4 ms·

One by one: I would argue you're not the public face of the company until you are the CEO, or a PR officer. While your primary job is involved with engineering

by wfo 11y ago

One by one: I would argue you're not the public face of the company until you are the CEO, or a PR officer. While your primary job is involved with engineering or architecture, you have a technical role, but as CEO your role shifts to become primarily political and managerial. These roles do of course all blend together at smaller companies, but the spotlight appears certainly the moment you assume the mantle of CEO. You are right I don't know the history by heart (certainly not as well as you do) but I think there's an argument to be made that in most companies there is significantly less concern about the politics/personal beliefs of non-CEO employees than the appointed public face. While I certainly agree the donation doesn't fit the legal definition, I'd say it falls under a very sane definition of hate speech, at least in the context under which the proposition existed at the time and the movement it represented. Prop 8 was an initiative designed as a symbolic gesture by anti-gay (read: hate) activists to codify in law the explicit removal ("re-removal", in the words of the judge who ruled on it) of rights from a marginalized group of people. Vocal support for it is hate speech. Monetary support is similar but more extreme. I don't think this characterization is far off though I will admit it is unnecessarily incendiary because of the unintended conflation with the legal term. So I will give you this; it is a speech action, and it is hateful, but I shouldn't have characterized it as hate speech. And for many "take your rights away" exactly characterizes this initiative. Though in California domestic partnerships exist which give the same rights as a marriage, it's codifying in law that a gay relationship is 'less than' a straight relationship. Removing the actual rights associated with the partnership happens to be politically untenable in California, though it isn't in many other states and so they have done exactly this; prop 8 was a symbolic gesture to many that said "We can't take your rights away much as we'd like to, but remember there are still a whole lot of anti-gay people in California". And since writing my original post I learned more about the history of the incident, read your blog post on inclusiveness in response to the incident which I found very passionate and compelling and changed my mind; I am still vehemently opposed to prop 8 or any measure like it and I still think it's a hateful and ugly thing to support, and that the public face of a company that supports inclusiveness has no business issuing public statements in favor of it, but I agree you were victimized by a crusade, the boycott was out of line and inappropriate, and have no problem with the appointment. So many news stories pass us by and all we retain from them are snippets of blogspam or clickbait articles or comments on social media and we all get our own impressions of how things occurred, often times they are horribly distorted one-sided glimpses we have into the histories of actual events. I think in general people in this age, myself especially included, are too quick to condemn in situations they don't fully understand so I apologize and I appreciate all the work you've done for Mozilla, and freedom and openness on the internet.

BradCantrell 11y ago
When gays talk about how they are being discriminated against by being prevented from equal rights of marriage that straight people have, I think this is kind of a 'me too' knee jerk reaction and I dont think most gays have put any thought into what marriage really is. Marriage is not just a man and woman committed to living together in a monogamous relationship, thats nothing more than a formalized relationship. A marriage is a contract where a man promises to provide for a woman and the children he has with her. Despite all the talk of 'feminism' and 'patriarchy', we live in a society where women still expects the man to provide for a her and the children they have together. Where does this sense of morality come from? There are societies in the world where men are not tied to women and children are raised as part of a community. The fact is that the laws of marriage uphold an idea of the christian family unit. All this hoohaw that gays make about how they can get married too now is really just a cheap shot at gaining benefits for married couples that are designed to offset the huge expense of having children. The vast majority of gays dont have children so this is whole idea of them getting married is just for show and to cash in on money they dont need. Heterosexual men are the providers of the children of this country whether or not they get married due to the child support laws that exist. There is a reason that many countries call the 'marriage' between gays a civil union, because the vast majority of the time thats all it is. These marriage and child support laws are based on christian morality despite how much divorce lawyers would argue that it grew naturally out of some kind of innate sense of justice.
- BobNNN 11y ago
  So why don't you folks fight for changes in the law to only convey the benefits of marriage to couples with children? Surely you'd include gay couples in that if you did, right?
  - BradCantrell 11y ago
    Thats exactly what is GOING to happen, there is going to have to be legal separation between married couple with and without children. In the past there were financial benefits given to everyone who was married rather than waiting till they have children to encourage couples to have children. Also because in western culture we are raised with the idea that a man will support a woman so she can stay in the home whether or not they have kids. All these implicit assumptions are gone now that gays are married. Gay couples are much more likely to be self-sufficient and not have one partner who relies on the other. When a heterosexual couple divorces, the wife takes half even though most often she did not contribute financially to the marriage because there is an implicit idea here that the man is providing ALL the financial support in the relationship. Tax and work benefits also make this assumption and so now we are going to have a lot of gays trying to cash in on all these marriage benefits even though they are most usually not supporting their spouse nor ever going to have children. These issues did not come up in the past because there were hardly any married gays, but now that gay marriage is federally legal you are going to see more legal and statistical definitions distinguishing between marriages where a spouse supports their significant other and possibly children and and marriages who dont. Guess what, you are going to find that 95% of the time that gays fall into the second category.

by wfo 11y ago

BradCantrell 11y ago

When gays talk about how they are being discriminated against by being prevented from equal rights of marriage that straight people have, I think this is kind of a 'me too' knee jerk reaction and I dont think most gays have put any thought into what marriage really is. Marriage is not just a man and woman committed to living together in a monogamous relationship, thats nothing more than a formalized relationship. A marriage is a contract where a man promises to provide for a woman and the children he has with her. Despite all the talk of 'feminism' and 'patriarchy', we live in a society where women still expects the man to provide for a her and the children they have together. Where does this sense of morality come from? There are societies in the world where men are not tied to women and children are raised as part of a community. The fact is that the laws of marriage uphold an idea of the christian family unit. All this hoohaw that gays make about how they can get married too now is really just a cheap shot at gaining benefits for married couples that are designed to offset the huge expense of having children. The vast majority of gays dont have children so this is whole idea of them getting married is just for show and to cash in on money they dont need. Heterosexual men are the providers of the children of this country whether or not they get married due to the child support laws that exist. There is a reason that many countries call the 'marriage' between gays a civil union, because the vast majority of the time thats all it is. These marriage and child support laws are based on christian morality despite how much divorce lawyers would argue that it grew naturally out of some kind of innate sense of justice.

BobNNN 11y ago
So why don't you folks fight for changes in the law to only convey the benefits of marriage to couples with children? Surely you'd include gay couples in that if you did, right?
- BradCantrell 11y ago
  Thats exactly what is GOING to happen, there is going to have to be legal separation between married couple with and without children. In the past there were financial benefits given to everyone who was married rather than waiting till they have children to encourage couples to have children. Also because in western culture we are raised with the idea that a man will support a woman so she can stay in the home whether or not they have kids. All these implicit assumptions are gone now that gays are married. Gay couples are much more likely to be self-sufficient and not have one partner who relies on the other. When a heterosexual couple divorces, the wife takes half even though most often she did not contribute financially to the marriage because there is an implicit idea here that the man is providing ALL the financial support in the relationship. Tax and work benefits also make this assumption and so now we are going to have a lot of gays trying to cash in on all these marriage benefits even though they are most usually not supporting their spouse nor ever going to have children. These issues did not come up in the past because there were hardly any married gays, but now that gay marriage is federally legal you are going to see more legal and statistical definitions distinguishing between marriages where a spouse supports their significant other and possibly children and and marriages who dont. Guess what, you are going to find that 95% of the time that gays fall into the second category.