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Eich didn't just hold the same nominal position on marriage, though. He donated a large sum of money to actively (and successfully for a time) strip his coworkers of their legal rights. Not only did his position on marriage not change, but he expressed no regret over the actual, tangible harm that he helped to cause to his numerous gay and lesbian coworkers. It doesn't sound quite as soft when you put it that way. There was no big ruckus when he was the CTO for the Mozilla Foundation, either. But when you become the CEO of an organization, you become its public face in many ways. And he had some baggage, there. Like it or not, many corporate CEOs are held to different standards of public discourse by their employers, because companies generally don't want to risk alienating consumers. Now, I don't know that it was right for him to lose his job. That was probably the wrong thing to happen at this point in time. I have big problems with companies being able to exercise control over people's expression of their political beliefs and actions. I feel bad for him losing the position, I really do. On the other hand, if he was not going to be able to effectively run the foundation and there were schisms forming in the community that's so essential to the continuation of the foundation's work...what are you, as Mozilla, to do? I mean, if you had a corporate leader who came out publicly and said, "I don't think mixed race couples should be allowed to marry," she or he probably would not last much longer in that position. And I'll bet most people would not have much of a problem. In fact, I don't have to bet about a situation like that — nobody shed too many tears for Donald Sterling. It's a complicated issue. I'd strongly suggest reading (or listening) to the things that Dan Savage and Andrew Sullivan (both gay writers with very different political bents) had to say afterwards. Savage pointed out, very interestingly, that this ouster, while pinned on the "gay mafia", was really something that came from other large tech companies, from online journalistic enterprises, and from inside Mozilla itself. It may just be the first pang of society saying, "Bigotry against gay people is not socially acceptable, just like many other forms of bigotry." Again, like it or not, society does this all the time. See, again, Donald Sterling for a case study in it. |
He also apologized repeatedly for offending his coworkers, so it's incorrect to say he "expressed no regret."
In fact, I think the vilification of Eich neatly demonstrates why Proposition 8 won at the ballot box. Religious people were frightened that their religious beliefs would first be rebranded as bigotry, which would then give their ideological opponents the opportunity to punish them. The fate of Eich seems to confirm these fears.