I agree that people shouldn't be protected from the consequences of what they say or do, and I don't agree with Eich's point of view.
However, I feel like the reaction to his becoming CEO and trying to get him to step down were unjustified.
I believe that someone shouldn't be judged on his political or religious affiliation when being considered for a new job or a new role. I have political convictions which are perpendicular to some of my colleagues ideas, and guess what, we get along just fine at work.
I fail to see how his opinion on same-sex marriage (or his sponsorship of conservative politicians in general) would be a problem for guiding Mozilla forward. As long as he doesn't use Mozilla as a tool for his personal agenda.
It's pretty well established at this point that those who scream the loudest about how important "tolerance" is often prove to be among the most intolerant in practice.
The same is holding true for those who are against "discrimination". They'll often have absolutely no qualms about using one form of discrimination in their quest to bring retribution to somebody else who may have engaged in something they consider to be discriminatory behavior.
Tolerance for people is not the same as tolerance for speech, or tolerance for actions. You are not a victim if people disapprove of your bigotry - your speech may be protected, but you are not protected from the consequences of your speech (and that includes the opinions of others).
People will find any reason to view themselves as victims when something they do or a person they agree with is criticised. That people are crying about "discrimination", because someone who actively worked to oppress people was rightly criticised for those actions, quite frankly astounds me.
Besides which, people aren't just criticising him for seeking to strip one the basic and fundamental liberties a modern society gives its citizens, purely on the basis of who they are (which he is entitled to do). They're criticising Mozilla, a company which strives towards the principles of openness and inclusiveness, for picking someone to represent them who doesn't represent the values of the organisation.
Inclusiveness means not discriminating against people based on who they are. It's the very simple idea that white people, black people, gay people and straight people are all people - they are entitled the same rights and the same protections.
Inclusiveness doesn't mean that you have to tolerate a person's actions. Damn right I'm going to criticise someone whose actions hurt people - they're not entitled to have me agree with their "conscience", nor are they entitled to my support for their actions.
Do you understand how discrimination against a person and condemnation of things that a person does are separate concepts?
How exactly do you figure that? The act of not tolerating intolerance is itself intolerance. It will always be around, if we take your approach. The only way to full tolerance is to be tolerant of intolerance.
This is a bollocks piece of writing that makes no argument or substantive point bend saying "I'm disgusted by this." Please don't promote it.
The idea that Eich has been "scalped" is ludicrous. He received a bunch of public pressure because of his controversial (for the community and post) views, he failed to deal with it, and he resigned.
Sullivan and yourself seem to imply that no public figure should be subject to pressure because of unpopular personal views, which is obviously not achievable or desirable.
I read the Sullivan piece but Sullivan (and you too, presumably) seem to think this is a First Amendment issue. I'm not understanding where his right to speak, or to act, have been limited in any way. Please explain.
Are you and Sullivan thinking that the First Amendment gives you the right to free speech and, additionally, also guarantees no response? Or maybe it guarantees that the response must be along the lines of, "oh well ... you have your opinion and I have mine ... now we'll just go on with each of us having our separate views." Does the First Amendment prevent me from having a particular response, even if the response is what you personally would consider viscous and outsized.
Again, please explain how this is a First Amendment issue?
Some opinions are very difficult to separate from behaviour. When you hold the view that someone is less entitled because of their sexual orientation, it is probably difficult to prevent that from affecting your relationships with some members of your workforce, however well-intentioned you may be, however hard you might strive.
What about if Eich had donated money to an organisation trying to stop black people getting married? Would you still think him entitled to be the CEO of a commercial organisation, without dissent?
I feel like your comparison of sexual orientation to ethnicity is a bit of a stretch. Marriage is something a lot of people have strong and (from my point of view) old-fashioned opinions on. The fact that he feel marriage is a bond between two members of a different gender does not necessarily mean he's going to actively discriminate members of the LGBT community in a professional environment.
It's of course possible that he might, but several things make me feel like he should have been given a chance to prove himself:
* He made a public statement clarifying his personal beliefs would not affect his work at Mozilla.
* He is being accused of discriminating at Mozilla, while as far as we know, no such thing has happened (yet).
* Given the amount of backlash he has suffered because of his 6 year old contribution to some campaign, I'm sure he's smart enough to handle matters in which he might be strongly biased by delegating them to someone else.
I was outraged when his contribution came to light a few years ago, but I honestly feel like he's getting too harsh a treatment for what he did.
The public head of contributed to a campaign aimed at removing rights from a significant part of the population. This wasn't off-hand remark or ill-received joke, his intentions cannot be misinterpreted in this case.
If you can put yourself in LGBT shoes, can you imagine working for Mozilla? What if it had to be closely with Mr. Eich? Could you be his PA?
Maybe if gay rights weren't at the forefront of public opinion right now, this could have slipped by unnoticed for a while. But especially now that it did, do you see a company with that manifesto keeping a CEO like Mr. Eich onboard?
Because, as he wrote just after that: "Marriage is something a lot of people have strong and (from my point of view) old-fashioned opinions on. The fact that he feel marriage is a bond between two members of a different gender does not necessarily mean he's going to actively discriminate members of the LGBT community in a professional environment."
People had (and have) a lot of strong and often (from my point of view) old fashioned views on ethnicity.
If I said that I don't think a black employee should be allowed to have the same voting rights as me (something which was historically the case and was felt to be reasonable by - for a long time - the majority), how much faith would you have in my not activity discriminating against them in a professional environment?
Less than I would have if you had spoken about marriage rights.
The difference being that to deny a group voting rights, it means you have something against that group specifically.
Whereas for marriage, it could just be that your notion of marriage as a custom (how you think marriage should be) is incompatible with the group performing it.
If you found a minister of a non-specific religion who refused to marry to black two people just because he just didn't see marriage in his faith as something that happened between black people, how much faith would you have that he had nothing against black people, that it was just about he saw marriage?
Well, if his religion stated so, then I would have no reason to doubt him.
Religion can have any arbitrary rule. No marriage for X group. No priesthood for Y group. That doesn't necessarily mean that it also sees Y group in a specific light otherwise.
And what if members of his religion has mixed views on the subject?
This is part of the problem with it as a religious argument - most religions don't have a unified view of the subject. To bring it back to the matter at hand there are plenty of Christian's who have no problem with gay marriage so is it really a Christian view, or just a view held by some Christians (which is a somewhat different thing)?
Oh, and religion may have any arbitrary rule but that doesn't mean we have to accept it. There is more biblical justification for stoning than for homophobia yet we're not on side with stoning.
Team Rarebit, two developers who are a gay couple, have made several blog posts about how support for Prop 8 affected them from an immigration perspective, which of course had both personal and professional consequences.
They also posted about how Eich's resignation is not their preferred outcome, and they would have preferred to see him acknowledge that his past actions had an impact on the Mozilla team and community that extended beyond personal feelings http://www.teamrarebit.com/blog/2014/04/03/a-sad-victory/
On the flip side, I would expect a vegan who donates money to organizations trying to stop state subsidies to meat production still be working fine with carnivores.
Wrong. As far as I know, he has not divulged his religious or political views. We do not know if he is Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, atheist or pastafarian. We do not know if he is a Democrat or a Republican.
We do know, however, that he was so incensed by the ideas of gays getting the right to marriage that he donated a very large sum of money to help fight the legal battle against it.
That speaks volumes about his personal bigotry. He was not being attacked for his religious or political views. He was attacked because he wants to discriminate against an entire class of people.
Barack Obama was so incensed at the idea of gays getting the right to marriage, that he 'stood' on a national stage, while running for the highest office in the land, and declared that marriage is between a man and a woman - an open declaration of bigotry. Not all bigotry is treated equally apparently.
Calling names is calling names is calling names, nothing else. It adds nothing to the conversation, it subtracts everything (and by the way, suggest that the person using them has not much of a clear idea how to defend his ideas, and I am not saying that you suffer from this problem).
By the way, it was the State of California that carried out the poll. Is the state 'bigot'?
I guess it should be illegal to do that if the vote were straightaway against someone's basic rights. Or am I missing something and if enough people deem it right one could get a poll on 'the right of colored people to go to University'?
"I'm for peace after we kill or imprison all the bad people."
"I'm for democracy after everyone agrees with me."
Soon in order to have a referendum on the ballot it will need to be voted on (to get it on a ballot) of which a simple majority must approve it. But, if "it should be illegal to do that if the vote were straightaway against someone's basic rights" were implemented then the referendum vote to get it on the ballot would become illegal too.
By the way, who defines "basic rights"? The majority? A minority in "power"? The who get to define "rights" are the ones that can defend their claims. Those that can defend their claims require weapons. This is what Kings did. They made claims to rights. Like, "I claim the right to the land you live on!" To which another king or the people would say "Bullshit!" Then if they couldn't amicable resolve their claims they went to war and defended their claims (whether their claims were moral or not). The outcome would speak for itself: the victor's claims were correct because they were able to defend their claims.
Our country was founded on protecting minorities not the majority. The greatest minority is the individual. I think we should be protecting individuals from tangible HARM not protecting "rights" and privileges which change over time depending on the whim of the majority or society.
Yes, we all have the right to choose to be sexually monogamous with another individual, pool our resources, and take care of and raise our offspring. We don't have a right to demand tax breaks or that third parties take care of our spouses and children. Get government completely out of marriage.
Also all the insulting shows that the possible vision of 'marriage as a social institution' has not entered into their heads.
The example of 'property' is good because it is also a social institution and it is something which one cannot take for granted (there are societies ---hippies--- which deny the existence of it). When some minority claims their right to property (for example, the 'poor') or claim that the 'right to property' is harming them, what shall we do?
Are we bigots because we insist on the right to 'property'?
Wikipedia estimates the campaign in support of Prop 8 raised $39.0 million. $1000 is not a "very large sum of money". It's a rounding error. Likely a rounding error for Eich's personal finances as well if he's at the level of CEO or potential CEO.
If you are going to attack Eich, do it with the known facts. Six years ago, he gave a $1000 donation to a $39 million political cause. His mood ("incensed") at the time is not known. His actions since then are mostly not known. His publicly stated position is full support for LGBT individuals in basically every area but marriage. His current views on whether homosexual marriages should be legal are not explicitly known. His personal feelings toward LGBT individuals (I've seen the word "hate" tossed around many times) are not known.
That is why I, and so many other people, have a problem with the response to his appointment as CEO. He made one known donation to a movement against homosexual marriage. It was an amount of money equal to a rounding error at most. This was six years ago. When appointed, he publicly promised to fully support LGBT individuals at Mozilla, including maintaining health benefits for same sex partners. He was actively promoting an initiative to bring LGBT and other potentially marginalized individuals into tech.
Why does someone who is actively supporting LGBT individuals above and beyond the legal requirement need to recant from a small, legal donation to a political cause? Why does he need to change his opinion to match the popular opinion? Why can he not simply keep his opinions to himself, go on actively supporting LGBT individuals at work, and stop making public donations opposing homosexual marriage? Because from all appearances, that was his plan.
My problem is that the tech community is more interested in his personal feelings than his actions. He has committed to supporting LGBT individuals at work. That is an action, or at least a promise of action. Whether he apologizes or changes his mind about homosexual marriage is a feeling. He was effectively ousted from his job not for his actions (because if he had said he no longer felt that way and apologized for his donation, he likely would have been able to stay), but for his feelings, his opinions. He was forced out because he apparently still felt his donation was good and that homosexuals shouldn't get married. Note that he did nothing to act on those apparent feelings while CEO. His crime was having the feelings, not acting on them. If he had convinced everyone he was now a supporter of homosexual marriage, he would still be CEO, even given his past donation and even if he had done nothing to counteract it.
Holding the correct beliefs is apparently now a job requirement at Mozilla.
I guess lots of folks weren't convinced that was 'his plan'. He was unconvincing, unrepentant even. That's critical - if he had convinced folks his bigotry days were behind him, maybe it would have worked out differently.
And $1000 is significant to me. It pays for print ads, or hours of activist pay. Doesn't matter how big a pile of money you put it it; it's still effective at spreading the message.
Arguably. He could just put more weight in one category than every other category combined, and Buchanan might match that category better than any other candidates.
Unless Eich actually makes a statement on his political views, we don't really know anything.
Actually, they make most of their money from referral traffic.
"The majority of Mozilla’s revenue is generated from search and commerce functionality included in our Firefox product through all major search partners including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon, eBay and others."
Notice I said "donations of time and labour". Not financial donations. Is most of mozilla's programming, bug tracking, promotions, evangelizaing, tech support, done by people who are salaries employees of Mozilla Corp? Or the wider "open source community"
The story is different when it comes to open source. OSS projects are communal in nature and much more democratic than their non-OSS counterparts. It should be no surprising to see the dynamics of state politics, such as examination of unrelated actions from actors, apply to OSS communities.
On that note, you can only be the dictator and force everyone to look at the bits alone, when you have something people need or you have endless patience to outlast your competition. This would be the Linus strategy. I dont think Mozilla has this option. ALSO, both consumers and employees in non-OSS establishments are making on CSR and meta-politics an priority. This will continue to increase in significance.
In your own example, you (a) aren't head of the organization and (b) are not, I assume, advocating a view that some of your colleagues should be second class citizens.
However, I feel like the reaction to his becoming CEO and trying to get him to step down were unjustified.
I believe that someone shouldn't be judged on his political or religious affiliation when being considered for a new job or a new role. I have political convictions which are perpendicular to some of my colleagues ideas, and guess what, we get along just fine at work.
I fail to see how his opinion on same-sex marriage (or his sponsorship of conservative politicians in general) would be a problem for guiding Mozilla forward. As long as he doesn't use Mozilla as a tool for his personal agenda.