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Right now, the United States is about evenly divided between people who support and oppose gay marriage. If everyone on the gay-marriage side "refuses to suppor

Right now, the United States is about evenly divided between people who support and oppose gay marriage. If everyone on the gay-marriage side "refuses to support bigots", and everyone on the anti-gay-marriage side "refuses to support sinners", then we wind up with two totally separate economies and social groups that don't talk to each other at all. This is very bad. You really, really don't want to live in a country where Blues can only eat in Blue restaurants and live in Blue apartments and wear Blue clothing, and Greens can only eat in Green restaurants and live in Green apartments and wear Green clothing. See: Northern Ireland, Iraq, Syria... "I am a pro-choice atheist. When I lived in Ireland, one of my friends was a pro-life Christian. I thought she was responsible for the unnecessary suffering of millions of women. She thought I was responsible for killing millions of babies. And yet she invited me over to her house for dinner without poisoning the food. And I ate it, and thanked her, and sent her a nice card, without smashing all her china. Please try not to be insufficiently surprised by this. Every time a Republican and a Democrat break bread together with good will, it is a miracle. It is an equilibrium as beneficial as civilization or liberalism, which developed in the total absence of any central enforcing authority." http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-co...

stormbrew 13y ago
And welcome to reductio ad absurdum. If we boycott this one thing we will boycott all the things and then we will live in a 70s dystopic film where the people who wear KFC shirts can't talk to the people who wear McDonalds shirts! Somehow we've gotten along just fine so far with the existence of boycotts without turning into a world where half the people are boycotting half the other people. Again, no one is saying boycott Mozilla because they hired a bigot. They're boycotting Mozilla because they chose a bigot as their chief executive knowing full well this blowback might happen (since it happened on a smaller scale with the CTO appointment in 2012). That means it doesn't matter to them, and for people to whom this issue matters a great deal that is unacceptable. Nor, incidentally, is anyone saying you should poison the guy's food. It is not "mean" to choose what you spend your money on.

stormbrew 13y ago

And welcome to reductio ad absurdum. If we boycott this one thing we will boycott all the things and then we will live in a 70s dystopic film where the people who wear KFC shirts can't talk to the people who wear McDonalds shirts! Somehow we've gotten along just fine so far with the existence of boycotts without turning into a world where half the people are boycotting half the other people. Again, no one is saying boycott Mozilla because they hired a bigot. They're boycotting Mozilla because they chose a bigot as their chief executive knowing full well this blowback might happen (since it happened on a smaller scale with the CTO appointment in 2012). That means it doesn't matter to them, and for people to whom this issue matters a great deal that is unacceptable. Nor, incidentally, is anyone saying you should poison the guy's food. It is not "mean" to choose what you spend your money on.