during which even same-sex sexual activity was illegal, let alone gay marriage.
Like a diet that sometimes prevents people from eating what they crave, the system is nothing more than a mechanism of self-control for the majority.
> I guess if they consider any other candidates for CEO from California, they'll have to ask them how they voted.
Interesting. The difference between which box you check, and giving money to influence other people to check a certain box. The privacy of the former is a nearly-sacred privilege, while the latter is not allowed to be private. And I do tend to agree with campaign finance disclosure, but the double-standard is interesting. To be consistent, will we have to make all voting records public?
Would there be outrage if there were political questionnaires for employment/promotion like this? If proof of lying was found, would there be more outrage over the lie; or over violating privacy to find out about the lie?
Please remember that part of the reason many voted in favor of Prop 8 was because of the amount of money raised in donations allowed a massive ad campaign that was full of lies and deceit.
Not sure why people always bring up "freedom of speech" in these types of scenarios. You can say what you want without going to jail; that's freedom of speech. It doesn't mean you won't feel social consequences.
> Speech is designed to invoke private and social consequences, whether the speech is "venti mocha no whip, please," or "I love you," or "fuck off." The private and social consequences of your speech — whether they come from a barista, or your spouse, or people online, or people at whom you shout on the street — represent the free speech and freedom of association of others.
> Yet people often confuse these categories.
I believe you are making the same confusion between the right of free speech - Eich can support a political position - and the freedom of association so employees of Mozilla and OKCupid need not be associated with a company that has Eich at its head. (In the employees' case, the right to quit.)
There can be and is a tension there. As a country we have said that the right of free association is limited while at work, and that certain factors - race, religion, country of origin, etc. - cannot be used to discriminate between employees. But other factors, like disrupting the office every hour on the hour for a boisterous rendition of the National Anthem, can be grounds for punitive action.
Exercising Freedom of Speech and Association shouldn't open one up to trial by public opinion - we did this once before, McCarthyism and the blacklist in the 50's - I'd rather not see us ever return to an era where there are bogymen lurking in the corners.
As much as I strongly disagree with the Prop 8 folks, I think resorting to trying them in the court of public opinion is fundamentally wrong.
Could you tell me how 'trial by public opinion' in this case is different than a call for a boycott or picketing? That is, I assume that you think people should have a right to boycott and picket. Those are well protected free speech rights in the US.
McCarthyism and the blacklist involved decades of government pressure, including passing various laws against Communists at both state and national levels. The blacklist specifically started after various people were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify to the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
That's hardly the same as a few organizations calling for a boycott of Firefox and a few people threatening to quit their jobs at or stop volunteering for Mozilla, is it?
The main point here is the notion of protected class. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class In the United States protected classes are predominately traits upon which the individual has no control over (the notable exception being religion, pregnancy, and veteran status which are present because of constitutional and social value reasoning). Because of this line of logic egalitarians in this country support moving sexual preference as a protected class. Holding opinions (for whatever reason, you don't get to hide behind religion on that one) is on you and if that causes your employer to look bad or runs against what they stand for it is perfectly reasonable to expect to be let go.
Things like this are about ethics, not "American Values" or any cultural norms. It used to be the cultural norm to be a white supremacist but that position as never actually been ethical.
Additionally, in this specific case it's worth noting that the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary the Mozilla Corporation are largely political organizations and someone who holds such obviously bigoted views is pretty clearly unqualified to lead an organization who's goals are freedom and openness.
Since you think ethics are absolute and unchanging, can you please tell the rest of us what the one true ethical code is?
I'm pretty sure a much more reasonable interpretation is that ethics are subject to cultural norms, and that we should not decide on one true version of ethics and force that upon everyone.
Obviously there is too much detail and history to lay out the Correct Ethical Choice for every single situation ever, but stuff like "give people equal rights," which is what we are talking about in this case, should be incredibly obvious to any reasonable person these days and judging by the backlash against Eich's appointment to CEO, that seems to be the case.
> the community has pressured him to step down because he expressed an opinion not held by the majority.
That's not true. The fact that the majority believe the idea was necessary for the pressure to be applied, but it is not why the pressure was applied. The pressure was applied because his views trample on others' rights, and equal rights is philosophically closely tied with the entire mission of an organization like Mozilla. There are many other things which the majority believe, but which most people would acknowledge an individual's right to disagree with. This issue is different because Eich's personal opinion negatively materially affects another class of people without any justification.
No; I don't agree with Eich's views, but merely having those views does not implicate anyone else's rights in any way at all. Rights are violated by actions, not merely by expressing distasteful opinions.
It's shocking and irritating to me that the three of the replies pointing out the strictly false nature of your post are all downvoted while your post sits inexplicably positive.
I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you somehow have been living under a rock and did not know that he donated $1000 to support California Prop 8.
You can turn any political belief into "someone's rights". There are people who believe abortion is a woman's right, and others that believe legal abortion is an unprecedented holocaust. I believe we should be able to work together and respect each other while we work that out.
This is enforcing an ideological litmus test on the industry, policing people's internal beliefs. It is terrifying.
Sure, the world is not black and white, you can always twist things around and mince words to support any viewpoint. But you picked a bad example, because the argument with abortion is that the unborn baby has rights too.
The only way you can say gay marriage violates someone's rights is to say that people have the right to not be offended, or the right to hate people who are different from them. For all the contortions that people will make on this issue, it's fundamentally about fear and hate and nothing more. Abortion is a much more nuanced issue.
Yes the framing is intentionally naïve, as if the minority-ness of the opinion is why he was rejected. If he was a vegan I doubt anyone would give a shit despite that belief being way more unpopular than opposition to gay marriage. The key is not that his belief was unpopular, it's that he held a belief widely regarded as bigoted and unjust. He then went on to enact those beliefs by proxy, through financial contributions.
Freedom of speech is to be exercised only for populist opinions.
If we continue to travel down this path, we'd all have the same opinions, as anyone who dares to hold an different opinion than the majority would be ostracized from the society.
Human society seems quite capable of forming isolated regions (usually geographic, but also online) where a certain belief can prosper despite it being opposed in other regions.
This is how East Germany worked. You weren't usually harmed for holding non-communist beliefs, but you were blacklisted so that you would never work again.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but blacklisting was done by the government. It wasn't just some business owners that decides they weren't going to hire non-communists. Big difference.
It's also important to remember that freedom of speech is only protected from the government (which is why your East Germany example is nonsensical). The first admendment says you can stand on a public street corner and yell "God hates Fags" however, if you do so on my property I will remove you.
Mozilla is not a governmental body and (so long as it doesn't violate the protected classes as codified by law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class) can hire and fire people to project whatever image they see fit.
Not all opinions are equivalent. There are opinions that are factually wrong or ethically wrong in the context of accumulated and shared wisdom of the society.
If you stubbornly hold on to latter, is it bad to you eventually become ostracized? Should we respect a holocaust denier as a good member of the society? As a CEO? How about someone who doesn't deny it, but thinks it was a right thing to do?
Is there? I don't think we want to take the stance, as a society, that it's ok to have unpopular opinions as long as you don't advocate for your opinions.
Why not? I don't care if my neighbor believes aliens built the pyramids and some deity created all animals in their present form in six days. I do care if they pressure the school board to teach those things to my children.
In the same way, I don't care if somebody believes that different races shouldn't intermarry because of dilution of racial purity or that people of the same sex shouldn't marry because of Adam and Steve. I do care if they try to put that into law.
This is the same logic that was used to justify policies like Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
We are not perfect beings; we make mistakes, we believe things that end up being false, and we do things that we (or the rest of society) will regret later. As such, advocating that opinions other than the current prevailing set should be suppressed is a dangerous game to play. I know that like most of the people advocating it are doing so out of a desire to see the world become a better place. But since we've been wrong before about what "a better place" looks like, we should exercise utmost caution in telling others to be silent about their own views.
Really? You think there's a chance we're wrong about the pyramids and allowing racial mixing?
Clearly, we aren't. Clearly, the people who push the opposing policies are harming society. Just like with evolution, there is no debate among thinking people about this.
Michael Walzer asks "Should we tolerate the intolerant?". He notes that most minority religious groups who are the beneficiaries of tolerance are themselves intolerant, at least in some respects. In a tolerant regime, such people may learn to tolerate, or at least to behave "as if they possessed this virtue". Philosopher Karl Popper asserted, in The Open Society and Its Enemies Vol. 1, that we are warranted in refusing to tolerate intolerance. Philosopher John Rawls concludes in A Theory of Justice that a just society must tolerate the intolerant, for otherwise, the society would then itself be intolerant, and thus unjust. However, Rawls also insists, like Popper, that society has a reasonable right of self-preservation that supersedes the principle of tolerance: "While an intolerant sect does not itself have title to complain of intolerance, its freedom should be restricted only when the tolerant sincerely and with reason believe that their own security and that of the institutions of liberty are in danger."
Meh. Sticking to your values of exclusion and divisiveness isn't really something I can respect someone for. 'Good for you for continuing to believe that gay people shouldn't be allowed to marry, even though it doesn't hurt you in any way if they do.'
Preventing gay people from getting married really just seems like spite, like 'I don't like you so you can't have this'. I can't respect someone like that.
> even though it doesn't hurt you in any way if they do.
He is no longer CEO of Mozilla, a job he quite clearly wanted to do. Sticking to his beliefs _HAS_ cost him.
It's not spite. It's based on his moral framework. 15 years ago I shared that framework, so I understand why he feels that way. He is, in my opinion, wrong, and I hope that he eventually realizes that (like I did).
But he stuck to his beliefs at a time when lesser men would have buckled.
We could do with my people like that in the financial industry..
Would you say the same of people who hold opinions you've always thought were immoral? Do you respect the current remaining members of the KKK for sticking to their guns?
You should respect him if he had the integrity to earnestly change his views. But he deserves absolutely no respect for sticking to views that are wrong and hateful that he refuses to even justify.
Just because you were a bigot 15 years ago doesn't mean you should respect bigots who haven't changed their opinions yet. You deserve some respect for changing your views, but Brendan only deserves contempt for failing to do that himself, not respect.
I think Eich is a bigot and I'm glad he stepped down. I don't see how someone can be against gay marriage and not have a problem with homosexuality in general.
How does one go about changing their views? They just wake up one day they're like "hmmm.. I just don't hate gays anymore"? Most of the reformed racists and other bigots I've heard about have become that way because something happened, maybe a family member came out or a black dude helped them jump start their car or something stupid like that.
Your comments read just like the people that claim homosexuality is a choice and gays should just choose to not be gay.
I agree with this. His last interview was just embarrassingly bad, no kind of leadership at all. Leadership is taking responsibility and owning your actions, not hand waving and vaguely pushing away.
From what I've seen, he has demonstrated a few of the traits of a Level 5 leader (from the book Good to Great). Very humble, puts others before himself, has integrity. The fact that he's not a skilled interviewer and terrible at politics is a plus, not a negative.
CEOs with integrity in the face of public persecution are very rare.
The next guy to replace him could be someone that will sink the Mozilla ship.
> Leadership is taking responsibility and owning your actions.
You are implying that it is a fact that his actions are wrong, when it's simply an opinion.
He could have at least honestly said that he wouldn't donate to such causes again. In the current climate, that would just be a foolish waste of money anyway.
I'm afraid I don't understand what you're saying. When he was asked if he would donate more money to these causes, a savvy person would have thought to himself, "You know, I've already said how I feel about the issue at hand. However, clearly my donations are causing some very bad press for the company I'm supposed to lead, so it would be unwise as a leader to repeat that action however I personally feel," and honestly answered, "No, I'm not going to donate to those causes anymore despite whatever my personal viewpoints are." No lies.
I completely agree, and thank you actually for saying "All he had to do was lie". We may not like that said option exists, but lying was an option. As was simply saying "I'm not going to lie {comment about personal beliefs}" - which may wouldn't have helped him keep the job, but might have given me more respect for the guy[1]
[1] As an out and proud queer, I'd rather someone be honest than obviously skirt around issues without addressing them. At least then we know were we stand
From Eich's position, and assuming he wanted to lead Mozilla, and assuming Mozilla wanted above all else for Eich to lead Mozilla, yes. Lying would have been the best move.
In a greater societal context, I'm not sure. I think it is naive to say being 100% honest and transparent 100% of the time is always the best solution, as theoretically appealing as that is. I think it depends on whether you personally think the greater good Mozilla could have done with Eich as CEO, if any, outweighs the (positive?) message that we send when we force people with unpopular beliefs out of their positions. I purposefully ignore the actual monetary contribution, since the Supreme Court struck down Prop 8 anyway.
This is the culture we've created for ourselves. The only people who can be in a position of power or publicity must be sanitized to the extreme. Hold a view that isn't mainstream and you will be eviscerated by a mob that has hijacked the media. I guarantee that no one has a completely "right" set of views that won't anger some faction of the population enough to create a mob response. Of course, we still need politicians, CEOs, and presidents. And thus the only way these people can rise to the top is to lie through their teeth. This is the environment we've created, and thus this is what we get.
Incentives matter, and instances like this simply re-enforce the fact that one must lie about their true opinions otherwise you will be tarred and feathered.
We're not talking about slightly controversial views, 'colorful' language, or a 'racy' past here, we're talking about out-and-out homophobia, wanting people to be treated as lesser humans simply because of who they love. Please, that is a LONG way from being 'sanitized to the extreme'.
Personally I think your characterization is hyperbole. There are a lot of rational reasons to oppose gay marriage (if you allow one their irrational premises). Opposing the state recognizing gay marriage is far from "treating people as lesser humans".
If there were no state benefits for those married, of course. But there are. Both opposing gay marriage AND not opposing that benefit system is patently discriminatory - how could it be anything else? It is saying 'there is no way you are going to get the same benefits as other people, because of whom you happen to love'.
I was under the impression that a sizeable amount of people are against gay marriage for purely symbolic reasons and that they would be fine with civil unions, which would grant all the same legal benefits of marriage. Under this scenario opposition to gay marriage seems more like a political/religious belief rather than a civil rights issue.
It seems like a semantic belief in that case, which doesn't seem to be worth spending $1,000 on, let alone the rest. Unfortunately, I don't share your optimism: I suspect that many of those objecting have a pathological dislike of gay people.
This was never about "treating people as lesser humans", despite the cawing hyperbole from the pro-homosexual-marriage faction...
This was basically a semantic debate.
Marriage, for most of recorded history, was defined as one thing.
There's a new style of relationship that's arisen in modern times, and that group wants to extend the definition of marriage to cover that as well.
Heck, in many countries, you don't even need a marriage, leg alone a civil union - simply being in a de-facto relationship (i.e. living together) will give you the same privileges (tax, medical etc.)
It was never about privileges (government's can't grant rights), but just about ideologies.
I disagree. Rationality is the process of deducing new knowledge from existing knowledge and axioms. Axioms generally aren't rational in this sense. "Irrational premises" were meant specifically to evoke the idea of religion, not necessarily as the opposite of "rational" used in the preceding sentence.
I genuinely don't want to rag on religious people, but I don't think that's legit. "We need to cut out peoples' hearts and offer them to the gods, because if we don't the sun won't rise" is not a "rational" argument for human sacrifice by any useful standard. No more so is "we need to deny gay people human rights because God wants us to." No amount of earnest belief makes that argument remotely valid.
So, no, there are zero rational reasons to oppose gay marriage, only irrational, bigoted reasons.
Not to make a general rule, but in this case I think it would have.
The most damaging thing about homophobic (or other bigoted) views isn't necessarily how the holder of those views acts toward people based on them (in this case it's clear that Eich didn't treat individuals any differently), but how making those views public legitimizes them in other people, giving space for others to act on them directly, and delays full societal acceptance of the marginalized group.
In other words, it's the knowledge that a public figure has those beliefs, not the beliefs themselves. If he just hid them, it would make things better overall.
I certainly think so, at least for Mozilla. Perhaps his close family and friends would be upset with him for lying about his views, but if he estimated that they would be okay with it, I don't see what the problem would be.
Yes. I was waiting until he had the opportunity to actually put out a good response (despite the initial waffle). That interview destroyed any faith I had.
But I blame this entire trial and failure on the Board. It is their responsibility to vet candidates, and their inability see how this could blow up shows a horrible lack of judgment on their part.
> "I understand how my activities can be seen as divisive and wrong and inconsistent with my commitment to upholding the diverse values underpinning the Mozilla community and I apologize for my behaviour at the time. I will do everything in my power to make up for it and I hope the community can judge me based me on my record from this point onwards".
The difference to me is that he hasn't admitted his previous views or apologized for the harm he did. Saying, in effect, "Oh, I don't want to talk about helping to strip gay people of their civil rights, but I promise at work I'll be totally awesome," struck me as a) weaselly, and b) unconvincing.
Personally, I don't care much about the donation alone. But his handling of it has been terrible. If he had owned his action and apologized, this would have been a small issue. But from both a staff- and media-relations perspective, leaving this an open issue and trying to dodge the meat of it was a mistake. It's that that makes me think he might not have been a good CEO.
>The most damning aspect of this was their a) inability to predict this would be an issue and b) their inability to deal with it once it did.
I'll grant you a) but with respect to b) there was nothing they could have really done once Eich decided to stand his ground. Who would have thought that Eich felt so strongly on this topic that he was willing to sacrifice his CEO position and possibly his future at Mozilla. He never came close to either apologizing for his actions or publicly supporting gay marriage. He really really is against gay-marriage, that's his thing.
> I find the moral compass of a lot of HN posters rather baffling sometimes.
From what I can tell, pretty much everyone in this topic thinks that opposing gay marriage is immoral and donating money to Prop 8 is a bad thing. The divide is on whether it is OK to oust someone for their beliefs, given a lot of extenuating circumstances. And on HN, there are a large number of people who think yes, and a large number of people who think no.
You know what bothers me? People who try to shut down debate. Those that think not only is the other side wrong, but it's not even up for discussion. There's another poster decrying the lack of ethics in the tech community, which really is another way of saying "don't even talk about this, my opinion is right/ethical/moral, and yours is wrong/unethical/immoral."
Another way of shutting down debate is by making snarky one-liners. Why actually talk about something when you can assert that you are right, and that HN is stupid (presumably excluding the large number of people who agree with you)? What exactly are you adding to the discussion?
Umm.. sorry, but not everyone thinks opposing gay marriage is immoral. That's just you hoping that everyone agrees with your point of view. Which they don't.
Morality has nothing to do with defining the limitations of artificial mad-made things such as "marriage".
It's like denying the gay community their annual mardi gras because the streets are trashed with broken bottles and nothing really good comes out of it except gay people have a big party. Cancelling the party would surely bring much "gay hatred" accusations. So the party continues, every year. And every year the same thing happens - streets trashed and gay party people pop pills all night long.
Imagine if there was an annual heterosexual party, celebrating heterosexuality? Imagine the outcry and hatred directed at such a thing?
I have nothing against gay people, but personally find the whole gay activist vibe on the marriage issue really pathetic and manipulative. Fair enough fight for equal laws regarding health and so on, but marriage is what it is. You need to respect people who want to keep marriage as something for a man+woman.
If I don't agree with gay marriage, I DO NOT deserve your hatred and ridicule,
>All he had to do was lie and say "I understand how my activities can be seen as divisive and wrong and inconsistent with my commitment to upholding the diverse values underpinning the Mozilla community and I apologize for my behaviour at the time. I will do everything in my power to make up for it and I hope the community can judge me based me on my record from this point onwards".
I think liberals have a hard time understanding that "bad people" people truly believe the things they say and do. If someone feels that their beliefs are justified they generally don't care if it upsets people. It seems like all you wanted from his guy was an insincere apology...or worse rhetorical nonsensical featuring all the right pleasant-sounding keywords.
Frankly, I prefer it when bigots speak freely and openly-- that way the rest of us can understand what we're up against.
"""All he had to do was lie and say "I understand how my activities can be seen as divisive and wrong and inconsistent with my commitment to upholding the diverse values underpinning the Mozilla community and I apologize for my behaviour at the time. I will do everything in my power to make up for it and I hope the community can judge me based me on my record from this point onwards"."""
An apology is acknowledgement of wrongdoing. He did not acknowledge wrongdoing, he acknowledged that he hurt people but did not admit to any wrongdoing.
Yeah I couldn't believe the last interview he did where he basically hand waved the whole controversy away and effectively said if people make a big deal it will just hurt Firefox.
>“It’s clear that Brendan cannot lead Mozilla in this setting,” said Baker, who added that she would not and could not speak for Eich. “The ability to lead — particularly for the CEO — is fundamental to the role and that is not possible here.”
The most damning aspect of this was their a) inability to predict this would be an issue and b) their inability to deal with it once it did.
All he had to do was lie and say "I understand how my activities can be seen as divisive and wrong and inconsistent with my commitment to upholding the diverse values underpinning the Mozilla community and I apologize for my behaviour at the time. I will do everything in my power to make up for it and I hope the community can judge me based me on my record from this point onwards".
Then, find ways to anonymously engage in whatever political causes he supports, or wait till he's no longer CEO.
The tone deafness of his last interview was kind of the last straw.