I'm genuinely curious where you would draw your line. Would you support firing Mozilla's CEO if it's revealed he voted for Mitt Romney? What if he gave his campaign $1000?
What I support is individual liberties. Which means that it doesn't necessarily matter whether or not I support something. Individuals and organizations are generally free to do what they want, including being free to do things I don't like, and vice versa.
Meaning:
1. Brendan Eich was perfectly free to make political contributions.
2. He was perfectly free to say whatever he wants about the issue in public.
3. People who don't mind are perfectly free to not care.
4. People who do mind are perfectly free to complain loudly.
5. People who do mind are free to walk away from the company.
6. Companies are free to respond to the above according to their interests.
But it still bothers me: How do you distinguish this approach from the blacklisting of alleged Communists in 1950's Hollywood? Or was that an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of the neutral or beneficial practice of people's political views being subject to the court of public (and institutional) opinion?
I would like to say: I respect your right to not hire someone you believe to be a Communist, but I don't believe you're acting in the best interests of society as a whole when you choose to allow someone's personal political activities to inform your hiring decisions.
The first amendment protects your freedom of speech from limitation by the government. It does not protect you from customer revolt because of your CEO's opinions.
That kind of authoritarian curtailment of freedom of expression and freedom of association is precisely why I railed against the idea of drawing any lines up above. When we start talking about drawing lines we're implicitly talking about criminalizing a certain kind of behavior. It's the first well-intentioned paving stone in a road that leads directly to tyrannies such as McCarthyism.
I'm not so sure how it's different from McCarthyism though.
"The Company is infested with homophobes. I have here in my hands a list of names that were made known to the Board as being contributors to and members of anti-gay organizations and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the Company..."
McCarthy's "speech" wasn't illegal either. It's not a crime to inquire of people whether they were or were not a Communist.
And before you comment that this is different, but of a gay person's moral rights, keep in mind that Communists actually were on a designed program of the violent overthrow of capitalist societies in order to bring about international Communism.
To protect gay marriage, a first step is to defend the very legal framework that would make gay marriage possible in the first place, which is what McCarthy actions were (when taken at face value).
If McCarthy had only gone after people that were actually trying to violently overthrow the US government and/or working for Stalin, history would look at him a lot differently. There were Soviet spies and they did a fair bit of damage. However, the people on his list were not in fact spies or communists and there was no good reason for him to believe they were.
However, I strongly disagree with the notion that there was no problem at all with people working for the State Department, the Army, or even in major media outlets, who actively supported, and were working towards, the violent overthrow of the US government in favor of a dictatorship of the proletariat.
If we look at the Eich situation, there were few concerns about accuracy, no guilt by association, and Eich had ample opportunity to disclaim his prior views/actions but declined to do so. So we are left with only the core question of whether or not there is something wrong with keeping avowed communists or bigots out of public positions.
The "list" he was holding wasn't a list at all. It was completely fake, made up for his own political grandstanding purposes.
Oh, sure, they eventually did come up with a real list after the witch-hunt got started but make no mistake that our problem with McCarthy was the witch-hunt itself, and the hysteria it generated. Oh sure, we all agree on "better dead than Red" but that wasn't what the HUAC ended up turning into.
8. People who don't like the people from 7 can complain about that.
9. People who want to derail interesting conversation about how people ought behave with uninteresting observations about freedoms of speech are ... free to do so.
etc. etc.
If it's really that indistinct, it's scary: I might want to work for a company some day that cares about where that line is, and I'd like to stay on the right side of it.
If you want an honest answer, I think if you want to play the political game, you need to keep your cards close to your chest. You may not like that answer, and you folks can furiously click on the downvote arrow all you like, but I think that's the reality of it: for an extreme example, look at how closely every single aspect of US presidential candidates' lives are picked over, both present and past.
I'll add to that: not everyone should do that - I'm glad that some people have stuck their necks out in the past. We all owe some of them a debt of gratitude. But, by and large, they're probably not the same people aiming at the top job in a large corporation.
Well, obviously I couldn't downvote your comment, and I hope others won't either, since you're essentially right. I'm just disappointed that the Mozilla CEO position is something that requires playing a "political game" in the manner you're describing. "Politics" in the general sense, of course, exists everywhere there's human interaction, but our civic society is damaged when bright, motivated people are discouraged from participating in it lest their actions be held against them in other spheres of their lives.
I'm most disturbed at the number of people who seem to think that it would be a great idea if we could, for example, keep track of the political donations of everyone we do business with so as not to "reward" those on the other side of whatever issues we care deeply about. After all, it's just an application of our "free speech"! That would, I think, be utterly poisonous to our way of life. If this kind of economic activism stays confined to CEO's of open source companies with dependence on their communities' views, I guess that isn't so terrible.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7567700
But that said, I guess everyone - or most people at least - has some things where there really is a line. I would not want to do business with someone on record as having donated to and espousing the views of the KKK, for instance. If they're the teller at the supermarket, I'm not likely to find out about it, but once someone steps into the spotlight, that kind of thing has a higher chance of surfacing, and when faced with it, I'm going to act on my own views. (Regarding LiberWriter, no, we've never had any books that extreme, thankfully). So I guess that's another reason why being the CEO is different.
Let me explain: I have no doubt that Brendan was an incredible CTO/is an excellent hacker/engineer.
But being CEO is not about that, it's about being a leader. Being a uniter and a communicator. a galvanizer to the corporation/community he was trying to lead.
Forget about his donation a few years ago. In the short time he was CEO, he had the opportunity to weather the storm (so to speak) he and Mozilla Corp found themselves in. But in fact, by avoiding the issue, he dug a even deeper hole.
His one interview about the issue to The Guardian was a complete mess PR wise: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/01/mozilla-ce...
It was a mistake to appoint him as CEO. I'm sad that he left Mozilla, he could have continued to provide a lot of value to Mozilla and the Open Web in several capacities, But he was not "incredibly well-suited" for the job as Mozilla CEO, IMHO.
I could come up with a lot of better ways to say what he tried (and failed) to communicate, and whether those points are relevant or not, he completely botched communicating them at all.
For example, his comments about LGBT rights in Indonesia appeared to be about how Mozilla, as a global company in a global market, has to tread carefully in non-liberal markets, because coming out as strongly, unshakeably, and vocally in favour of LGBT rights could carve you out of entire markets which would be willing to look the other way but won't tolerate 'shoving it in their faces' so to speak.
Instead, it sounded like 'gay rights isn't really a given, so who knows how things will end up right?', which sounds to me like he's saying 'This fight isn't over yet, we still might win', which is ten times worse than just saying nothing.