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

I think we should be very wary of mainstream media coverage (and yes, Slate 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 "culture war" political narratives. It's designed to present the story to people without having to actually tell them anything they don't already know.

A much better attempt at the same basic argument (that it's a shame Eich was forced out) can be found here: https://medium.com/p/7645a4bf8a2

Given the tools at our disposal and the massive number of people from the tech community who blog, there's really no need to rely on Slate to tell us what to think here.

Or at least the PR reasons ("do what the customers want") and the libertarian reasons ("private companies can make any decision that they want for any reason") for not wanting Eich for CEO are the old PR and libertarian reasons for firing gays.

What if your reason is that he supports the elimination of benefits for a commonly discriminated against minority class, and he's being put into a position to at least indirectly make decisions about those benefits at a company that has historically supported them?

Any way to figure out an analogy to that in discrimination against gays?

edit: That's a serious question, and if you have a serious opinion, I'd think you'd reply after downvoting.

While I think David Flanagan's essay is excellent, that in no way detracts from Slate's coverage. And this deserves to be placed in the context of the broader "culture war" -- no part of this fiasco turned on any technical or browser-specific details.

Isn't that, "Two wrongs make a right?" In any case, it is still an intolerance.

It's very dangerous ground to label political donation as "intolerance." It's inimical to civic and democratic political processes in a free society. In fact, I would label it as intolerant.

If a person is taking actions that are nonviolent and legal, and they do not advocate the active destruction of our system of self governance, they should be allowed to coexist. This is what tolerance means. We need to let people oppose us and take positions we don't like. That is what it means to live in a free and democratic society. So long as those people don't act like sore losers, they get to take part.

While it was done legally, the actions that got Brendan Eich fired for a donation he made six years ago strike me as the actions of "sore winners." Brendan Eich's behavior, while a PR disaster at the end, consisted of running a company with policies friendly to homosexual relationships.

Mr. Eich was the one behaving magnanimously in this situation.

Thanks for the well-positioned comment. I had half a mind to nod my head at this article, but you're so right. The problem with Eich's donation was that it made an otherwise-unnecessary personal opinion perfectly obvious.

Actively contributing to a campaign to crush individual rights is a pretty strong indicator that as a CEO he'd have trouble living up to all sorts of equal-opportunity employers requirements.

Yeah, it sucks that this was dragged into the public, and don't even get be started on the waste-land of cable news. But he probably should have thought of the employment implications in donating to a campaign against gays before he did it.

I like the bathroom floor analogy, because there's a tacit social contract that we don't shit on the floor. Same is true in business. He's free to say whatever he wants in public, but he's also free to be heavily encouraged to resign over whatever is he DOES say.