arstechnicaAfter Eich resigns, conservatives slam Mozilla—and call for boycott"If that attitude spreads, it will damage our society. "
by Nate Anderson - Apr 4 2014, 7:45pm EDT
Media coverage of Mozilla and its Firefox Web browser over the past week has largely focused on new CEO Brendan Eich and his 2008 opposition to gay marriage (in the form of a $1,000 donation to California's Prop 8 campaign). Yesterday, Eich resigned from Mozilla, and Mozilla has had plenty of support for letting Eich leave.
But it's a new day, and that means it's the turn of more conservative or libertarian thinkers and activists to bash Mozilla. Some are even calling for boycotts of the Firefox browser in campaigns that mirror those of sites like OKCupid, which encouraged users of its dating site to ditch Firefox as a way of pressuring Mozilla to distance itself from Eich.
Andrew Sullivan, the Daily Dish blogger and book author who has done as much as anyone over the last decade to make "marriage equality" a term that even conservatives can love, ripped Mozilla for not backing Eich.
"There is only one permissible opinion at Mozilla, and all dissidents must be purged!" he wrote, adding:
Yep, that’s left-liberal tolerance in a nut-shell. No, he wasn’t a victim of government censorship or intimidation. He was a victim of the free market in which people can choose to express their opinions by boycotts, free speech and the like. He still has his full First Amendment rights. But what we’re talking about is the obvious and ugly intolerance of parts of the gay movement, who have reacted to years of being subjected to social obloquy by returning the favor... This is a repugnantly illiberal sentiment. It is also unbelievably stupid for the gay rights movement. You want to squander the real gains we have made by argument and engagement by becoming just as intolerant of others’ views as the Christianists? You’ve just found a great way to do this. It’s a bad, self-inflicted blow. And all of us will come to regret it.
Over at The Atlantic, gay marriage supporter Conor Friedersdorf sounded similar concerns.
Calls for his ouster were premised on the notion that all support for Proposition 8 was hateful, and that a CEO should be judged not just by his or her conduct in the professional realm, but also by political causes he or she supports as a private citizen.
If that attitude spreads, it will damage our society...
It isn't difficult to see the wisdom in inculcating the norm that the political and the professional are separate realms, for following it makes so many people and institutions better off in a diverse, pluralistic society. The contrary approach would certainly have a chilling effect on political speech and civic participation, as does Mozilla's behavior toward Eich...
There is very likely hypocrisy at work too. Does anyone doubt that had a business fired a CEO six years ago for making a political donation against Prop 8, liberals silent during this controversy (or supportive of the resignation) would've argued that contributions have nothing to do with a CEO's ability to do his job? They'd have called that firing an illiberal outrage, but today they're averse to vocally disagreeing with allies.
Jim Burroway of the gay advocacy and information site Box Turtle Bulletin picked up the "ability to do the job" and ran with it:
But at a time when we are demanding passage of the Employment Non-Discrmination Act so that companies can’t just up and fire LGBT employees because they don’t agree with them — as they can now in about two-thirds of our states — we need to think very long and hard about whether we should demand someone be removed from his job for exercising his constitutional rights as part of the cornerstone of our democracy: a free and fair election.
We say that LGBT people shouldn’t be fired for something that has nothing to do with their job performance. I think that principle is good enough to apply to everyone, including Eich. And there is no evidence that I can find that his donation affected his ability to do the job he was hired to do. Eich made his donation out of his own pocket. He didn’t do it on behalf of Mozilla, he didn’t do it with Mozilla funds or through a foundation sponsored by Mozilla. And he certainly didn’t own Mozilla, which is a non-profit organization. It was his own dime on his own time.
Others have gone beyond argument, though, calling for boycotts of Mozilla and its browser. The conservative Allapundit, for instance, supports gay marriage but can't abide the view that "free speech is valuable only insofar as it serves the right politics."
If you oppose gay marriage (which I do not), you should treat this as a lesson that organized economic power is really your only way to make [same sex marriage] fans think twice about purge-minded boycotts. You’re not going to talk them into an “agree to disagree” accommodation at this point; the trends in popular opinion are too far in their favor, and to many of them, opposing gay marriage is tantamount to opposing interracial marriage, i.e. a vestige of a system of persecution. Start by dropping Firefox, if you use it now, and go from there. If you don’t, this will keep happening.
The conservative activists at TruthRevolt went a step further, mirroring OKCupid's actions by blocking Firefox users to the site and displaying a message that says, in part:
Pardon this interruption of your TruthRevolt experience. Mozilla recently forced its CEO, Brendan Eich, to resign over his personal support for traditional marriage. The firing followed a vicious smear campaign against Eich by dating website OKCupid, in which OKCupid blocked Mozilla users from visiting their website.
We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access TruthRevolt, given Mozilla’s crackdown on political and religious positions held by millions of Americans.
A look through the Ars comments on previous stories about the controversy shows the same passionate divide seen more publicly in the blogosphere this week, though so far the attention has focused almost exclusively on Mozilla. It's not hard to see how similar litmus tests could spread, though. Will we soon see the day in which each faction in a political battle backs only its "own" technical products—one side using only Google, the other using only Bing—based on the personal views of the CEOs?
The online battle of ideas this week has been, in part, about whether that world would be a better one.
