9 ms·

If he was a developer, architect or something else like that, I'd generally agree. However, he is now CEO. Imagine just how many people he'd alienate inside Mo

If he was a developer, architect or something else like that, I'd generally agree. However, he is now CEO. Imagine just how many people he'd alienate inside Mozilla by basically saying "I don't think you should have the same rights as me". This is not just another political topic, no matter how people would like to frame it that way. This is about treating people the same. You can still think that homosexuality is wrong and support gay marriage. But someone who goes so far as to say no to gay marriage is basically saying they view that group of people as less than another group of people and should have less rights. This is unacceptable.

twoodfin 13y ago
This is unacceptable. C'mon. In 2004 and 2008, with this very much a live issue, something north of 90% of American voters voted for a presidential candidate who professed to be against gay marriage. You are getting and will continue to get the social change you want, but it's crazy to ostracize someone for having the same political view as 2008 candidate Barack Obama. Try to be graceful and persuasive.
- josefresco 13y ago
  Yes because we all know statements made on the campaign trail meant to appeal to both sides are a 100% accurate portrayal of the candidate's actual position.
  - mscarborough 13y ago
    At some point Obama might have to take an actual stand on something, and then follow up on it. Him being a politician doesn't absolve him of his uselessness. Last example: ooh Putin, you're going to face costs for these shenanigans!
- wpietri 13y ago
  Are you saying that a boss of gay people shouldn't get called out for effectively saying, "Hey, you people don't deserve the same civil rights the rest of us do"? That he should be able to just coast along? Because that sounds like horseshit to me. That gay people can now get married in some minority of American states is progress, sure. But I'm not seeing why that means people, gay or straight, can't call a bigoted action a bigoted action. If somebody is obligated to be graceful and persuasive here, surely that's Eich, who started this out by doing something a lot of his employees find obviously hostile.
  - skybrian 13y ago
    I think someone should ask him whether he's changed his mind. It seems fairly likely; public opinion on gay marriage has changed a lot since 2008.
    - wpietri 13y ago
      Hi, Brian! In 2012 he refused to say: https://brendaneich.com/2012/04/community-and-diversity/ https://brendaneich.com/2012/04/community-and-diversity/
      - catshirt 13y ago
        ha, this is a laughable anti-apologetic defense. replace "gay" with "black" or "women" and laugh along. edit: as i reread this an hour later i can't help but feel more strongly. i was originally laughing at the ignorance on display but it's probably more harmful than funny. "...people in any group or project of significant size and diversity will not agree on many crucial issues unrelated to the group or project." ... "Not only is insisting on ideological uniformity impractical, it is counter-productive..." this sounds like a defense out of American History X.
  - chc 13y ago
    He didn't say that at all. You are reading a whole lot into a simple transfer of money about which Eich has said hardly a word. You have taken something that is barely an identifiable stance — and certainly not a public one — and turned it into a declaration of extremism. An equally plausible read would be "Eich belongs to a religion that holds marriage as a core tenet and was encouraged by his pastor to donate along with the rest of the congregation. He actually wants gays to have equal rights and believes treating gays well is the right course for any business entity, but his personal religious beliefs — which he keeps strictly separate from his official duties — have certain hooks in the word 'marriage'." Fun fact: Many churches were actually telling their congregants that without Prop. 8, the state would require their church to perform gay marriages, and that they should vote for Prop. 8 if they wanted their church's religious freedom to remain intact.
- thinkpad20 13y ago
  Actively contributing to anti-gay causes is not the same thing as being on the fence about gay marriage.
  - charlieh 13y ago
    He wasn't "on the fence about it". He's just changed his position more often than some people change their tires. Obama was for same-sex marriage in 1996, "undecided" in 1998, opposed in 2004 and 2008, and for it again in 2012. Unambiguously.
    - thinkpad20 13y ago
      Correct or not, that's irrelevant to the point I was making. The farthest he has ever gone against gay marriage is to say that he personally believed marriage was between a man and a woman. He never campaigned against it and even when personally opposed to it, consistently said that legislation like DOMA was unnecessary. That's hardly equivalent to giving $1000 to prop 8.
      - charlieh 13y ago
        As I said to the other poster, your position appears to be this: Giving money to politicians who are against same-sex marriage: bad. Actually being a politician who's against same-sex marriage: perfectly fine. That's quite a high tolerance for cognitive dissonance you have going on there, dude.
- scarmig 13y ago
  Obama also (deeply incoherently, I might add) opposed Prop 8, while Eich actively funded it. Obama's position was cowardly, but pretty much every knowledgeable Democrat and Republican believed and knew that he was just cynically posturing. He was a supporter of gay marriage in 1994, for Christ's sake. How many social liberals went through the past two decades and became less supportive of gay marriage? Only to switch their mind three years later? Trust me, I'd be the first to point out that there's a whole lot to criticize Obama for in all of this. But believing he's a homophobe instead of a cynical liar is a bridge too far.
  - JohnBooty 13y ago
    Looked at from another angle, it's actually quite democratic for a candidate for public office to shift his or her platform away from their personal beliefs and towards the beliefs of those they're attempting to represent.
    - scarmig 13y ago
      But all he ended up representing was incoherent and incompatible policy preferences. I might agree that represents public opinion well, but it's nothing to be proud of.
      - JohnBooty 13y ago
        At the time he was elected in 2008, a majority of Americans did not favor same-sex marriage. At the time he changed his public stance, a majority of Americans favored same-sex marriage. Seems coherent.
- mscarborough 13y ago
  Is being graceful the same as being against other people having loving relationships that are different than the majority? Because Obama was against it? I really do not understand this perspective.
- Crito 13y ago
  If you replaced the word "gay" with the word "interracial", would you be receptive to the argument that we should excuse this sort of bigotry because in the past many Americans thought that way? Of course you wouldn't, so don't try to excuse it in this case.
dhimes 13y ago
I think your best bet is to treat him as someone who is ignorant and afraid. I moved to MA a decade ago. I wasn't sure what to expect with the legalization of gay marriage. (I support gay rights, voted in favor of gay marriage, have gay friends and family, etc., just like everybody else. The only reason I thought about it was because I had young children.) Answer: not much changed. No big deal. I didn't have to explain anything to my young children- turns out the kids worked it out for themselves.
- wpietri 13y ago
  I think that's good advice generally. That's certainly what I do when I'm dealing with, say, people on Facebook. But having a boss who's ignorant and afraid? Maybe of you? That's some bad news.
  - dhimes 13y ago
    No, he's probably not afraid of gay people, exactly, but is certainly ignorant of how gay people love. Often, though, once it gets humanized, this type of fear goes away. So I'd say, give him a chance. Think of the win if he is convinced to change his mind.
mindslight 13y ago
> But someone who goes so far as to say no to gay marriage is basically saying they view that group of people as less than another group of people and should have less rights Or they just think the practice of government marriage-sanctioning should be scrapped altogether, rather than extending the privilege to one more politically-popular group and pretending that you're ending discrimination.
- fingerprinter 13y ago
  And, in the meantime we continue to deny an entire set of people rights they should have and bury our head in the sand to the current real world problems this poses. Even if you hold the position you stated and wanted that change, we can't deny someone rights in the current system for some future better situation. There is an immediate and real world problem that needs to be addressed while you strive to implement your preferred system.
  - mindslight 13y ago
    Except that when you put your energy into lobbying instead of going your own way and DIY, you're supporting the machine known as government and legitimizing its role as arbiter-of-all-that-is-good. When your campaign succeeds, it does so at the expense of pigeonholing the entire issue of unnecessary marriage regulation into the simplistic "gay marriage", and people consider the entire issue solved and look for the next thing to feel progressive about. But even worse, your narrow success then serves as an advertisement of the system working and covers up the fact that you're actually three steps back due to increased government intervention everywhere else.
    - tommorris 13y ago
      Yeah, the "DIY" approach: ask all the gay couples out there who tried that with big expensive packages of legal documents that ended up being worth sweet fuck all precisely at the moment they needed it. Part of the reason there is a push for gay marriage is because the alternatives (civil partnerships, "DIY" marriages using contracts) and they've failed to provide the necessary protections for couples in the way marriage rights seem to. There is a compelling societal need to be able to say "here are people who are in an intimate, long-term trusting relationship for the purposes of decision making, finance, tax and so on". I wish you luck in your campaign to find a compelling and convincing political and intellectual argument for something that would serve the social goods that marriage does and would effectively replace marriage for gay and straight couples. Until then, I'd quite like to be able to get married to someone of the gender I'm actually attracted to. (And as of Saturday, I will be able to, thanks to the marriage laws in England changing.)
yummyfajitas 13y ago
This is about treating people the same. Gays and straights are treated the same - both are free to marry people of the opposite sex. Gays may prefer not to do that, but they do have the legal right. As for finding your preferences are not legally favored, that happens to lots of people. I prefer to have no fixed address, which is NOT a legally favorable preference to have (try opening a bank account, etc). I prefer not to buy insurance covering procedures I will never need [1]. Are laws preventing me from satisfying my preferences on these matters all unacceptable? If Eich favored Obamacare or "Know Your Customer" banking laws, would that also be unacceptable? [1] Supposing that I lived in the US.
- wpietri 13y ago
  Your notion of "treated the same" matches approximately nobody's, aside from a handful of wordy bigots. More importantly, it doesn't qualify under the 14th amendment, which is the standard that matters here: http://www.freep.com/assets/freep/pdf/C4220110321.PDF http://www.freep.com/assets/freep/pdf/C4220110321.PDF
  - yummyfajitas 13y ago
    You can demonize me all you want, but you've still provided no philosophical justification for the viewpoint that penalizing preferences in general is acceptable except for gay sex preferences. Citing an activist court opinion (which totally misuses the rational basis test) is not a substitute for thinking through your own views. If your actual opinion is merely "gays are on my team, therefore I support them", that's fine. But don't couch it in abstract principles like "treating people the same.
    - wpietri 13y ago
      "Activist court" used to have a pretty specific meaning, so I'm sad to see it become, "issuing opinions I don't agree with". There's no legislating from the bench here. There was a law that was judged to be unconstitutional, so it got struck down. As it has in other jurisdictions for strikingly similar reasons. And that Random Internet Guy disagrees with a variety of federal judges on how to apply the rational basis test is interesting I guess, but you can see how I'd be unmoved. The purpose of civil marriage is mainly to promote families. That being the way we insure the continuance of our society down the ages. Some people make their families in a way that is perfectly fine on outcome measures, but other people find squicky. My view, one with which the courts are agreeing, is that "eeew" is not a rational basis for excluding those people from the institution of marriage, because the 14th amendment demands (and our sense of natural justice requires) that people be equal before the law. Of course, I am also on team gay, because I have gay friends and gay family members. And also because I'm not a bigoted asshole. But happily, it fits in with my "treating people the same" bias, one I have carefully considered, so this one hasn't required a lot of extra thinking. And since this bias is conveniently baked into American jurisprudence already, I'm looking forward to this working itself out over the next decade or so as the "eeew" brigade dies off. And I'll add that I have no obligation to provide justifications for views that I don't hold, like the kookily put one in your first sentence. If you'd like to keep putting yourself forth as a pillar of rational discussion, I'd suggest you stick to holding people to account only for what they've said, not the things you imagine while getting freaked out about gay sex.
laughinghan 13y ago
You seem to be either implying or assuming that not supporting gay marriage necessarily means believing homosexuality is wrong, but in my experience, that is false and only the converse is true. The people I know who don't support gay marriage have no problem with homosexuality or homosexual people (that is, they have no problem with people identifying as gay nor having gay sex), they just believe that allowing gay marriage would be redefining "marriage". (Which I believe is a bigoted opinion, but I am sympathetic to their ignorance and fear.) I don't believe this is sampling bias on my part; in fact, I thought that was exactly the position on gay marriage taken up by both Obama and McCain in 2008, I specifically remember there was some debate or joint interview or something where Obama opened by strongly asserting that gay people deserve all the same rights, and McCain opened by strongly asserting that he doesn't believe in "redefining marriage", and they proceed to find that they completely agree with each other.
Tactic 13y ago
Your summary of what Eich is "basically saying" seems misleading and intended to incite others. I am highly doubtful that he believes other people don't deserve the same rights he does but instead disagrees as to if certain things are right or privileges. While I do not agree with Eich's views, framing the argument this way accomplishes nothing but fanning the fires. It makes one side feel oppressed and the other attacked. It puts everyone into a defensive mode rather focusing on the real issues. At worst it is manipulative at best it is close minded.

twoodfin 13y ago

This is unacceptable. C'mon. In 2004 and 2008, with this very much a live issue, something north of 90% of American voters voted for a presidential candidate who professed to be against gay marriage. You are getting and will continue to get the social change you want, but it's crazy to ostracize someone for having the same political view as 2008 candidate Barack Obama. Try to be graceful and persuasive.

josefresco 13y ago
Yes because we all know statements made on the campaign trail meant to appeal to both sides are a 100% accurate portrayal of the candidate's actual position.
- mscarborough 13y ago
  At some point Obama might have to take an actual stand on something, and then follow up on it. Him being a politician doesn't absolve him of his uselessness. Last example: ooh Putin, you're going to face costs for these shenanigans!
wpietri 13y ago
Are you saying that a boss of gay people shouldn't get called out for effectively saying, "Hey, you people don't deserve the same civil rights the rest of us do"? That he should be able to just coast along? Because that sounds like horseshit to me. That gay people can now get married in some minority of American states is progress, sure. But I'm not seeing why that means people, gay or straight, can't call a bigoted action a bigoted action. If somebody is obligated to be graceful and persuasive here, surely that's Eich, who started this out by doing something a lot of his employees find obviously hostile.
- skybrian 13y ago
  I think someone should ask him whether he's changed his mind. It seems fairly likely; public opinion on gay marriage has changed a lot since 2008.
  - wpietri 13y ago
    Hi, Brian! In 2012 he refused to say: https://brendaneich.com/2012/04/community-and-diversity/ https://brendaneich.com/2012/04/community-and-diversity/
    - catshirt 13y ago
      ha, this is a laughable anti-apologetic defense. replace "gay" with "black" or "women" and laugh along. edit: as i reread this an hour later i can't help but feel more strongly. i was originally laughing at the ignorance on display but it's probably more harmful than funny. "...people in any group or project of significant size and diversity will not agree on many crucial issues unrelated to the group or project." ... "Not only is insisting on ideological uniformity impractical, it is counter-productive..." this sounds like a defense out of American History X.
- chc 13y ago
  He didn't say that at all. You are reading a whole lot into a simple transfer of money about which Eich has said hardly a word. You have taken something that is barely an identifiable stance — and certainly not a public one — and turned it into a declaration of extremism. An equally plausible read would be "Eich belongs to a religion that holds marriage as a core tenet and was encouraged by his pastor to donate along with the rest of the congregation. He actually wants gays to have equal rights and believes treating gays well is the right course for any business entity, but his personal religious beliefs — which he keeps strictly separate from his official duties — have certain hooks in the word 'marriage'." Fun fact: Many churches were actually telling their congregants that without Prop. 8, the state would require their church to perform gay marriages, and that they should vote for Prop. 8 if they wanted their church's religious freedom to remain intact.
thinkpad20 13y ago
Actively contributing to anti-gay causes is not the same thing as being on the fence about gay marriage.
- charlieh 13y ago
  He wasn't "on the fence about it". He's just changed his position more often than some people change their tires. Obama was for same-sex marriage in 1996, "undecided" in 1998, opposed in 2004 and 2008, and for it again in 2012. Unambiguously.
  - thinkpad20 13y ago
    Correct or not, that's irrelevant to the point I was making. The farthest he has ever gone against gay marriage is to say that he personally believed marriage was between a man and a woman. He never campaigned against it and even when personally opposed to it, consistently said that legislation like DOMA was unnecessary. That's hardly equivalent to giving $1000 to prop 8.
    - charlieh 13y ago
      As I said to the other poster, your position appears to be this: Giving money to politicians who are against same-sex marriage: bad. Actually being a politician who's against same-sex marriage: perfectly fine. That's quite a high tolerance for cognitive dissonance you have going on there, dude.
scarmig 13y ago
Obama also (deeply incoherently, I might add) opposed Prop 8, while Eich actively funded it. Obama's position was cowardly, but pretty much every knowledgeable Democrat and Republican believed and knew that he was just cynically posturing. He was a supporter of gay marriage in 1994, for Christ's sake. How many social liberals went through the past two decades and became less supportive of gay marriage? Only to switch their mind three years later? Trust me, I'd be the first to point out that there's a whole lot to criticize Obama for in all of this. But believing he's a homophobe instead of a cynical liar is a bridge too far.
- JohnBooty 13y ago
  Looked at from another angle, it's actually quite democratic for a candidate for public office to shift his or her platform away from their personal beliefs and towards the beliefs of those they're attempting to represent.
  - scarmig 13y ago
    But all he ended up representing was incoherent and incompatible policy preferences. I might agree that represents public opinion well, but it's nothing to be proud of.
    - JohnBooty 13y ago
      At the time he was elected in 2008, a majority of Americans did not favor same-sex marriage. At the time he changed his public stance, a majority of Americans favored same-sex marriage. Seems coherent.
mscarborough 13y ago
Is being graceful the same as being against other people having loving relationships that are different than the majority? Because Obama was against it? I really do not understand this perspective.
Crito 13y ago
If you replaced the word "gay" with the word "interracial", would you be receptive to the argument that we should excuse this sort of bigotry because in the past many Americans thought that way? Of course you wouldn't, so don't try to excuse it in this case.

dhimes 13y ago

I think your best bet is to treat him as someone who is ignorant and afraid. I moved to MA a decade ago. I wasn't sure what to expect with the legalization of gay marriage. (I support gay rights, voted in favor of gay marriage, have gay friends and family, etc., just like everybody else. The only reason I thought about it was because I had young children.) Answer: not much changed. No big deal. I didn't have to explain anything to my young children- turns out the kids worked it out for themselves.

wpietri 13y ago
I think that's good advice generally. That's certainly what I do when I'm dealing with, say, people on Facebook. But having a boss who's ignorant and afraid? Maybe of you? That's some bad news.
- dhimes 13y ago
  No, he's probably not afraid of gay people, exactly, but is certainly ignorant of how gay people love. Often, though, once it gets humanized, this type of fear goes away. So I'd say, give him a chance. Think of the win if he is convinced to change his mind.

mindslight 13y ago

> But someone who goes so far as to say no to gay marriage is basically saying they view that group of people as less than another group of people and should have less rights Or they just think the practice of government marriage-sanctioning should be scrapped altogether, rather than extending the privilege to one more politically-popular group and pretending that you're ending discrimination.

fingerprinter 13y ago
And, in the meantime we continue to deny an entire set of people rights they should have and bury our head in the sand to the current real world problems this poses. Even if you hold the position you stated and wanted that change, we can't deny someone rights in the current system for some future better situation. There is an immediate and real world problem that needs to be addressed while you strive to implement your preferred system.
- mindslight 13y ago
  Except that when you put your energy into lobbying instead of going your own way and DIY, you're supporting the machine known as government and legitimizing its role as arbiter-of-all-that-is-good. When your campaign succeeds, it does so at the expense of pigeonholing the entire issue of unnecessary marriage regulation into the simplistic "gay marriage", and people consider the entire issue solved and look for the next thing to feel progressive about. But even worse, your narrow success then serves as an advertisement of the system working and covers up the fact that you're actually three steps back due to increased government intervention everywhere else.
  - tommorris 13y ago
    Yeah, the "DIY" approach: ask all the gay couples out there who tried that with big expensive packages of legal documents that ended up being worth sweet fuck all precisely at the moment they needed it. Part of the reason there is a push for gay marriage is because the alternatives (civil partnerships, "DIY" marriages using contracts) and they've failed to provide the necessary protections for couples in the way marriage rights seem to. There is a compelling societal need to be able to say "here are people who are in an intimate, long-term trusting relationship for the purposes of decision making, finance, tax and so on". I wish you luck in your campaign to find a compelling and convincing political and intellectual argument for something that would serve the social goods that marriage does and would effectively replace marriage for gay and straight couples. Until then, I'd quite like to be able to get married to someone of the gender I'm actually attracted to. (And as of Saturday, I will be able to, thanks to the marriage laws in England changing.)

yummyfajitas 13y ago

This is about treating people the same. Gays and straights are treated the same - both are free to marry people of the opposite sex. Gays may prefer not to do that, but they do have the legal right. As for finding your preferences are not legally favored, that happens to lots of people. I prefer to have no fixed address, which is NOT a legally favorable preference to have (try opening a bank account, etc). I prefer not to buy insurance covering procedures I will never need [1]. Are laws preventing me from satisfying my preferences on these matters all unacceptable? If Eich favored Obamacare or "Know Your Customer" banking laws, would that also be unacceptable? [1] Supposing that I lived in the US.

wpietri 13y ago
Your notion of "treated the same" matches approximately nobody's, aside from a handful of wordy bigots. More importantly, it doesn't qualify under the 14th amendment, which is the standard that matters here: http://www.freep.com/assets/freep/pdf/C4220110321.PDF http://www.freep.com/assets/freep/pdf/C4220110321.PDF
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  You can demonize me all you want, but you've still provided no philosophical justification for the viewpoint that penalizing preferences in general is acceptable except for gay sex preferences. Citing an activist court opinion (which totally misuses the rational basis test) is not a substitute for thinking through your own views. If your actual opinion is merely "gays are on my team, therefore I support them", that's fine. But don't couch it in abstract principles like "treating people the same.
  - wpietri 13y ago
    "Activist court" used to have a pretty specific meaning, so I'm sad to see it become, "issuing opinions I don't agree with". There's no legislating from the bench here. There was a law that was judged to be unconstitutional, so it got struck down. As it has in other jurisdictions for strikingly similar reasons. And that Random Internet Guy disagrees with a variety of federal judges on how to apply the rational basis test is interesting I guess, but you can see how I'd be unmoved. The purpose of civil marriage is mainly to promote families. That being the way we insure the continuance of our society down the ages. Some people make their families in a way that is perfectly fine on outcome measures, but other people find squicky. My view, one with which the courts are agreeing, is that "eeew" is not a rational basis for excluding those people from the institution of marriage, because the 14th amendment demands (and our sense of natural justice requires) that people be equal before the law. Of course, I am also on team gay, because I have gay friends and gay family members. And also because I'm not a bigoted asshole. But happily, it fits in with my "treating people the same" bias, one I have carefully considered, so this one hasn't required a lot of extra thinking. And since this bias is conveniently baked into American jurisprudence already, I'm looking forward to this working itself out over the next decade or so as the "eeew" brigade dies off. And I'll add that I have no obligation to provide justifications for views that I don't hold, like the kookily put one in your first sentence. If you'd like to keep putting yourself forth as a pillar of rational discussion, I'd suggest you stick to holding people to account only for what they've said, not the things you imagine while getting freaked out about gay sex.

laughinghan 13y ago

You seem to be either implying or assuming that not supporting gay marriage necessarily means believing homosexuality is wrong, but in my experience, that is false and only the converse is true. The people I know who don't support gay marriage have no problem with homosexuality or homosexual people (that is, they have no problem with people identifying as gay nor having gay sex), they just believe that allowing gay marriage would be redefining "marriage". (Which I believe is a bigoted opinion, but I am sympathetic to their ignorance and fear.) I don't believe this is sampling bias on my part; in fact, I thought that was exactly the position on gay marriage taken up by both Obama and McCain in 2008, I specifically remember there was some debate or joint interview or something where Obama opened by strongly asserting that gay people deserve all the same rights, and McCain opened by strongly asserting that he doesn't believe in "redefining marriage", and they proceed to find that they completely agree with each other.

Tactic 13y ago

Your summary of what Eich is "basically saying" seems misleading and intended to incite others. I am highly doubtful that he believes other people don't deserve the same rights he does but instead disagrees as to if certain things are right or privileges. While I do not agree with Eich's views, framing the argument this way accomplishes nothing but fanning the fires. It makes one side feel oppressed and the other attacked. It puts everyone into a defensive mode rather focusing on the real issues. At worst it is manipulative at best it is close minded.