Denying gays the right to marriage is not a free speech issue, it's a human rights issue. Replace gay marriage with interracial marriage and see if the idea of "we failed you because we didn't support your right to believe that interracial marriage is wrong" still stands up.
Trying to equate this to a free speech issue is just another way of discriminating against gays. Eich actively supported the discrimination against gays and there's no way that he has the moral right to lead a company like Mozilla. I for one am glad that he was put through the wringer and hope anyone else that believes in any form of discrimination and wants to lead a company gets the same treatment or worse.
EDIT: someone rightfully pointed out I overstepped my description. I changed "Eich discriminated against gays" to "Eich actively supported the discrimination of gays"
I have to ask, do you realize how hypocritical some of your statements sound?
I'm talking about ones like, "I for one am glad that he was put through the wringer and hope anyone else that believes in any form of discrimination and wants to lead a company gets the same treatment or worse."
On one hand you decry discrimination, but then on the other you encourage discrimination against people who you've deemed to have engaged in discrimination. It's very contradictory, and suggests that you in turn should then be subjected to some very negative treatment, "or worse".
Sure, I can see them being different things. But that doesn't meant that they both can't be involved at the same time.
Maybe what Eich is facing is seen as "punishment" by some, but it is indisputably discrimination, too. Losing one's job solely because of one's beliefs is a form of discrimination, regardless of what those beliefs may be.
I don't see how you can seriously say that you're against discrimination and those who discriminate, yet you'll resort to that exact same discriminatory behavior while supposedly trying to stop discrimination!
This is a false equivalence. You are presupposing that being pro-marriage-equality and anti-marriage-equality are positions of equal moral value. They are not.
It's like claiming someone being placed in prison for murder is being "discriminated against" for being a murderer. No, we are punishing despicable behavior.
> hope anyone else that believes in any form of discrimination and wants to lead a company gets the same treatment or worse.
Is it okay to discriminate against people who discriminate? I'm not being sarcastic, it's a serious philosophical question.
Why do we even apply fair procedures and guarantee the rule of law for murderers, many of whom are racist, misogynistic, and/or homophobic? They discriminate, so why shouldn't we discriminate against them, too?
You're right, it's a human rights issue. But the thing about human rights is that even people who violate other people's human rights retain human rights of their own, merely in virtue of the fact that they are a specimen of Homo sapiens. Without human rights, we'll be left with nothing more than an endless cycle of discrimination, which quickly becomes indistinguishable from an endless cycle of vengeance.
As I mentioned below, you have confused discrimination with punishment. Eich is not being discriminated against, he is being punished. He lost his job because the people he worked for and the customers of his company's product did not want his as their CEO.
If he never works in the tech industry again because he is a shunned pariah, then that would probably be discrimination.
In the sentence I quoted above, you wished that anyone who donates to an anti-gay-marriage campaign (or similar) will be prevented from occupying an executive position of any company in the future. That sounds more like discrimination than punishment, even according to your own definition.
No it sounds perfectly consistent to me. Anyone who discriminates against any class of people should be rightfully suffer the consequences of their views.
If they recant their discriminatory views, I have no problems supporting them. Gay people do not have the same luxury of changing who they are.
He paid his money to take away some rights from some people. He wanted a certain group of people to not have the same status in society he himself enjoys. That goes beyond expression. That's using your money, effectively your power in society, to step on some elements of that society.
He used money influence to deny homosexuals their human rights and dignity. I don't know what definition of "discrimination" we're using here, but that's pretty despicable behavior by any measure.
Only the most recent declarations of human rights have included any provisions about sexual orientation at all. The UN declaration was in 1948 - hardly a friendly time for homosexuals. The US bill of rights was held widely, really until the Civil War, to enshrine - implicitly in its provisions on private property - property in people. LGBT people have had to fight hard even to get to the point where gay marriage is even thinkable, let alone considered a fundamental human right, partly because "it's a human rights issue" is question-begging in the extreme. What's your definition of human rights? I bet Brendan Eich's is different. You won't prove one or the other from first principles, I guarantee you.
What we have here, with this little brouhaha, is political bikeshedding. Gay marriage is hard. We just got it in this country (the UK), almost 50 years after homosexual acts were first partially decriminalised. In the US, it seems to be a matter to force through on a tedious state-by-state basis. The obstacles to doing so are huge - because millions of Americans (and millions of British, etc), well organised in right-wing pressure groups and militant churches, consider homosexuality to be depraved and sinful.
Meanwhile, in the tech world, people are generally upping their consciousness on this issue and others. Good. But this is not a problem individuals scattered around an industry can solve. It's a matter for political movements of concerned citizens and always has been.
But there's Brendan Eich. We know very well he donated a whole thousand dollars to the campaign for a cruel, vindictive law (although only because somebody dug it out of CA state records - not because he's on record stating his views). He is in a prominent and vulnerable position of influence - on our turf. Heck, he's in the Valley! We may not be able to do anything about victims of homophobia in West Texas, but we can do something about Brendan Eich. And doing something, apparently, is always better than doing nothing.
Yes, Eich's opinions are vile, and he should be challenged to drop them. But he's not the problem. If he has conducted himself in a bigoted way in his many years as CTO, then that would disqualify him - probably under state or federal law, never mind the morality of it. If not, then there is no material difference whatsoever to LGBT people at Mozilla - any more than there are to LGBT contributors to ES6 or whatever. Don't worry about right-wing hackers who keep their opinions on the quiet and on the side. Worry about the televangelists, the tea party and the rest who breed bigotry to scale.
Denying gays the right to marriage is not a free speech issue, it's a human rights issue. Replace gay marriage with interracial marriage and see if the idea of "we failed you because we didn't support your right to believe that interracial marriage is wrong" still stands up.
Trying to equate this to a free speech issue is just another way of discriminating against gays. Eich actively supported the discrimination against gays and there's no way that he has the moral right to lead a company like Mozilla. I for one am glad that he was put through the wringer and hope anyone else that believes in any form of discrimination and wants to lead a company gets the same treatment or worse.
EDIT: someone rightfully pointed out I overstepped my description. I changed "Eich discriminated against gays" to "Eich actively supported the discrimination of gays"