[fennecfoxen]

Okay. "First" was rhetorical, rather than factual. :P

In any event, there have been plenty of regimes in history where you needed to be a member of The Party and toe the party line... and if not, you'd be ineligible for any position of power, and maybe out of a job. Perhaps your nation had a revolution, and the party in question is Communists. Perhaps it's merely a Reformation, and you're just not allowed to be Catholic anymore (or a counter-reformation, and you're not allowed to be Protestant). Maybe it's just the local banana republic.

And this is purely a partisan-affiliation play. No one has seriously asserted that Eich was mean to any individual gay person, influenced company policy in a way that said gay people are unwelcome, or anything of that nature.

In any event, it's quite clear that at least some portion of our society -- the one Mozilla operates in -- works under the guiding principles of those regimes. How modern of us!