[BearOso]

> Can people please stop this latent homophobia? Mozilla fired a person who donated money to a deplorable cause. You can try to hide behind free speech, but we all know what this is about.

He quit. And I don’t agree with it, but I wouldn’t exactly call his cause deplorable. People with those views can believe they’re being completely ethical. That was also in 2008, a different political climate, and nobody allowed him to learn from it or to restitute.

Of course, I agree that wasn’t their downfall—it was simply misdirected goals and funding.

[dralley]

>He quit. And I don’t agree with it, but I wouldn’t exactly call his cause deplorable.

The purpose of Proposition 8 was to remove the right to marry from gay couples - yes remove - because the courts had already granted them that right.

If I was a gay Mozilla employee and I learned that my CEO wanted to remove rights which the legal system had already granted me, I would be so incredibly demoralized and pissed.

Regardless of personal beliefs, it's a bad thing for a leader of a tech company to be doing if they want to retain talent.

[nnethercote]

It was a really weird and messy situation, and unpleasant to live through.

I agree that Brendan's Prop 8 donation was bad. But he did it privately, and never (AFAIK) made anti-LGBT comments in public. People who had worked with him for many years were surprised to find he had these views. It was only found out because of political donation public disclosure laws.

Some Mozilla employees publicly criticized Brendan for the Prop 8 donation, but some defended him, because of the aforementioned privateness of it. A number of the defenses came from LGBT employees.

The pile-on at the time was intense. It lasted more than a week. It reached the front page of my local paper. Crazy stuff.

Brendan chose to stand down as CEO and also quit Mozilla. He wasn't fired, and Mozilla leadership asked him to stay.

All this nuance was lost. Lots of left-leaning people concluded that Mozilla had knowingly promoted a proudly anti-LGBT guy to CEO. Lots of right-leaning people concluded that Mozilla had fired their CEO for his political views. Both conclusions were greatly over-simplified. Almost everyone found a reason to hate Mozilla. Bad times!