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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

> This CEO doesn't hate gay people. He's not homophobic. He simply is against gay marriage

This CEO doesn't hate black people. He's not racist. He simply is against miscegenation.

Yeah, that doesn't work either.

> a view shared both culturally and legally by much of the USA.

Which isn't exactly relevant, the enlightenment of the majority is usually debatable and "much of the USA" isn't CEO of a company whose mission statement is "to promote openness, innovation & opportunity on the Web".

> It seems that those against this CEO consider gay marriage a civil right's issue.

How is it anything but a civil rights issue?

> But much of the USA doesn't agree, neither culturally nor legally.

I don't think so. They don't think the right should be provided, just as they did last time around, that didn't make civil rights issues "not civil rights".

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Allow me to reframe the argument in simpler terms:

> [T]he conversation about Eich’s appointment has been incredibly encouraging to me [...]

Let me see if I understand correctly: it's incredibly encouraging that a person is being skewered for something he did years ago and apologized for? Has he publicly opposed gay marriage in some other way since then? No? Okay...

As a side note...

> I don't think so. They don't think the right should be provided, just as they did last time around, that didn't make civil rights issues "not civil rights".

...let's not forget that around 90% of the language in the '64 Civil Rights Act was around repealing existing discriminatory laws, which is something most people were in favor of anyway.

> and apologized for?

Could you link to that? He has stated that his giving to prop 8 was not "evidence of animosity" and did not make him "hateful" or "a bigot"[0]. Not a surprising position for him to take regardless of its correctness: I don't know many people who'd call themselves hateful and bigoted even if that applied.

But to my knowledge, he has not at any point apologised for giving to Prop 8, quite the opposite.

> Has he publicly opposed gay marriage in some other way since then? No? Okay…

His donations to prop 8 were not public in the first place, the donation lists (of both sides) were leaked. I'm not sure how that's relevant though, he's not changed his mind since then.

> ...let's not forget that around 90% of the language in the '64 Civil Rights Act was around repealing existing discriminatory laws

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.

[0] https://brendaneich.com/2012/04/community-and-diversity/

> His donations to prop 8 were not public in the first place, the donation lists (of both sides) were leaked.

This is incorrect. By law, donations in excess of $100 must be publicly listed. Proponents of prop 8 tried unsuccessfully to get courts to block operation of that law.

Some proponents not all. Let's not tar them all with the same brush.

There's a rather stark contrast. You're worried about "tarring" them with trying to gain privacy for themselves at the cost of a rather nebulous public good, but you're perfectly happy to defend their attempts to remove rights from other people in exchange for no gain, nebulous or solid, public or private.

Sickening.

Ah, I didn't know that. Thank you for the correction (sadly I can't edit my original comment anymore, so I can't put the correction there directly)

When did he apologize? I just googled "Brendan Eich apology" and the best I got was a readwriteweb article from only 3 days ago entitled "Brendan Eich: Just Apologize For Supporting Proposition 8" [1]. Can you cite something with an apology in it?

[1] http://readwrite.com/2014/03/28/brendan-eich-mozilla-ceo-pro...

All I found was his public statement. It's an assertion that he's pro-equality without any mention of why people might think otherwise.

Brendan Eich did not apologize:

http://readwrite.com/2014/03/28/brendan-eich-mozilla-ceo-pro...

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