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Comment by andrewla | Hacker News Reader

This is a little off-topic, but the article calls it out specifically, accusing Brendan Eich of being an "absolute scumbag" Aren't we past performative displays of outrage over this?

He, like 52% of voting Californians, in 2008, opposed gay marriage. This was a different time: there were various arguments about "civil unions", concern from religious groups, worries about slippery slopes, etc., but we are passed that now -- he no longer holds this belief, and time has proven those concerns to be ill founded. Nobody should be held in indefinite contempt for political positions they once held. If we can forgive Barack Obama for opposing gay marriage, then we can forgive Brendan Eich. You can say that you like his work without having to have endless caveats about how you don't agree with a political position he took twenty years ago that even he no longer advocates.

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I once mildly defended Eich on HN, and he replied and asked me not to. I hope he won't mind if I just say that my view of him is more in line with those of his old Firefox coworkers who personally worked with him.

>You can say that you like his work without having to have endless caveats about how you don't agree with a political position he took twenty years ago that *even he no longer believes*.

Not according to the public record.

I updated the comment to say that "... he no longer advocates". In the public record, to be clear, his total contribution to the discourse was a financial disclosure of a donation. We have literally no idea if he has made further donations, either in favor of or against this or any other policy (because smaller donations are anonymous) and he has refused to speak publicly about anything related to this, except to offer general support for "inclusiveness".

But this comment is of a type that I feel we have moved past. Ideological purity tests were always awful. If you want someone to set policy for how marriage should be considered in some context, then Eich is probably not the person to ask to do this.

But on technical matters unrelated to this I fail to see how it has any bearing at all, because his positions (based on indirect evidence) were not outlandish or out of the mainstream at the time.

I don't disagree that it's a pretty sharp left turn for this (kind of muddled in general) blog post; I was pretty narrowly focused on the ahistorical notion that Eich had recanted in the intervening years.

That being said, I find it odd that you think no one can sincerely hold the position that someone's bigotry was/is abhorrent, however mainstream it was when they were putting money behind it (which is about as direct a piece of evidence that you can get).

If you truly find it abhorrent then I think it's fine to continue to call it out. Since this was a position also held by the majority of California voters, or, to reuse my example above, Barack Obama, I find it hard to give much credence to the idea of it being an example of "abhorrent bigotry".

I was alive and an adult as of 2008, and I didn't live in California, but I remember this situation. At the time, I was a somewhat naive young libertarian and my thought was that this was a great time to get the government out of the marriage business completely; leave marriage to churches and have the government only involved in the civil union aspect, which more naturally generalizes to gay marriage as well as certain conservatorship relationships or even polyamory, without forcing any cultural or religious shifts. So had I been in California at the time, I might well have voted for this measure, but I do not feel that I was a bigot for this, much less an abhorrent bigot. Since Eich never made and has never made public statements in any direction, we have literally no idea what his actual views on the subject were.

>Since this was a position also held by the majority of California voters, or, to reuse my example above, Barack Obama, I find it hard to give much credence to the idea of it being an example of "abhorrent bigotry".

Well neither qualifier requires a consensus view, so there's no correlation here.

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