Mozilla Supports LGBT Equality

If the best candidate for the head leadership role of your company is a divisive figure because of documented bigotry, then the entire board has failed the rest of the company.

And then there's the part where they made someone who is absolutely, positively against the concept of gay people having the same rights as everybody else the figurehead of the organization.

$1k is a pretty trivial amount of money to anyone with a career in tech as long as Brendan's.

If public outrage becomes so effective at creating a policy to not hire people with certain opinions, and to purge people who are discovered to hold certain opinions, indeed purging people from entire professional fields to which they may have devoted significant portions of their lives mastering, then we are condemning those people to a kind of economic death. This is only marginally better than actually condemning them to death (which doesn't seem beyond some of the "die x-scum die" types).

You're esentially asking why he shouldn't be publically bullied out of a position in which he's the most qualified because of his (assumed) belief that marriage can only be between a man and a woman (a belief that the majority Californians who voted in 2008 also held.)

I don't agree with that belief, but the comments here and around the web have been absolutely disgusting: comparing him to the KKK and the Nazis, claiming he hates gays, calling him a bigot, etc.

More likely, his belief stems from ignorance instead of hate or bigotry. Why shouldn't the public exhibition of his opinion affect his career? Because people should be taking the moral high ground and empathize in a way that Eich obviously didn't when he made that donation.

Perhaps, instead of shitposting on HN or parading around Twitter about his (assumed) opinions when people haven't actually met Eich, they should reach out and offer their perspective by sending him a personal e-mail detailing how his actions have harmed people. He might even see it your way and change his deeply held belief.

Would you describe someone who made a single monetary donation to a white supremacist cause 6 years ago and didn't say anything about it to anyone at the time, such that it took 4 years to discover the donation had even been made, an "active, avowed white supremacist"?

I'm not saying there are easy answers here, but I think that your hypothetical assumes someone who lets their horrible backwards beliefs affect their professional actions.

So let's consider the counterfactual that more closely models the current situation: someone who made a single donation to a white supremacist cause 6 years ago, has not publicly expressed any white supremacist views other than making the donation, routinely works with non-white colleagues in a reasonable way, and supports workplace involvement in Black History Month activities is appointed CEO. What should happen? I want to say I'd be OK with this, but it's hard to predict visceral reactions ahead of time. :(

As another interesting counterfactual, say that instead of donating to a white supremacy organization they donated to Nation of Islam. Otherwise, assume it's all the same: works fine with Jews and whites, doesn't speak out on race/religion issues in day-to-day interactions. I want to say I'd be OK with this too, though personally I'd have more skin in the game here than in the other cases, and I suspect people would generally be more OK with this situation than with the person who donated to a white supremacist cause...

(As an aside, would you consider Nation of Islam as an organization that believes "non-Muslims should be put to the sword"?)

Edit: I think at the heart of the issue is that people have a really hard time accepting that someone might make such a donation but be OK working with the sort of people the organization they donated to is against. I know _I_ have a hard time imagining anyone who donates to a "women should be the property of their husbands" organization interacting well with women in a workplace environment. It doesn't help that I don't know any people who would make such a donation, leaving me guessing at the reasons why one would, and Occam's Razor would say be that they hold deep-rooted beliefs about women being inferior. I've tried to come up with some other reasons someone might make such a donation while being OK working with women, but they all seem contrived to me. If faced with an actual example of a person who made such a donation but works well with women, I would be _very_ interested in talking to them to find out where they're coming from.

As a result, people are operating from assumptions which don't actually match reality as well as they should in this case. Your counterfactual of an "active, avowed white supremacist" more closely models how people are perceiving this situation, based on their knowledge about the donation only, and no knowledge about Brendan's day-to-day interactions with LGBTQ colleagues, than do my counterfactuals. But mine more closely model what's really going on...

Telling someone that they can hold views that differ from yours as long as they never show those views or act in support of them seems like one of the very arguments that the equal rights movements are fighting against.

I accept that some some political views are unacceptable to you.

Do you do background checks on people you might work with to see whether they hold such views? Or do you just avoid working with people about whom you found out by accident that they hold such views?

That is, are you actively making sure that none of the people around you hold the views you find unacceptable, or is it more of a don't ask don't tell kind of policy, where you don't care if people have unacceptable views as long as they don't mention them in your hearing?

Are you saying you consider the political views of almost all Republicans "unacceptable", and you wouldn't work in the same place as them?

Because - sadly, because I agree with you that they are wrong - over half of California opposed gay marriage in 2008 (and while things have improved somewhat, they remain far from where they should be).

They are wrong, but their position is a mainstream one. I'm not sure refusing to work with them is practical. (It might be in a small company, especially in ideologically uniform regions like the bay area, but not in general.)

I'm an atheist (like I assume you are), but what you just described is straightforward religious discrimination, which is illegal in the US and many other places, for good reason.

How is this argument different from the arguments of people who want to draw the line at hiring transgendered people or hiring women or hiring people who are over 6 feet tall? The only material legal difference, as far as I can tell (IANAL) is in whether you are discriminating against a protected class or not, and what constitutes a protected class seems to be largely a political decision. And religious affiliation is definitely explicitly protected.

These are, of course hard issues. It's _hard_ for all of us to not discriminate against people based on our prejudices. For you it seems to be hard to not discriminate against Scientologists. The right moral response is to realize your prejudices and fight them. The laws actually make that a bit easier in some ways (e.g. it's illegal for you to ask prospective job candidates whether they're Scientologists).

Whether it's a social fit problem depends on two things. The first is whether the person's private beliefs affect their workplace behavior. Obviously in some cases they do and in others they don't. People are pretty good at compartmentalizing.

The second social fit problem is whether the person's co-workers are so outraged by the fact of the beliefs existing (or the person's gender being "wrong" or their hair being red, or whatever these people happen to have personal hangups about) that it affects _their_ behavior. This is pretty common, obviously, and the fault in such cases lies in the co-workers not the hire. There may still not be a good "social fit" as a result, but this situation is cause to look long and hard at the "society" that's not being fit into...

I would like you to also consider a concrete example. You say you won't hire a believer in alien abductions. Would you hire a "tin-foil-hat" type who believes the NSA is spying on everyone? Would you have hired such a person two years ago, or would you have considered them paranoids whose "thought patterns and general mental stability" would preclude a good "social fit"? Clearly your priors have updated since 2 years ago, but it's always worth evaluating whether your priors might be wrong and whether a reasonable person might come up with different priors.

OK, thanks for the information. If there's a link to an HN thread or two about that discovery/controversy, I'd be happy to see it.

Not sure why I'm getting downvoted for asking for more information, but such is HN I guess.