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Comment by twoodfin | Hacker News Reader

This is unacceptable.

C'mon. In 2004 and 2008, with this very much a live issue, something north of 90% of American voters voted for a presidential candidate who professed to be against gay marriage. You are getting and will continue to get the social change you want, but it's crazy to ostracize someone for having the same political view as 2008 candidate Barack Obama. Try to be graceful and persuasive.

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Are you saying that a boss of gay people shouldn't get called out for effectively saying, "Hey, you people don't deserve the same civil rights the rest of us do"? That he should be able to just coast along?

Because that sounds like horseshit to me. That gay people can now get married in some minority of American states is progress, sure. But I'm not seeing why that means people, gay or straight, can't call a bigoted action a bigoted action. If somebody is obligated to be graceful and persuasive here, surely that's Eich, who started this out by doing something a lot of his employees find obviously hostile.

I think someone should ask him whether he's changed his mind. It seems fairly likely; public opinion on gay marriage has changed a lot since 2008.

Hi, Brian! In 2012 he refused to say: https://brendaneich.com/2012/04/community-and-diversity/

ha, this is a laughable anti-apologetic defense. replace "gay" with "black" or "women" and laugh along.

edit: as i reread this an hour later i can't help but feel more strongly. i was originally laughing at the ignorance on display but it's probably more harmful than funny.

"...people in any group or project of significant size and diversity will not agree on many crucial issues unrelated to the group or project." ... "Not only is insisting on ideological uniformity impractical, it is counter-productive..."

this sounds like a defense out of American History X.

He didn't say that at all. You are reading a whole lot into a simple transfer of money about which Eich has said hardly a word. You have taken something that is barely an identifiable stance — and certainly not a public one — and turned it into a declaration of extremism.

An equally plausible read would be "Eich belongs to a religion that holds marriage as a core tenet and was encouraged by his pastor to donate along with the rest of the congregation. He actually wants gays to have equal rights and believes treating gays well is the right course for any business entity, but his personal religious beliefs — which he keeps strictly separate from his official duties — have certain hooks in the word 'marriage'."

Fun fact: Many churches were actually telling their congregants that without Prop. 8, the state would require their church to perform gay marriages, and that they should vote for Prop. 8 if they wanted their church's religious freedom to remain intact.

He did effectively say that, because that was the practical effect of passing Prop 8, something he helped pay for.

If he was misled on this topic, all he has to do is say, "Hey, I was wrong: I thought this was about free speech, but it turned out that wasn't the case. I had also confused the notions of religious and civil marriage. Mea culpa. I fully support the subsequent court decisions recognizing that all my employees have the right to be married to the partner of their choice."

Instead, he's chosen to stonewall. Which means that the most plausible reading is that he still believes in what Prop 8 was plainly trying to do: strip civil rights from gay people.

Really? I don't see any reason to suspect his intentions were any more sinister than my friends and family members who supported Prop. 8, who generally had much less interest in stripping gay people's rights than they did in protecting a religious institution that is very important to them. A lot of the people I know who supported Prop. 8 have actually spoken out against homophobic rhetoric they've come across, because they sincerely do care about gay people — but they still supported Prop. 8, because they felt more like their religion was under attack than gay people.

I'm not saying that it was all because of the flat-out lies like the state forcing gay marriages on churches, either. I was just giving that as an example of how hard churches worked to tie Prop. 8 with being a good religious person. Not everyone who supported it did so because they personally have it in for gay people.

It seems to me to come down to the same thing. Either Eich was misled, in which case he should apologize. Or he was trying to strip a civil right from gay people for his personal reasons. Whether that's anti-gay animus or just believing that his right to religious freedom trumps other people's civil rights seems irrelevant.

Either way, I think he owes an explanation to the gay people he will soon be managing, and to Mozilla's many gay and gay-allied business partners and donors. Like it or not, the CEO personally represents the organization. His saying, "Gosh, my reasons for oppressing gay people are personal and complex," doesn't wash with me, and it surely won't with a lot of other people.

Obama also (deeply incoherently, I might add) opposed Prop 8, while Eich actively funded it.

Obama's position was cowardly, but pretty much every knowledgeable Democrat and Republican believed and knew that he was just cynically posturing. He was a supporter of gay marriage in 1994, for Christ's sake. How many social liberals went through the past two decades and became less supportive of gay marriage? Only to switch their mind three years later?

Trust me, I'd be the first to point out that there's a whole lot to criticize Obama for in all of this. But believing he's a homophobe instead of a cynical liar is a bridge too far.

Looked at from another angle, it's actually quite democratic for a candidate for public office to shift his or her platform away from their personal beliefs and towards the beliefs of those they're attempting to represent.

But all he ended up representing was incoherent and incompatible policy preferences. I might agree that represents public opinion well, but it's nothing to be proud of.

At the time he was elected in 2008, a majority of Americans did not favor same-sex marriage.

At the time he changed his public stance, a majority of Americans favored same-sex marriage.

Seems coherent.

If you replaced the word "gay" with the word "interracial", would you be receptive to the argument that we should excuse this sort of bigotry because in the past many Americans thought that way?

Of course you wouldn't, so don't try to excuse it in this case.

Actively contributing to anti-gay causes is not the same thing as being on the fence about gay marriage.

He wasn't "on the fence about it". He's just changed his position more often than some people change their tires.

Obama was for same-sex marriage in 1996, "undecided" in 1998, opposed in 2004 and 2008, and for it again in 2012.

Unambiguously.

Correct or not, that's irrelevant to the point I was making. The farthest he has ever gone against gay marriage is to say that he personally believed marriage was between a man and a woman. He never campaigned against it and even when personally opposed to it, consistently said that legislation like DOMA was unnecessary. That's hardly equivalent to giving $1000 to prop 8.

Yes because we all know statements made on the campaign trail meant to appeal to both sides are a 100% accurate portrayal of the candidate's actual position.

At some point Obama might have to take an actual stand on something, and then follow up on it. Him being a politician doesn't absolve him of his uselessness.

Last example: ooh Putin, you're going to face costs for these shenanigans!

Is being graceful the same as being against other people having loving relationships that are different than the majority? Because Obama was against it? I really do not understand this perspective.

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