The problem is that this stops being "ideology" when it starts interfering with the operation of Pycon. For example, if other people have to travel to the count

The problem is that this stops being "ideology" when it starts interfering with the operation of Pycon. For example, if other people have to travel to the country the PyCon is in, and they are in any way gay (and yes, there are bound to be gay people in Python's development community), they're risking arrest just to go. Strip away the moralizing and it's still extremely problematic to put an African PyCon in a country with such authoritarian[0] laws. Going back to Rust for Linux (the actual thing we were talking about), you cannot cleanly separate the "religious" and "technical" sides of the argument. Rust doesn't provide safety advantages when calling into C code unless you inform the type system of what the memory safety requirements of that C code are. Otherwise you have to litter your code with unsafe blocks everywhere to manually call into C, which makes it a lot closer to C code. Safe Rust requires you to know and understand what the C code is doing, or have good documentation related to that code, and keep your bindings up to date when the C code changes. That's both technical and religious - insamuch as Rust demands good docs and some subset of the C people don't want to provide them. [0] Yes, banning homosexuality is inherently authoritarian. It's literally the first thing any authoritarian does, to check if society's liberal reflexes still work or not.