Brendan Eich: The shaming of a gay-marriage opponent

The CEO of Mozilla resigned under duress over a $1,000 donation in support of the 2008 ballot initiative to ban gay marriage in California.

With the legalization of gay marriage sweeping the nation, said Charles C.W. Cooke in NationalReview.com, you might think that those who fought so hard for the cause would be feeling magnanimous. Instead, they’re busy “bludgeoning their enemies” into groveling submission. The latest to feel the gay-marriage lobby’s wrath is tech wizard Brendan Eich, who last week resigned under duress as CEO of Mozilla, the firm behind the Firefox Web browser. Eich’s departure came after a campaign by progressive activists and the OkCupid dating website, which had urged its users to boycott Firefox. Eich’s crime? Six years ago, he donated $1,000 to support Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot initiative to ban gay marriage in California. Belief in traditional marriage “was no extreme mind-set” at the time, said Katrina Trinko in USA Today. In fact, 52 percent of California’s electorate shared Eich’s opposition to gay marriage that year, as did such noted homophobes as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, a majority of Congress, and most Americans. Many people’s views have since “evolved,” but when did traditional beliefs become impermissible heresy? In America, we work alongside people with whom we disagree, rather than demand that they be fired and “banished from polite society.”

Eich is hardly a victim here, said Mary Hamilton in TheGuardian.com. When he donated to the Proposition 8 campaign, he helped bring about the invalidation of hundreds of same-sex marriages, causing great pain to those couples. So who bullied who? Yes, Eich has the right to freedom of speech, but gay Californians and their supporters also exercised their freedom of speech by calling for a boycott of Mozilla, which wisely let him step down. Generally speaking, a person’s political views shouldn’t affect his or her employment, said Will Oremus in Slate.com, but opposing gay marriage in modern America isn’t just another political view. “It bespeaks a conviction that some people do not deserve the same basic rights as others,” which makes Eich as much of a problem for Mozilla as if he’d taken a stand against interracial marriage.

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