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Mozilla employees tell Brendan Eich he needs to “step down”

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Re: Mozilla employees tell Brendan Eich he needs to “step down”

#81

Post by simonster »

mikestew wrote: post #8

Just the CEO? Who else shall we burn at the stake? Mary, the office manager, goes to church every Sunday. How did she vote? John over in mobile dev is a devout Muslim, I'll bet he doesn't take kindly to such things as gay marriage. Time to start scanning through those campaign contribution records for Prop 8 and seeing if a JOIN on the employee database gives us any results. I've always held to the idea that my job i…

Mary and John aren't the CEO. There was disappointment over Brendan Eich's position on gay marriage when he was CTO, but I don't think anyone was calling for him to resign, and even now I'm not sure anyone is calling for Eich to leave Mozilla. CEO is the ultimate leadership role, and if you are gay or have gay friends, having someone in that role who does not believe in gay marriage hurts.

Re: Mozilla employees tell Brendan Eich he needs to “step down”

#83

Post by sergiosgc »

stormcrowsx wrote: post #19
eigenvector wrote: post #4

The fact that they can come out and say this demonstrates that these employees, the people best able to assess this, don't believe that Eich will retaliate. That Mozilla is and remains a place where any employee can express their views on political issues, even if they know they're contrary to the CEO's. And that destroys any argument for Eich's role as CEO creating a conflict with Mozilla's ability to welcome LGBTQ…

Eich was actively trying to stop what many people think should be a human right. He should face flak, and get a hard time over it, they should threaten his position. Even if they don't get him out of CEO it will make the next idiot that's high up in a company think twice before donating to stop human rights.

(touching this issue with all due care as not to call in the activists; read all the way through before replying)

Redefinition of marriage is not a human right, sorry. I can't decide I'd like to marry my work and have society accept that as marriage. Marriage has a definition, that up until now hasn't included gay couples. Changing that is not trivial, is not a law of nature and is not supportable on human rights grounds.

Let's, for the sake of argument, assume that gay couples are already free to live together and enjoy the protection given to married couples: inheritance, hospital/prison visiting rights, IRS deductions, [whatever social right I may be missing]. I know that is not the case; bear with me.

Now, imagine that a group wants to reserve the right to call marriage limited to a long term commitment between man and woman. Also imagine that gay couples want to call their long term commitment a marriage.

Now, you have an unsolvable problem. Both groups may argue that it is their right to define what marriage is all the way to the end of times. The problem is mostly with the naming of the concept; it is not with rights attributed to gay couples. Framing the discussion around the concept is actually hurting LGBTQ movements.

My personal opinion? Grant all, and I mean all rights to gay couples that classic couples have. Use the first-come-first-served rule and maintain the term marriage to mean a classic family. Create a new term for gay couples.

Give it two generations and this whole shout war will subside, and by then everyone will naturally call gay couples married couples, just like any other. In the mean time, important goals can be reached faster (like visiting rights).

Re: Mozilla employees tell Brendan Eich he needs to “step down”

#84

Post by [deleted] »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #45
mikestew wrote: post #8

Just the CEO? Who else shall we burn at the stake? Mary, the office manager, goes to church every Sunday. How did she vote? John over in mobile dev is a devout Muslim, I'll bet he doesn't take kindly to such things as gay marriage. Time to start scanning through those campaign contribution records for Prop 8 and seeing if a JOIN on the employee database gives us any results. I've always held to the idea that my job i…

Thank you for posting this. It's insane that there's this witch-hunt over someone's personal views, and the fact that this outlandish behaviour is actually supported and applauded by people. If anything this just gives more credence to the 'gay agenda' conspiracies that up until fairly recently no one took seriously...

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla employees tell Brendan Eich he needs to “step down”

#85

Post by davidgerard »

angersock wrote: post #38
davidgerard wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>when there is no documented instance of him ever disparaging or otherwise harming LGBTQ employees or community members. Except the bit where he contributed $1000 to a campaign to vilify them and take away their rights.

Here's the proposition's full text: http://www.ag.ca.gov/cms_pdfs/initiatives/i737_07-0068_Initi... It hardly vilifies anyone--it's pretty stupidly worded as is ("marriage"? What is that? How does it compare with "civil union"?) Look, did you vote for Obama or Bush? Then you too have actively vilified people and acted to take away their rights. We can't punish people for participating in our form of government, even…

Last election, I voted for Stella Creasy. So far she's been pretty good value and low on the vilification factor.

Re: Mozilla employees tell Brendan Eich he needs to “step down”

#86

Post by drone »

Jormundir wrote: post #42
eigenvector wrote: post #4

The fact that they can come out and say this demonstrates that these employees, the people best able to assess this, don't believe that Eich will retaliate. That Mozilla is and remains a place where any employee can express their views on political issues, even if they know they're contrary to the CEO's. And that destroys any argument for Eich's role as CEO creating a conflict with Mozilla's ability to welcome LGBTQ…

I wouldn't call it a witch hunt. Now every Mozilla employee's work is contributing to Eich's paycheck. The paycheck with which he will (has) donate(d) to oppose gay marriage. If I was a Mozilla employee, this is not something I would want to be contributing to. This argument can obviously be applied to any employee in the company, but it's severely exacerbated when it's applied to the CEO, who's getting a huge payche…

"This argument can obviously be applied to any employee in the company, but it's severely exacerbated when it's applied to the CEO"

So, you're saying then, that they should go through the donations of every employee, ever, and fire anyone who donated to a cause that a sub-group of employees disagrees with?

Re: Mozilla employees tell Brendan Eich he needs to “step down”

#87

Post by wonderzombie »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #51
Jormundir wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call it a witch hunt. Now every Mozilla employee's work is contributing to Eich's paycheck. The paycheck with which he will (has) donate(d) to oppose gay marriage. If I was a Mozilla employee, this is not something I would want to be contributing to. This argument can obviously be applied to any employee in the company, but it's severely exacerbated when it's applied to the CEO, who's getting a huge payche…

It definitely is a witch hunt. What next? Are you going to fire any employee that goes on vacation to Russia, Turkey, or gasp Cuba? Or anyone that contributes to a charity you don't agree with?

There're any number of reasons why someone might visit those countries. When you put up $1K towards a political campaign whose raison d'etre is to deny gay people the right to marry, it's rather well defined what the expectation is.

I don't understand what charities have to do with this, though. Surely there are charities which would be morally objectionable. If he'd donated to a charity with similar aims to the Prop 8 campaign, I imagine it would change people's opinions rather little. Or how about a charity which campaigned against interracial marriage?

Re: Mozilla employees tell Brendan Eich he needs to “step down”

#88

Post by MBlume »

eigenvector wrote: post #4

The fact that they can come out and say this demonstrates that these employees, the people best able to assess this, don't believe that Eich will retaliate. That Mozilla is and remains a place where any employee can express their views on political issues, even if they know they're contrary to the CEO's. And that destroys any argument for Eich's role as CEO creating a conflict with Mozilla's ability to welcome LGBTQ…

> The fact that they can come out and say this demonstrates that these employees, the people best able to assess this, don't believe that Eich will retaliate. That Mozilla is and remains a place where any employee can express their views on political issues, even if they know they're contrary to the CEO's. And that destroys any argument for Eich's role as CEO creating a conflict with Mozilla's ability to welcome LGBTQ employees and community members.

Or these employees have consciously chosen that they'd rather the knife come, if it's going to come, sooner than later.

Re: Mozilla employees tell Brendan Eich he needs to “step down”

#89

Post by rjknight »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #45
mikestew wrote: post #8

Just the CEO? Who else shall we burn at the stake? Mary, the office manager, goes to church every Sunday. How did she vote? John over in mobile dev is a devout Muslim, I'll bet he doesn't take kindly to such things as gay marriage. Time to start scanning through those campaign contribution records for Prop 8 and seeing if a JOIN on the employee database gives us any results. I've always held to the idea that my job i…

Thank you for posting this. It's insane that there's this witch-hunt over someone's personal views, and the fact that this outlandish behaviour is actually supported and applauded by people. If anything this just gives more credence to the 'gay agenda' conspiracies that up until fairly recently no one took seriously...

No, it really doesn't.

There are sensible people on this thread trying to argue that Brendan Eich shouldn't be forced to resign because of his private political views, and there are idiots like you using words like 'witch-hunt' and talking about the 'gay agenda' (what, you think they have a committee somewhere drawing up a hit-list?). I sincerely doubt that you are trying constructively to help here.

Re: Mozilla employees tell Brendan Eich he needs to “step down”

#90

Post by hkphooey »

m0a0t0 wrote: post #39
hkphooey wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are employed on what they contribute to the company, not on their social or political views. If these employees are such bigots and fascists, that they can't fathom someone having a different opinion to their own, they should resign and work elsewhere. Mozilla is a technology company with the mission to promote a free and open web. If these employees believed that Mozilla was some kind of political organisatio…

So preventing equality is not bigotry then? I would argue that calling out something like that is noble, not fascist. Labelling the people who criticised Eich as fascists is as bad as calling him one for his beliefs.

Does Eich refuse to work with gay people? Is he suddenly firing people because of their sexual orientation or political beliefs? No. So who is the fascist? Looks like the mob who demand he resign or be fired because they don't like his views.

BTW:

Marriage equality? So why doesn't the campaign include polygamous families? They exist, they have kids, they even have TV shows, and there has been a cultural history of polygamy around the world for thousands of years until modern times.

The campaign for gay marriage is exactly that, gay marriage, but it is not a campaign for civil rights for everyone, because if it were, it would support the right for polygamous marriages to be recognized.

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