401–410 of 1001 posts
These are the targets that should be addressed.
If it was correct for Brendan Eich to resign, would it be incorrect for any company to now offer Brendan Eich a job?
Instead they will lie and say, "Your skills are not the right fit. Best of luck with your search."
Very few people have the courage of their convictions. Eich could have caved and said something like "I've changed my thinking about Prop 8 and I deeply regret supporting it."
Instead, he stayed true to his convictions and did the best thing for Mozilla which is clearly an organization he cares deeply about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I support legalizing gay marriage. But two things, first, supporting prop 8 does not mean you "believe a certain group of people don't deserve to live their lives like others." It means you don't believe that the government should recognize same sex marriages as marriages. There are a large gradient of views here, and on one extreme are the bigots who hate homosexuals and on the other there are people who simply have…
Support for Prop 8 has a huge age gradient, as does anti-homosexuality in general. Support for Prop 8 falls by about 0.75% per year Ages 18-24 voted overwhelmingly against it. 65+ voted overwhelmingly for it. Old people hate gays. Young people don't. Support for Prop 8 among young people in the SF Bay Area is negligible. These are the people Eich was supposed to lead as CEO of Mozilla. You can't lead people who think…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He supported an anti-gay marriage candidate with campaign contributions. Essentially, if he'd not had the Prop 8 donation, and only the campaign contributions, no one would have made a connection. His donations would've shown that he supported Republican candidates (since he, outside a response to the Prop 8 donation, made no statements regarding gay marriage that anyone ever linked to) and nothing else.
How do you know that he donated to these candidates primarily because of their anti-gay rights views anyway? Correlation != causation you know?
I honestly feel like Brendan is the victim here. He might have religious or moral views on gay marriage that some of us don't agree with, but being forced to step down as CEO because of those views... well that's something I don't think any of his critics should be proud of.
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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 su…
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, a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm an openly gay male, I came out at 15. Why should there be social or employment consequences - in my mind this is just as bad as when employers fire employees for being gay.
Being gay and being a bigot are not comparable, that's insane.
Alternatively, maybe we can decide on a set of American values and we can investigate and blackball people who hold unamerican views.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 su…
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, a…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So Barack Obama, the President of the US, was against gay marriage in 2008; I'm confused as to why he gets a pass here, but the head of Mozilla doesn't?
He evolved. Brendan did not.
To me this is a win for freedom of speech and free markets. You're free to express your close minded opinion, but the market is free to reject it and you.
Bringing up the free market seems a bit stretched, though, since most people's relationship to Mozilla is their free browser. How much does Mozilla get from their users versus donations from companies like Google? Of course, goodwill is important for any big company, which was definitely at stake here.