The Excuses for Purging Brendan Eich Are the Old Excuses for Firing Gays

People have forgotten the magnanimous spirit championed by Martin Luther King.<p>He did not advocate that one day, the oppressed would be on top and the &quot;bad guys&quot; would get theirs. That sort of attitude would be inimical to what he, Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela would have advocated. Getting Brendan Eich fired makes nobody more free or less oppressed. Instead, it moves society towards a state where no one feels free to say what they really think, unless it hews to the majority opinion, and where might makes right and principles of tolerance and decency are only applied to the &quot;correct&quot; people. In days past, the &quot;correct&quot; people would have excluded non-whites and homosexuals.<p>An English vicar once said that to judge someone&#x27;s character, observe not how they treat the people they need, but how they treat the people they don&#x27;t need.

The lesson Mozilla learned here is that the angry Internet mob can get whatever it wants. It doesn&#x27;t really matter which side of history the mob is on. The lesson that other boards learned with this is not &#x27;hire socially-conscious people&#x27;, but &#x27;keep your head down and maintain the status quo&#x27;.<p>Fifty years ago a similar uproar would have developed if a company hired a black CEO. The press release announcing his removal a week later would have been the same, some fluff words about being unable to effectively lead when he&#x27;s spending all his time dealing with this.

From the start I was unconfortable with the idea of firing or demoting someone who had worked 15+ years in an organization without any related issues raised before.<p>And now I&#x27;m appalled by all these justifications while nobody seems to really discuss the huge technical loss. Maybe it&#x27;s my engineering side speaking but I&#x27;m outraged to see such a great engineer forced to leave by people who in the end for the most part don&#x27;t really care about Mozilla and will soon go to the <i>next cause to defend</i>. Meanwhile Mozilla has lost a bit of its soul and a part of its mind. The outcome is just sad.

I think we should be very wary of mainstream media coverage (and yes, <i>Slate</i> is mainstream media here) of this issue, because writers like William Saletan know relatively little about the specifics of Mozilla, technology or the personalities involved. This article ignores the specifics of the case and places it entirely within existing &quot;culture war&quot; political narratives. It&#x27;s designed to present the story to people without having to actually tell them anything they don&#x27;t already know.<p>A much better attempt at the same basic argument (that it&#x27;s a shame Eich was forced out) can be found here: <a href="https://medium.com/p/7645a4bf8a2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;7645a4bf8a2</a><p>Given the tools at our disposal and the massive number of people from the tech community who blog, there&#x27;s really no need to rely on <i>Slate</i> to tell us what to think here.

&gt; It used to be social conservatives who stood for the idea that companies could and should fire employees based on the “values” and “community standards” of their “employees, business partners and customers.” Now it’s liberals.<p>Uh, pretty sure social conservatives far and wide are <i>still</i> wholly in favor of discriminating against homosexuals. We&#x27;re decades early on this being a case of the persecuted becoming the persecutors.

I&#x27;m sure many supporters of Brendan Eich&#x27;s ouster are completely sincere, but it&#x27;s difficult to explain the <i>intensity</i> of their feelings on this issue. It can&#x27;t be as simple as &quot;civil rights&quot; and &quot;marriage equality&quot;; for example, (first) cousin marriage is important to many groups—indeed, in Islam cousin marriage is not only allowed, it&#x27;s often preferred [1]—but it is illegal in most states [2]. And yet, I rarely see advocates of &quot;marriage equality&quot; get all lathered up over this issue. Are advocates of &quot;marriage equality&quot; in favor of legalizing cousin marriage? If not, why not? If so, why have they not worked harder to achieve it?<p>I see no way to resolve this paradox from within the context of progressive ideology, but it&#x27;s trivial to explain once you view it from the outside. As the example of cousin marriage shows, the behavior of Eich&#x27;s purgers <i>is not</i> consistent with mere &quot;civil rights&quot; and &quot;marriage equality&quot;, but it <i>is</i> consistent with signaling tribal membership, seizing political power, and smashing their enemies.<p>As it happens, right now gay marriage is an effective club with which progressives can beat conservatives. At some point, this may also be the case for cousin marriage—I can easily imagine opponents of cousin marriage someday being branded &quot;Islamophobes&quot;, just as today opponents of gay marriage are branded &quot;homophobes&quot;. But I predict that this will happen if, <i>and only if</i>, it serves progressive political ends.<p>[1]: <a href="http://wikiislam.net/wiki/Cousin_Marriage_in_Islam" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wikiislam.net&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cousin_Marriage_in_Islam</a><p>[2]: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage_law_in_the_United_States_by_state" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cousin_marriage_law_in_the_Unit...</a>

It&#x27;s ok though, because this time the mob is <i>right</i>. All those other times the mob was <i>wrong</i>. So long as you can predict exactly which way subjective collective reasoning will go for years into the future you&#x27;ll be fine.

Whether or not these points have merit, this media pundit is only replying to other media pundits. Some important nuances are being lost. If there is a way to make this sad story even sadder, it&#x27;s turning it into a political football.<p>Is there anything Mozilla or Eich can do to clarify things? But I don&#x27;t know if that matters any more, now that American political commentators have tasted blood.

I think that this case is doing a lot of bad to the cause of gay rights, because it feeds intolerance and radicalization.

Or at least the PR reasons (&quot;do what the customers want&quot;) and the libertarian reasons (&quot;private companies can make any decision that they want for any reason&quot;) for not wanting Eich for CEO are the old PR and libertarian reasons for firing gays.<p>What if your reason is that he supports the elimination of benefits for a commonly discriminated against minority class, and he&#x27;s being put into a position to at least indirectly make decisions about those benefits at a company that has historically supported them?<p>Any way to figure out an analogy to that in discrimination against gays?<p>edit: That&#x27;s a serious question, and if you have a serious opinion, I&#x27;d think you&#x27;d reply after downvoting.

I really wish anyone at all would acknowledge that not everyone who had a problem with his donation wanted him out of a job. People are too eager to combine everyone into two faceless mobs when the arguments were far more nuanced than two mindless binaries.<p>The general wave of anti-gay equality campaigns didn&#x27;t start or stop with prop 8. It began as a reaction to some of the early victories of the pro-equality movement. My own state tried to make it legal for businesses to deny service to me just a few weeks ago. His donation exists in a context where people are still suffering from the constant assault on their status as equal citizens.

&gt; Losing your job for being gay is different from losing your job for opposing gay marriage. Unlike homosexuality, opposition to same-sex marriage is a choice, and it directly limits the rights of other people.<p>He wrote an entire article equivocating them, then he quickly writes a couple sentences pointing out he full well knows it is absolute nonsense. Well played by him, I read the article.

He&#x27;s right. And so the fuck what?<p>It&#x27;s not the reasoning I care about. It&#x27;s never been about the reasoning. No one ever bought any bullshit about &quot;community standards&quot; even when it was being used to oust gays. It was about the act of marginalizing individuals over something that literally affects nobody else.<p>If a gay person works at my company, his being gay will have no affect on my livelihood. People with an anti-gay agenda have made a choice to stand in the way of progress. That means their actions negatively affect the people around them, malevolent. They&#x27;re entitled to no consideration, because it&#x27;s their choice to ostracize themselves for their ignorance. It should be seen the same as firing someone who habitually shits on the bathroom floor.