Less than two weeks after becoming the CEO of Mozilla, the software company who supports the Firefox web browser, Brendan Eich has stepped down after a backlash in regards to his opposition to same-sex marriage and financial support he gave to support Proposition 8 in California in 2008.
So to recap: a guy donates a whole thousand dollars to support something he believes in, and six years later, he becomes a CEO, and has to be destroyed because of it. It is an opinion that an independent citizen has!
So many people in our society have become so mindless and politically correct. And if it’s an issue that society says is something you need to support, then you had better be in lock step, and not have any independent or opposing thoughts, or people will set out to destroy you because of it. Especially if you’re someone in the public eye. I see George Takei celebrating this on Facebook, like it’s some great victory, self-righteously lecturing us: “Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences. This man donated money to a campaign designed to keep LGBT people from full equality and to deny our families equal rights under the law. He was free to make that choice, but we are free to hold him accountable. If he’d donated money to White Supremacists to help outlaw interracial marriage, there’d be little outcry over his ouster.”
In 2008, the same year that Eich made his donation, Barrack Obama and Hilary Clinton were both vying for the democratic party nomination for president. Both of them were opposed to same-sex marriage. Since 1998, in 32 states, it has come to a vote on whether or not the citizens of that state wanted to add constitutional bans on same-sex marriage. Minnesota is the only one of those 32 states where the majority of voters actually supported same-sex marriage.
In 13 of those states, the vote wasn’t even close, with more than 70 percent of people voting to ultimately preserve the traditional American definition of a marriage.
I see opinion polls that show that attitudes are changing. Are they? How can we know what people truly believe if we want to beat down those who think it’s wrong? So much pressure gets put on people to just accept what the social agenda is. And as a result, it becomes easier to stop thinking and just go with the other lemmings than to stand up for what you think is right.
Every month it seems like someone famous makes some comment that offends people, and there’s suddenly a movement to get the person fired. We just saw this with the #cancelcolbert campaign. People like to be indignant and demand apologies. What good does it do to force someone to apologize? A person should never apologize for saying something they believe. Regardless of if someone agrees or disagrees with Eich, I respect that he didn’t change his stance and say something he didn’t truly believe. “I don’t think it’s good for my integrity or Mozilla’s integrity to be pressured into changing a position, he said.
Last week, Eich wrote on his blog a list of commitments he was making to the LGBT community:
Active commitment to equality in everything we do, from employment to events to community-building.
-Working with LGBT communities and allies, to listen and learn what does and doesn’t make Mozilla supportive and welcoming.
-My ongoing commitment to our Community Participation Guidelines, our inclusive health benefits, our anti-discrimination policies, and the spirit that underlies all of these.
-My personal commitment to work on new initiatives to reach out to those who feel excluded or who have been marginalized in ways that makes their contributing to Mozilla and to open source difficult. More on this last item below.
He seems pretty tolerant and accepting to me.
The activism site CREDO had over 60,000 signatures in an attempt to compel Eich to apologize, or else resign (or be fired). On their site, they said, his hiring “is a forceful gesture that elevates an advocate of writing discrimination into our laws to the head of a global brand representing openness and equality.”
With that last point, some are trying to argue that since Mozilla uses open source software, that it is contrary to the very nature of what Mozilla stands for. I find that hypocritical. So one must be “open” to accepting all lifestyles, but one need not be open in terms of accepting different opinions.
Just because someone opposes same-sex marriage does not mean that they are necessarily hateful or evil. As long as a person is decent to other people, why does it matter whether or not someone accepts every aspect of a person’s life? We see people do things with which we disagree every single day. Why do we have to accept everything, except for someone who doesn’t believe in accepting something? That becomes unacceptable.
People should not be punished for opinions. If someone has an opinion with which I disagree, I would prefer to know about it. But no, we have a politically correct culture that bullies people. We harass people for having different opinions. I return to Takei’s comments, where he says “freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences.”
Apparently it doesn’t, but why do the consequences need to be that you must be silenced and removed? “This man donated money to a campaign designed to keep LGBT people from full equality and to deny our families equal rights under the law.” And millions of Americans have voted for that same thing. Millions of people believe that a true “marriage” is meant to be shared by one man and one woman.
I don’t see what the man’s personal views on same-sex marriage and a donation he gave six years ago has to do with his ability to run a company.
jrb
Josh Benner 