Comment by BrendanEich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BrendanEich | Hacker News Reader

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Hey, Dave. I’m not sure why you thought I was a libertarian. I haven’t identified as such since the ‘80s. As for Buchanan in the ‘90s, I don’t support everything he said - I was most supportive of his economic nationalism.

Did you ever support a politician (say, Obama) only to find they said something you disavowed? Sam Yagan of okcupid did. I disavow Buchanan’s unconstitutional AIDS registry, and probably other proposals he has made.

As for “social authoritarian”, California regulates and licenses marriage via family law, as do all states. I come from an older generation of allies who supported Mark Leno et al. when they labored over, passed, and amended to full positive-rights equivalence with marriage, CA’s Domestic Partner Law (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_partnership_in_Cali...). This was considered just and sufficient, until it was not — and then anyone who questioned the revolutionary tactics used to cast former allies as haters and bigots became a hater too.

I dissent from all such revolutionary tactics and agendas. I agree with dissenting LGBTQ scholars of note on this point re marriage equality, e.g., Camille Paglia. (I don’t agree with those scholars on everything, of course. Same as with most people, including politicians I’ve supported in the past.)

Now the shoe is on the other foot. Marriage equality is law and I’m an officer of a corporation with a genuinely diverse roster of employees. I am committed to the fullest definition of inclusivity, which covers right wingers as well as left, libertarians and non-libertarians. For you to gin up a case that I pretended to be a libertarian is silly (I never pretended that).

But worse, if you judge Brave by a past and too-narrow slice of my opinions, you are doing what haters who boycott Apple because of Tim Cook do. It is your right, of course, but it looks like consequentialism (end justifies means) or really just Who/Whom ax-grinding. I hope you will use Brave in view of what we are trying to do, as a group of people who share a cause and set of beliefs, whatever our other or past causes and beliefs.

I actually supported Brave in spite of your history. We've talked on Mastodon.social about it. I am always a fan of humans being complex and redemption being contextual.

Then I read about BAT. Your business plan soured me.

I'm very sorry that I missed ended your politics Brendan. Sincerely. O obviously misinterpreted what you said. But that changes very little, and I've already spoke at length about what it doesn't change elsewhere in this thread.

You say more about BAT sourness? Here, twitter DM, whatever works. Thanks.

> I come from an older generation of allies who supported Mark Leno et al. when they labored over, passed, and amended to full positive-rights equivalence with marriage, CA’s Domestic Partner Law [...] This was considered just and sufficient, until it was not

Oh, please, no, it wasn't by, well, almost anyone. Most LGBTQ advocates and allies never considered it “just and sufficient”, they (at best) considered it at best a distasteful compromise that was better than the pre-existing state and at worst a capitulation to those who wanted to give religious groups a veto over he definition of civil marriage which ignored the enduring lesson of the struggle for civil rights that separate institutions are inherently unequal nnyour and entrenched in law the othering of LGBTQ people and thir families and relationships.

The idea that there was ever a consensus, either in society or among LGBTQ advocates and allies, that the separate institution of domestic partnership was “just and sufficient” is rewriting history.

> Oh, please, no, it wasn't by, well, almost anyone.

False. Mark Leno said so. http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Gay-marriage-up-to-govern...

You may not be familiar, but in previous decades, Mark Simpson, Michel Foucault, and many other gay writers were against "gay marriage", often expliciltly arguing it was an embourgeoisement to be rejected.

Andrew Sullivan and others (with lots of documentary and eyewitness evidence) have written about how they had to move the consensus even among gay people toward marriage equality when it was far away. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...

> Mark Leno said so.

I can believe Leno said that, but I am also quite aware that it was a very small minority opinion even among supporters of the legislation.

I'll also note that Leno isn't quoted as saying anything like that in the article you cite to support that Leno said it, though.

> You may not be familiar, but in previous decades, Mark Simpson, Michel Foucault, and many other gay writers were against "gay marriage", often expliciltly arguing it was an embourgeoisement to be rejected.

You are misrepresenting Foucault, who did not argue against (or for, it just simply wasn't a controversy he addressed) equality in marriage but that the limitations (irrespective of sexual preference of the partners) of socially acceptable and institutionalized relationships to only marriage and family-by-descent ought to be lifted and additional forms of relationship recognized and valorized.

Neither did Simpson come from the radical, anti-embourgeoisement, angle you suggest, instead simply buying into the (historically inaccurate) religious right story about the origin of civil marriage and the pro-state-establishment-of-religion argument of the religious right that would give the religious right veto power over the civil definition of religion. That's certainly a viewpoint that exists—and which AFAICT Simpson still holds—but it wasn't a dominant one among LGBTQ activists and allies anytime in the 1999-2011 history of the establishment and expansion of California's Domestic Partnership system. Not even when aggregated with people who did take the radical position you identify, even though neither Simpson nor Foucault are among them.

> Andrew Sullivan and others (with lots of documentary and eyewitness evidence) have written about how they had to move the consensus even among gay people toward marriage equality when it was far away.

I'm not sure why you are pointing to an Slate article that is simply a reprint of one of Sullivan's 1989 articles laying out a conservative case for gay marriage to support your contention that Sullivan and others still had to move the consensus of LGBTQ advocates and allies to support marriage sometime after the time in 2011 when California harmonized domestic partnership with marriage so that the two arguably differed in name only.

Sullivan was certainly important in moving the needle in terms of what people thought was reasonable to set as a near term goal and how they sought to sell it (whether he really shifted the ground on the long-term goal, or just made it seem less quixotic and pie-in-the-sky might be a debate), but he did that well before the time you are referencing.

You spin a fine tale, but it seems to be entirely historical revisionism backed with red herring links and name dropping.

I'm not spinning, I saw Leno on the news. I'll try to find a decent link.

As for Simpson, others should read him and decide for themselves: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/dec/02/propos... (among other pieces)

Pretending marriage equality was always on deck when Leno et al. were working on domestic partnership is the spin here. Either the advocates of the previous decade's reform were not telling the truth (and Obama was strategically lying when he too endorsed civil unions but rejected marriage equality), or they meant what they said at the time. You can't have it both ways.

Again the revolutionary (full Alinsky) playbook is evident: down the memory hole with the past; lie (to self and others, doesn't matter) about goals, promising no further; then go further the minute you get it and isolate and demonize anyone who objects. No thanks.

> Pretending marriage equality was always on deck when Leno et al. were working on domestic partnership is the spin here

I'm not sure what you mean by “on deck”. If you mean tactically attainable, yes, there was a wide view even among advocates and allies that it was not. DP was a tactical advance, on that there was broad consensus (though, ironically, the anti-embourgeoisement radicals you point to support this weren't part of it, as they generally viewed marriage as an archaic social institution not to be sought or imitated, but to be eliminated.)

But your claim wasn't about what was viewed as politically pragmatic, but about DP status being seen by advocates and allies generally as “just and sufficient”, rather than unjust and insufficient because it was separate, but at least better than the status quo ante because it was—to the extent possible for the state alone—formally equal.

> and Obama was strategically lying when he too endorsed civil unions but rejected marriage equality

Disagreeing with a movements aspirations isn't a lie. Now, whether Obama was a secret supporter tactically lying to placate opponents, a moderate opponent of the goals of the movement telling the truth, or a stronger opponent telling tscticsl lies to get support of the movement while not alienating it's opponents is...well, completely irrelevant to whether the movement itself saw civil unions as “jist and sufficient” rather than merely a lesser injustice than the status quo ante.

> Either the advocates of the previous decade's reform were not telling the truth [...] or they meant what they said at the time.

You are conflating LGBTQ advocates with the politicians who were (or, in Obama's case, were not) involved in reforms. Those may be overlapping groups, but they aren't the same groups.

Now, if all you meant to say was that you identified with the narrow, political establishment group that endorsed civil unions as the end goal rather than the mainstream of LGBTQ advocates and allies at the time who openly called for marriage equality as the goal but accepted formally equal unions as a tactical advance, that's defensible. But it's not at all defensible to claim that the movement saw civil unions as “just and sufficient”, that was overtly never the case, whatever a handful of politicians trying to balance between the movement and conflicting groups might have said (and, who knows, might have even believed it when they said it.)

It's pretty wild how far into this we are given that Eich wants to present himself as somehow pro-LGBT for Prop8 support.

Perhaps it has been lost to the sands of time, but it seems curious that this didn't come up as a publicly stated defense while the Mozilla board was contemplating what to do with their total PR disaster out of a corporate office.

Why might that be? You are smart, I think you will figure it out from public info. I’m bound by non-disclosures so cannot say much.

Your decisions are your own. But trying to suggest that donating for CA's prop-8 was in fact a pro-LGBT act is simply not going work well here. Please stop insulting our collective intelligence suggesting this.

If you've changed your mind, or have reasons, or whatever? Great. But trying to suggest that in fact you were a better advocate and steward of LGBT rights while (perhaps unintentionally, perhaps deliberately) suggesting everyone else was wrong in what they wanted? No.

You could also just say, "I have changed my mind" or "I have decided this issue is less important to me now" or even maybe, "I thought I was doing the right thing, but in hindsight I chose a bad strategy." A million other phrases that own your actions and don't project onto others.

> trying to suggest that donating for CA's prop-8 was in fact a pro-LGBT act...

I suggested no such thing. I said explicitly I was sticking to a previous bargain. Hate on that if you must, but don’t put words in my mouth.

At this point you have misread so many declarative statements I’ve made here that I am going to let you have the last word, if you like. But no, I never suggested that. It seems to me you are engaging in faulty logic to cast what I wrote in an either/or. Stopping here.

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