God that was horrible to read. Can you imagine trying to do anything with someone so toxic? "Can you pass the cheese please? NO BECAUSE YOU SAID BAD THINGS ON TWITTER!"
These people are not acting in love. They are acting in hate trying to protect those they love. It is shameful. It is how wars start.
@elia's last commit to Opal was about two weeks ago, and that issue dates from 2015. That doesn't seem to add up to what you seem to argue that it does.
It's enough to establish that Coraline's goal is to collect the scalps of people she disagrees with, and the Contributor Covenant is one prong of her strategy. Whether or not she was successful is another matter, but as for intent, it's right there in the title -- "Transphobic maintainer should be removed from project". The Contributor Covenant is quick and clear to emphasize that removal is a penalty for violation of the code, or for not taking sufficient steps as a maintainer to ensure that guilty parties are sufficiently unpersoned.
I'm opposed to racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia too, but damnit, if I'm a maintainer and Alex Jones has a good patch, I'm going to clip out the attached verbiage about Hillary Clinton being a literal demon and roll the patch into my next rc. I'd be doing the project a disservice not to.
The OED has entries that were submitted by an insane murderer from the asylum (look up William Chester Minor).
One incident, three years ago, which came to nothing in any event? I think we must differ in our definitions of 'enough'. Are we looking at an established pattern of behavior which is suggestive of current intent? Or are we instead looking at a single moment of excess, whose outcome provided a salutary lesson since taken firmly to heart? There's not enough here to know - the claim has yet to be substantiated, if substantiation there be.
eta: As it happens, I'd take Alex Jones's patch, too. But I would require it be resubmitted anonymously, and without inflammatory verbiage. If not so resubmitted, I would not merge it. Yes, it does the project a disservice to reject good code. But software, like every made thing in the world, is made by people. It is not unreasonable for me to look at the sort of people who attend upon Alex Jones, and then at the sort of people who find his presence so distasteful that they will not associate themselves with anything he's touched however fleetingly, and decide which sort of people I prefer to include, by my actions, in my pool of potential contributors. If the latter group seems to me to be more likely to contribute good code, then I'm not going to put them off by having Alex Jones on my contributor list. If that costs the project a good patch, then that cost is still less than the other - if I've evaluated correctly, and if the patch has merit, someone not so divisive will submit another like it before very long.
Of course, most people don't give a damn either way, and mainly just want to do the work they're doing and land their changes with a minimum of fuss. Which is more or less the point that I'm trying to make here: this is neither an attempt to install a blood estrogen titer in the code review process for Linux kernel contributions, nor to ensure that Linux kernel development is a clubhouse admitting only pale penis-bearing people of power. Everyone attempting to make a substantive contribution, of whatever sort, to the process, is doing so in good faith, out of a genuine belief that their contribution will improve the quality of the result. But I appreciate that's hard to keep sight of, when Twitter and ESR and /g/ join in, in their inimitable fashion to add only heat and no light.
These people are not acting in love. They are acting in hate trying to protect those they love. It is shameful. It is how wars start.