I recently wrote about the National Organization for Marriage's reaction to the resignation of Brendon Eich as CEO of Mozilla over his donation to Prop 8. But the conservative freakout over his resignation extends much further than NOM.
Jim Treacher of The Daily Caller writes:
If you believe marriage is between a man and a woman, that means you hate gay people. Why? Because everybody says so. You don’t want to be an outcast, do you?
Therefore, if you’ve ever in your life donated to a cause that seeks to preserve the traditional definition of marriage, that means you must be shunned.
That’s what happened to Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich. In 2008, he donated $1,000 to support California’s Proposition 8. Now, just a couple of weeks after Mozilla named him CEO, he’s stepping down after his own employees called for it. In public.
Breitbart's Ben Shapiro
writes:
On Thursday, CEO Brendan Eich of Mozilla was forced out of his job thanks to his $1,000 donation to the Proposition 8 pro-traditional marriage effort in California in 2008. At that point, he held the exact same position as Barack Obama on traditional marriage. Now, that position has soured in the nostrils of the militant left, which seeks to ruin the lives of those with whom it disagrees.
The editors of National Review
write:
The nation’s full-time gay-rights professionals simply will not rest until a homogeneous and stultifying monoculture is settled upon the land, and if that means deploying a ridiculous lynch mob to pronounce anathema upon a California technology executive for private views acted on in his private life, then so be it.
The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto
writes:
So here we have at least three corporations ganging up on an individual and depriving him of his livelihood solely on account of his personal political views.
Rush Limbaugh
declared:
He is being described now as a bigot and "filled with hatred" because he believes that marriage is a union of a man and a woman. He tried to hang on when the controversy hit. He said, "Look, my personal political views have nothing to do with the way I plan on running Mozilla." That didn't fly. They had to get the scalp. They had to take him out. They had to send a message to anybody else that your view must comply.
If you are in the tech industry, and if you work anywhere in the tech business, and you're gonna become a powerful executive anywhere, you had better toe the line. You had better be in favor of everything the militant gay activists are in favor of or we're gonna claim your scalp. We're going to destroy your career. And everybody is afraid of them. So Brendan Eich is gone, for the identical position that President Barack Obama held at the exact same time, in 2008.
Bottom line: conservatives think we're intolerant liberals. But if they're so concerned about someone losing a livelihood over a seemingly irrelevant aspect of their lives, maybe they may want to ask World Vision why
they are ensuring the same thing:
Today, the World Vision U.S. board publicly reversed its recent decision to change our employment conduct policy. The board acknowledged they made a mistake and chose to revert to our longstanding conduct policy requiring sexual abstinence for all single employees and faithfulness within the Biblical covenant of marriage between a man and a woman.
In our board's effort to unite around the church's shared mission to serve the poor in the name of Christ, we failed to be consistent with World Vision U.S.'s commitment to the traditional understanding of Biblical marriage and our own Statement of Faith, which says, "We believe the Bible to be the inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God." And we also failed to seek enough counsel from our own Christian partners. As a result, we made a change to our conduct policy that was not consistent with our Statement of Faith and our commitment to the sanctity of marriage.
Here's my ultimate stance on this. I support the right of Mozilla, as a private company, to fire Brendon Eich over his donation to Prop 8. However, I do not believe that they should. However, that's not what happened. Eich resigned voluntarily. I cannot stress that enough. I also support World Vision's right to not hire people in same-sex marriages. However, I do not believe that they should.
In summary, here are the two situations:
Mozilla's CEO voluntarily resigned after being criticized for donating to a political campaign that wrote discrimination against LGBT people into California's Constitution.
World Vision ensured that they would refuse to hire anyone if they disapprove of an aspect of their personal lives.
What's more intolerant?
What's more deserving of outrage?
Obviously, the latter. So why is it going to the former?
The answer is simple. Conservatives love anti-LGBT discrimination. They don't get outraged over it. They just can't stand it when it's turned back on them (even though that's not what happened).
To an untrained observer, this controversy may seem like intolerant liberalism. But once you get deeper, it becomes clear that this is intolerant and hypocritical conservatism.
Mon Apr 07, 2014 at 1:54 PM PT: Some of the comments have been critical of the diary. I'll address those here:
I stand by my statement that Eich resigned voluntarily. No matter what pressure he faced, ultimately, it was his decision to resign. No one made that decision for him. He wasn't sacked.
I also saw a statement that the situation at World Vision is different to that at Mozilla because it's a religious organization. World Vision is a religious organization, but both Mozilla and World Vision are private organizations with the legal (not necessarily moral) right to hire who they want.
Mozilla also had an interest in not having him as CEO. To have him as CEO would have been damaging to them.
Finally, I would like to make it clear that I do not believe that people should be fired or denied service over political beliefs or political actions (but again, that's not what happened here). I've argued this before:
http://www.dailykos.com/...