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

http://www.slate.com/blogs/saletan/2014/04/07/brendan_eich_homophobia_and_corporate_values_the_left_is_the_new_moral_majority.html

by DaveMebs • 12 years ago

84 101 12 years ago

slate.com

mullingitover2• 12 years ago

It used to be social conservatives who stood for the idea that companies could and should fire employees based on the “values” and “community standards” of their “employees, business partners and customers.” Now it’s liberals.

Uh, pretty sure social conservatives far and wide are still wholly in favor of discriminating against homosexuals. We're decades early on this being a case of the persecuted becoming the persecutors.

danmaz743• 12 years ago

The problem is that, now, it becomes more difficult to argue that people shouldn't be fired because of their opinions about sexual preferences.

npsimons2• 12 years ago

If someone donates money to support a bill to make it illegal for straight people to marry, then the comparison might be justified. Until then, equating a private, in-born sexual preference (or opinions of such) with attempting to enshrine bigotry in the law is really stretching things.

pessimizer3• 12 years ago

Were people ever arguing that, or were they arguing that people shouldn't be fired because of their sexual preferences? Are racial minorities being fired because of their opinions about race?

neilk• 12 years ago

Whether or not these points have merit, this media pundit is only replying to other media pundits. Some important nuances are being lost. If there is a way to make this sad story even sadder, it's turning it into a political football.

Is there anything Mozilla or Eich can do to clarify things? But I don't know if that matters any more, now that American political commentators have tasted blood.

danmaz743• 12 years ago

I think that this case is doing a lot of bad to the cause of gay rights, because it feeds intolerance and radicalization.

npsimons2• 12 years ago

I think that this case is doing a lot of bad to the cause of gay rights

Indeed; if one were of a more conspiratorial bent, they might be inclined to think that's the exact purpose of this whole farce.

aneisf• 12 years ago

Intolerance of an intolerance is not equatable with the original intolerance.

stcredzero23• 12 years ago

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.

chc8• 12 years ago

This isn't intolerance of intolerance. It's punishment for a small donation six years ago. If Eich were running around being a dick to gay Mozilla employees, nobody would disagree with firing him. But he's not. People are attacking him for his political sympathies, not for being intolerant. (In fact, Eich's behavior at Mozilla was exemplary. I have never heard of any instances where he had trouble tolerating gays or liberals.)

When we talk about "intolerance of intolerance" being OK, we're being a bit flip. What is actually meant by the phrase is that it's OK to make people act tolerant, even if they aren't naturally inclined to do so, in order to preserve a particular group's rights. They can hold whatever opinions they want, but they have to be civil. But Eich was already doing that. He was even one of the people who helped draft Mozilla's inclusiveness guidelines. This was just punishment because Eich held a particular opinion, not because he was actually having trouble tolerating gays in the organization.

Zigurd• 12 years ago

That would be true if gays were trying to make straight marriage illegal. However, in reality, there is no symmetry in this issue.

rjknight• 12 years ago

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.

mcherm• 12 years ago

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.

jessaustin• 12 years ago

Thanks I had missed that. The crux of the issue, for me:

Most (or perhaps all) of the Mozillians who tweeted this were employed by the Mozilla Foundation, not the Mozilla Corporation which means that they report to the executive director of the foundation and not to the CEO. As foundation employees, they did not share the same org chart as Brendan.

I didn't realize the foundation had so many employees.

001sky2• 12 years ago

So, Mozilla is a three headed monster:

Executive Chairwoman, Mozilla Foundation (Mitchell Baker)
Executive Director, Mozilla Foundation (Mark Surman)
CEO Mozilla Corporation (New position, 2008)

Mark Surman's employees using @mozilla handles were calling for the resignation of a competing CEO?

Am i reading this right? In other words this was under political air-cover.

The Mozilla Foundation now focuses solely on governance and policy issues...

The corporate governance here actually seems like a problem.

The new CEO and the New COO of @mozilla are going to look at this with ???

forgottenpass• 12 years ago

Each situation is unique, but leaning too hard on that fact starts to resemble "It's different when I [Mozilla] do it."

there's really no need to rely on Slate to tell us what to think here.

It's OK, good even, to stick your ear outside the tech bubble. But you shouldn't let anyone - in or out - tell you what to think. Everyone has ideas, synthesize them with a heavy scoop of context. You should be as skeptical of tech-bubble sources as you are mainstream ones, just in some different ways for different reasons.

koenigdavidmj2• 12 years ago

The lesson Mozilla learned here is that the angry Internet mob can get whatever it wants. It doesn't really matter which side of history the mob is on. The lesson that other boards learned with this is not 'hire socially-conscious people', but 'keep your head down and maintain the status quo'.

Fifty years ago a similar uproar would have developed if a company hired a black CEO. The press release announcing his removal a week later would have been the same, some fluff words about being unable to effectively lead when he's spending all his time dealing with this.

ryandvm• 12 years ago

Indeed. I don't agree with Eich's personal views on gay marriage, but I'm kind of disappointed that everybody seems to be cool with getting people fired because they stood up for their personal views.

People are comfortable with his firing because they feel his views are "wrong", but pretty much all progressive views, by definition, started out as "wrong" as well...

dragonwriter3• 12 years ago

I don't agree with Eich's personal views on gay marriage, but I'm kind of disappointed that everybody seems to be cool with getting people fired because they stood up for their personal views.

No one got fired here. Brendan Eich quit a job that, from all reports, he was dubious about taking from day one.

thumbtackthief• 12 years ago

What if it came out that his personal views (and political donations, more importantly) were against interracial marriage or women's suffrage? No one would bat an eye at his losing his position as CEO (voluntarily or not). Everyone is just shocked because our society is finally starting to recognize anti-gay bigotry as abhorrent as racism or sexism.

devindotcom7• 12 years ago

I don't understand why the "angry internet mob" is any different from thousands of people boycotting a company for unfair labor practices, or doing a sit-in somewhere, or picketing? How is the internet mob different from these other forms of nonviolent political activism?

stcredzero23• 12 years ago

It's worthy activism to repeal unjust laws, or help to pass other laws to protect people's rights. It's something else to merely attack the people you don't like, no matter how noble your justification is.

A more accurate description of this action would be as a boycott of a company with fair labor practices, for an exercise of free speech the CEO made 6 years ago. Does that even make sense? It sounds like a gratuitous witch-hunt to me.

If one's activism is going to further the notion of tolerance and social justice, then it had better hew to the principles of tolerance and social justice. Merely resembling other civil rights actions on the surface is just "Cargo Cult Activism."

koenigdavidmj2• 12 years ago

My point was that conservatives can do witch hunts too. Mozilla gave every indication that it just gave up when the pressure overcame them, rather than actually deciding this on its merits, bad publicity be damned.

noddingham• 12 years ago

Based upon the thoughtless drivel that I see spewed across Twitter, I don't see how it could be considered political activism of any sort. It takes no effort and no risk to shout something on Twitter.

stcredzero23• 12 years ago

The lesson Mozilla learned here is that the angry Internet mob can get whatever it wants.

The typical angry Internet mob is, frankly, stupid, ill informed, incapable of clear thought, not sophisticated enough to appreciate detail and nuance, and unable to comprehend that principles of justice and tolerance apply evenly to all. The typical angry Internet mob has most of the disgusting qualities of the people who bullied me in school. It's just that now, they label themselves as "geeks" and "nerds."

The Japanese have a saying that it's only through suffering that one truly comes to understand kindness. Many geeks and nerds used to value principles and a sense of scientific/technical rigor and honor, which they deeply understood because they knew firsthand what it means to be subject to the power of groups lacking such principles.

There's a famous Feynmann story about how he discovered that Brazilian science students were able to recite the book-knowledge about the polarization of light but were unable to apply the basic physics to actual examples. The typical Bay Area 20-something Computer Science/Programmer geek will now stare at you blankly when you mention "frequency response." (or even prejudicially flip the idiot bit on you because you said something "audiophile" sounding) However, almost all of them will tell you enthusiastically about studying Fourier Transforms.

pessimizer3• 12 years ago

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.

stcredzero23• 12 years ago

What the record actually shows is that the policies of Mozilla, in the time he was CEO, treated well those who had cause to oppose him in his private political life.

pessimizer3• 12 years ago

in the time he was CEO

You mean during that week that everybody hammered him about his anti-gay donations and then he quit? I have doubts about his ability to push substantial policy during that period, to say the least.

dclowd99013• 12 years ago

He's right. And so the fuck what?

It's not the reasoning I care about. It's never been about the reasoning. No one ever bought any bullshit about "community standards" even when it was being used to oust gays. It was about the act of marginalizing individuals over something that literally affects nobody else.

If a gay person works at my company, his being gay will have no affect on my livelihood. People with an anti-gay agenda have made a choice to stand in the way of progress. That means their actions negatively affect the people around them, malevolent. They're entitled to no consideration, because it's their choice to ostracize themselves for their ignorance. It should be seen the same as firing someone who habitually shits on the bathroom floor.

secstate• 12 years ago

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.

stcredzero23• 12 years ago

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.

The actual policies of the organization he helped to run would suggest exactly the opposite.

news_to_me2• 12 years ago

"If an anti-gay person works at my company, his being anti-gay will have no affect on my livelihood. People with a gay agenda have made a choice to stand in the way of progress. That means their actions negatively affect the people around them, malevolent. They're entitled to no consideration, because it's their choice to ostracize themselves for their ignorance. It should be seen the same as firing someone who habitually shits on the bathroom floor."

See how this goes both ways?

differentView5• 12 years ago

Do you believe gay people being allowed to marry negatively affect you? If so, how?

chc8• 12 years ago

That's the same thing they said about gays and miscegenators. They weren't opposed just because people were on their high horses — no, it was the damage that gays and miscegenators did to society that required us to run them out of society.

In the end, it's all just "You hold the opposite opinion from me about what's good for society, so I'm going to try to evict you from society."

dclowd99013• 12 years ago

Believing homosexual behavior undermines society is predicated on a false premise: biblical morality.

Doing shitty things that undermine the lives of others is objectively evil.

doe88• 12 years ago

From the start I was unconfortable with the idea of firing or demoting someone who had worked 15+ years in an organization without any related issues raised before.

And now I'm appalled by all these justifications while nobody seems to really discuss the huge technical loss. Maybe it's my engineering side speaking but I'm outraged to see such a great engineer forced to leave by people who in the end for the most part don't really care about Mozilla and will soon go to the next cause to defend. Meanwhile Mozilla has lost a bit of its soul and a part of its mind. The outcome is just sad.

stcredzero23• 12 years ago

will soon go to the next cause to defend

Just who is being "defended" here? No free society should take offense to a nonviolent political stand, even unpopular ones. Going after someone like this is not defense. It's attack.

devindotcom7• 12 years ago

Wait, why is it defense for him to speak in favor, and attack for others to speak against? Don't mass speech and boycotts constitute a "nonviolent political stand"?

dllthomas10• 12 years ago

Doesn't placing "such a great engineer" in a CEO role already mean he's not being applied to engineering tasks?

stcredzero23• 12 years ago

Managing engineers with a good understanding of what they do is a very valuable skill.

stcredzero23• 12 years ago

People have forgotten the magnanimous spirit championed by Martin Luther King.

He did not advocate that one day, the oppressed would be on top and the "bad guys" would get theirs. That sort of attitude would be inimical to what he, Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela would have advocated. Getting Brendan Eich fired makes nobody more free or less oppressed. Instead, it moves society towards a state where no one feels free to say what they really think, unless it hews to the majority opinion, and where might makes right and principles of tolerance and decency are only applied to the "correct" people. In days past, the "correct" people would have excluded non-whites and homosexuals.

An English vicar once said that to judge someone's character, observe not how they treat the people they need, but how they treat the people they don't need.

devindotcom7• 12 years ago

You seem to know these men well!

Would they have said we should not have spoken out when a company we know and would like to trust advances a man demonstrably and unrepentantly against equal rights for gay people to its highest post? Or would nonviolent activism and speech asking that such a person not be allowed to represent that company, and that someone with such views should not be honored but repudiated, be "inimical" to their philosophies?

I don't presume to know what King or Gandhi would have done. But I don't think speaking out against a public figure who stands against equal rights is wrong.

stcredzero23• 12 years ago

I don't presume to know what King or Gandhi would have done. But I don't think speaking out against a public figure who stands against equal rights is wrong.

Sure, but going after someone for a political donation from 6 years ago after the issue has already been won seems vindictive and socially counterproductive. Can you point me to something that MLK, Mandela, or Gandhi did or said that would indicate they'd do something like that? I can point to many examples of words and actions of theirs that would suggest they'd advocate for a more magnanimous path.

johngalt2• 12 years ago

It's ok though, because this time the mob is right. All those other times the mob was wrong. So long as you can predict exactly which way subjective collective reasoning will go for years into the future you'll be fine.

devindotcom7• 12 years ago

Ah, so you would have maintained a healthy distance during the civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s as well?

johngalt2• 12 years ago

Would I distance myself from MLK? no. From the black panthers? yes. There is a vast difference between believing something to be true, and wishing harm upon those who refuse to acknowledge that truth.

Are there any injustices you see in the world that aren't also the popular opinion in your peer group?

mkr-hn2• 12 years ago

I really wish anyone at all would acknowledge that not everyone who had a problem with his donation wanted him out of a job. People are too eager to combine everyone into two faceless mobs when the arguments were far more nuanced than two mindless binaries.

The general wave of anti-gay equality campaigns didn't start or stop with prop 8. It began as a reaction to some of the early victories of the pro-equality movement. My own state tried to make it legal for businesses to deny service to me just a few weeks ago. His donation exists in a context where people are still suffering from the constant assault on their status as equal citizens.

lexcorvus2• 12 years ago

I'm sure many supporters of Brendan Eich's ouster are completely sincere, but it's difficult to explain the intensity of their feelings on this issue. It can't be as simple as "civil rights" and "marriage equality"; for example, (first) cousin marriage is important to many groups—indeed, in Islam cousin marriage is not only allowed, it's often preferred [1]—but it is illegal in most states [2]. And yet, I rarely see advocates of "marriage equality" get all lathered up over this issue. Are advocates of "marriage equality" in favor of legalizing cousin marriage? If not, why not? If so, why have they not worked harder to achieve it?

I see no way to resolve this paradox from within the context of progressive ideology, but it's trivial to explain once you view it from the outside. As the example of cousin marriage shows, the behavior of Eich's purgers is not consistent with mere "civil rights" and "marriage equality", but it is consistent with signaling tribal membership, seizing political power, and smashing their enemies.

As it happens, right now gay marriage is an effective club with which progressives can beat conservatives. At some point, this may also be the case for cousin marriage—I can easily imagine opponents of cousin marriage someday being branded "Islamophobes", just as today opponents of gay marriage are branded "homophobes". But I predict that this will happen if, and only if, it serves progressive political ends.

[1] http://wikiislam.net/wiki/Cousin_Marriage_in_Islam

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage_law_in_the_Unit...

dragonwriter3• 12 years ago

I'm sure many supporters of Brendan Eich's ouster are completely sincere

What "ouster"?

It can't be as simple as "civil rights" and "marriage equality"

Even ignoring the questionable use of "ouster", yes, it can.

for example, (first) cousin marriage is important to many groups [...]. And yet, I rarely see advocates of "marriage equality" get all lathered up over this issue.

So, what? Opponents of interracial marriage bans in the 1950s-1960s didn't get "lathered up" over cousin marriage bans, or same sex marriage bans, either. That doesn't mean that opposition to interracial marriage bans wasn't all about civil rights and equality.

Are advocates of "marriage equality" in favor of legalizing cousin marriage?

Some probably are, some probably are not. As with most political issues, position on this issue doesn't absolutely determine position on any other issue.

If not, why not?

Conceptually, regulating new legal family relationships on the basis of existing family relationships is different than doing so based on some other non-family status, so there is no real reason why positions on these should be expected to correlate.

If so, why have they not worked harder to achieve it?

This is the "why aren't advocates of 'X' spending equal effort on every other analogous issue" argument, which ignores that actually effecting change often requires serial focus, rather than parallel effort.

I see no way to resolve this paradox from within the context of progressive ideology

And yet, as noted above, I see several that fit quite well in that framework. Maybe what you fail to see says more about what you want to see than about what actually is there?

lexcorvus2• 12 years ago

This rationalization of anti–cousin marriage bigotry makes you sound like an Islamophobe who cares little about violating Muslims' religious liberties by denying them their basic civil rights. Be careful not to get purged.

scintill76• 12 years ago

Even if I don't agree with all of this, it's at least a good explanation of why I find "marriage equality" distastefully propagandistic. If people waving that banner truly wanted "marriage equality" they would be fighting for normalizing marriage laws across the whole nation (marriage age and other requirements like relatedness as you mentioned), polygamy, etc. If they wanted to extend the logistical benefits of marriage (tax breaks etc.) to more people, they could fight for marriage between people that were doing it purely for the legal benefits.

Just call it "fighting for same-sex marriage", because that's what it's mostly about. "Marriage equality" feels like trying to sway the listener by giving a deceptively broad impression of the aims of the movement.

MetaCosm• 12 years ago

Losing your job for being gay is different from losing your job for opposing gay marriage. Unlike homosexuality, opposition to same-sex marriage is a choice, and it directly limits the rights of other people.

He wrote an entire article equivocating them, then he quickly writes a couple sentences pointing out he full well knows it is absolute nonsense. Well played by him, I read the article.

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

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