Tim Cook Speaks Up
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
When I was a child, I felt generally good about myself. I was reasonably smart, well-spoken, curious, and so on, and I wanted to do something important with my life. Some nagging part of me suspected I was gay from very early on, but I resisted it intensely. I wasn't really afraid of being mistreated, although I probably should have been. People were already calling me names so I wasn't worried about that. More important for me was my sense that being gay meant being marginal.
There hasn't been a gay President, and at least when I was a child there weren't many gay people visible to me at all. The image of gay people presented to me were not powerful, focused on frivolous things, and consumed by attitude and lifestyle. If I wanted to do something important, I couldn't possibly be gay. It just didn't fit.
Knowing that the CEO of not only the most powerful company, but also the most admirable company, is gay would have helped me enormously. I always wanted apple products even before I could afford them, and this would have meant a clearly visible path forward. I can't imagine how happy this must be making some confused young people, given how happy it's making me right now.
After I came out, one of the best things was getting an email from an 18-year-old guy who had read my blog saying that he'd never spoken to or read anything from a gay person in technology and it was cool to read something from someone who as a programmer and geek came from the same perspective as him. He then said he'd gotten the courage to tell his parents from that.
Which left me feeling amazing for about a week.
Tim Cook's article will do the same for young gay techies but on a much grander scale. :)
I never understood this. You're gay, so what? What is this thing with some people feeling like they just have to tell others about their personal sexual orientation; especially in the context of business article. This has nothing to do with Apple.
If they wanted to report on Apple's equality they could have left things with the two sentences:
"The company I am so fortunate to lead has long advocated for human rights and equality for all. We’ve taken a strong stand in support of a workplace equality bill before Congress, just as we stood for marriage equality in our home state of California."
and be done with it.
because it's assumed that you're straight unless told otherwise.
"The lies and bigotry aimed at gay people thrived for so long precisely because nobody knew any gay people. That's exactly why coming out was (and still is) necessary. One of the reasons the gay rights movement has been so spectacularly successful over the last 40+ years is because the lives of actual gay people is a living testament to the falseness of the vicious stereotypes spread by homophobic pricks."
Now if only we could remind people that there's nothing wrong with having an unpopular opinion.
After all, Brendan Eich has done more for computing than Cook ever will.
Edit: Eich supported Proposition 8 which was _ruled unconstitutional_ for violating the Equal Protection Clause. Yes, his support was non-criminal, but he was fundamentally supporting something wrong, both morally and legally.
And, let us note, it's all speculation on this point as to what or why he did it, because the man himself hasn't said anything on the matter--mostly because of the gay hate brigade rallied against him.
By contrast, Tim Cook continued contracts with Foxconn with the sole goal of minimizing production costs by using underpaid overworked labor--and if you look at Apple close enough, yeah, there's some nastiness there. He's a solid operations guy (clearly!), but has directly supported policies that have harmed both our industry and workers abroad.
I'm likely going to get downvoted into oblivion (again, and in hilarious underscoring of my point).
I'm going to upvote you for this.
Just because Tim Cook is gay doesn't make him Mother Teresa. He seems quite happy in promoting brutal Victorian style work-houses because it's "over there". Out of sight, out of mind. He's quite the hypocrite.
He's also no better or worse then the operations guy at Dell, Samsung, Lenovo, etc. who are all churning out products from the same manufacturers and assembly lines in China and South-East Asia. I don't know why people keep promoting the myth that he is some amazing operations guy when everything is outsourced anyway, and recent products have suffered from manufacturing delays and raw material supply issues.
Yes, yes, and yes.
Many of my more naive, young gay friends and acquaintances actually DO seem to think that 'being a powerful gay person', onto itself, makes him worthy of worship.
> He's quite the hypocrite.
Did he actually say that its wrong to promote brutal Victorian style work-houses?
It's also completely irrelevant to the subject of Brendan Eich's support of bigoted TV ads. Which is why I found the arguments made by the poster above you to be not really interesting, or worth responding to.
It's depressing to see this myth perpetuated that Mother Teresa was a good person.
She was a horrible human being who denied poor and sick people the help and medicated relief they needed just because of her religious beliefs. Of course, she also denied abortion, contraception and all other kinds of medical help that were not in line with her religious beliefs.
She was convinced that suffering brings you closer to god, so she made sure everyone under her care suffered as much as possible.
She was a sick and twisted person and the faster she gets forgotten, the better.
http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/582913-mother-teresa-...
If you have ever seen a leper in India and their condition, you would not have called her sick and twisted.
Mother Theresa believed that suffering brings you closer to god. Sure, she were courageous and tried their best to help people, but that was probably more inspired by actively seeking suffering (and helping other people suffer) than altruism.
But it's absolutely on par for Catholicism (or guilt-based Christianity in general). Declaring her a saint was perfectly reasonable.
Strom Thurmond filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1957 for 24 hours and 18 minutes. After that he continued to serve in the US Senate until 2003.
Yes, his actions were a lawful expression of his power. But I think there is something deeply wrong with using your power, even lawfully, to deny the rights of people who are less powerful than you. Even if you are nice to those same people in personal interactions.
Underpaid in what way? Are there many other jobs those people could be doing which pay them better? They're not paid much by US standards but the alternative is subsistence level farming. Is anyone who puts their production into China (and let's remember that's basically everyone in hardware before we single out Apple) being nasty by offering people a better income than they can get anywhere else?
It's the market rate, something incidentally most people in tech in the West are pretty happy about when it's driving massively above average salaries for programmers and the like.
In terms of overworked - Foxcon workers recently went on strike because the amount of overtime they were being offered had been reduced. If they're overworked it would be very odd behaviour to strike to demand more.
Essentially Foxcon workers get to choose between two things - a shitty life working at Foxcon and a really shitty life not working there. That's unfortunate, but it's not Tim Cook's fault, it's in part the fault of the Chinese government, in part the result of them having been dealt a shitty hand and a consequence of global capitalism which most of us are in some way complicit in.
To place this at the door of Cook is pretty naive.
Whether or not those choices are moral is certainly up for debate. Whether or not Time Cook was largely responsible for them is not.
And as for the "market rate" you are talking about a country that does not allow it's currency to float on the exchanges, heavy subsidizes or outright controls much of the industry and denies workers access to information online about working conditions and pay. Playing into a regime that intentionally abuses workers to ramp up their industrial output wouldn't be something I would be particularly proud of and most definitely would not be something I would consider controlled by market forces.
Cook is clearly a prime decision maker in where Apple operate but the poor situation for Chinese workers can't reasonably be laid at his door.
The wages are controlled by market forces, even if the market is being manipulated by the Chinese government.
But Cook isn't responsible for Chinese economic or fiscal policy and pulling Apple out if China would hurt the workers who may have shitty jobs but at least have jobs.
As it is Apple face higher scrutiny than most of their competitor in the same situation and as a result actually behave marginally better when it comes to worker treatment.
It's not something to be particularly proud of but the overall plight of Chinese workers, even those at Foxcon, is not a situation for which Cook can realistically be held significantly responsible or categorised as nasty (nasty being the original characterisation I was refuting).
It's the consequence of a capitalist economy which Cook may be a small part of but is neither the creator nor the controller.
Do you have any proof of this or citations on it? Everything I've seen about Apple regarding its supply chain is that it goes above and beyond the minimum needed to be in compliance, and they seem to genuinely care about the well being of their employees in China.
Awesome. I need that line added to my CV. Something like: "Conscientious worker, who often goes above and beyond the minimum needed to be in compliance."
As does Sony, Microsoft, Amazon, Nintendo, and more
When the controversy broke he was literally asked what his views on SSM were, and he didn't give an answer. That strongly implies he doesn't think SSM should be legal.
It's perfectly legal and acceptable to not use someone's product if you don't agree with their politics. That person does not suffer any loss of rights.
Here's what often gets missed in this debate: Eich's handling of the outrage, demonstrated incompetence at his job. An exec is a leadership position by definition - the entire Mozilla thing showed us that Eich is not fit to lead.
What does this have to do with anything? Lots of people supported things that later get ruled unconstitutional.
Using "constitutional" as a synonym for "good" is a bad idea.
You know, I'm sick and tired of this lie. A homosexual has exactly the same right to marriage as a heterosexual: a gay man is exactly as free to marry any unmarried consenting woman as a normal man and a lesbian is exactly free to marry any unmarried consenting man as a normal woman.
The essential confusion regards the nature of marriage. It's not about a couple (or group) and their feelings towards one another; it's about the formation of a family and the production of a new generation.
I bet you're hard at work trying to deny infertile couples the ability to marry.
Even if you were right, which you aren't, tradition is not a compelling argument. We've done away with a lot of stupid traditions, like slavery and dowry.
Even if you were right, which you aren't, gay couples can adopt.
I could go on, but why? Your arguments are tired and baseless.
This preposterous argument about 'its about producing a new generation' is sophomoric and lazy. It doesn't stand up to a few seconds of reflection. Yet I hear it again and again - its even part of the Mormon official line.
That procreation argument is silly. Human beings order themselves into societies, and not as some sort of procreation machine. But instead to encourage kindness, cooperation, happiness. We have laws to keep from harming one another, and roofs over our heads to keep us warmer and dryer than we 'naturally' would have been. This is what it means to be human, too.
Oh I get it - argue whatever it takes to make male-female marriage sacred and anything else wrong. Ok. I see.
I would say that marriage and sex get their value and purpose from God. That he created man and woman to come together in marriage and have sex. That he made sex pleasurable, and good, and that one of the benefits of sex is often that children are produced.
I think we must either get our understanding of sex and marriage from a source outside ourselves (the transcendent God) or we just make things up to suit our individual drives - and the second option opens us up as individuals, and as a society, to a lot of harm.
I understand this is not a popular viewpoint, especially on HN, but I think it's valuable to offer some pushback in a civil way every now and then.
If you look at the actual legal structure of marriage outside of who is permitted into it, that's very obviously not the case for the civil institution of marriage -- virtually all of the legal effects are directed toward the creation of a legal relationship of mutual support between the partners. Even the pieces that relate to children (e.g., the presumption of paternity) directly serve the purpose of reinforcing the mutual support relationship between the partners.
One could argue that one of the (many) social functions served by this mutual support arrangements which justifies having a prepackaged, publicy-recognized set of obligations, permissions, and legal privileges for mutual support is the creation of a superior environment within which to raise children, but there are other public functions served, and n any case an environment for raising children doesn't require that children be produced by the people raising them.
As for who has done more for what — web browsers were going to have a scripting language. Is Javascript so astoundingly good that we can only assume any alternative would have been worse?
Note that I draw a very strong distinction here between officers and typical employees -- typical employees are not allowed to speak for the company unless specifically authorized, whereas a high-profile officer's public conduct is more inextricably tangled with the company itself. Someone might rightly interpret Eich's donation as an indication that Mozilla would be a less-friendly environment for a gay programmer than another company would, because Eich's opinions and policies are directly able to shape the culture therein.
There's no magic here. There are many ways in which executives are subject to substantially greater scrutiny than ordinary employees. This probably sucks for them, but in today's environment, it's part of the job. Changing that - well, that's a longer discussion.
Except Mozilla didn't make that choice. Eich was not fired or asked to resign. Mozilla made it clear they still wanted him. Eich voluntarily stepped down and excused himself from the community after it had shown its shallow, naive definition of tolerance. I don't blame him for not wanting to work in the industry anymore.
But if you believe that, that's a pretty intolerant view you have there.
The question of tolerance of intolerance isn't perhaps as simple as you make out. It's been well discussed without a clear answer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Right. It's really quite simple.
All this support of Eich as some kind of a martyr (or a victim of reverse bigotry, in any way comparable to the bigotry Eich promotes through his donations) is grossly misplaced.
Chilling political discourse by threatening the livelihoods of those you disagree with is a threat to democracy itself and should not ever be allowed to happen. Eich's forced resignation was an offense against everything America allegedly stands for.
There is no paradox of tolerance. It is rational to be intolerant of intolerance, in order to preserve a tolerant society. Karl Popper summarizes: "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them...We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant"
But here's where we differ. I believe in his right to express his opinion without fear of losing his ability to make a living. You, and the rest of the liberal lynch mob that forced him out, are doing nothing more than suppressing his rights. And thus begins the end of democracy.
You have to admit, using your rights to take someone else's rights away.... is a dubious position to hold.
You cannot divorce the actual issue he is expressing his opinion on from the fact that he is expressing an opinion. The context matters. You can't consider a different particular instance and expect the same conclusion, because the context changes.
Of course you can. In fact this is one of the fundamental tenets of our entire political system. There are no carved out exceptions suspending constitutional protections for really bad opinions. We have a framework through which people with strong conflicting opinions can air them without fear of certain kinds of retaliation. That broke down here, and it's disgusting and scary.
The basic slippery slope you envision is "if we restrict rights, from what principle do we decide where to stop doing that?" The fault in the argument is that it is totally reasonable to not tolerate intolerance, and again, uncritical tolerance is not what we desire here, but rather tolerance of viewpoints which are not intolerant.
No, but there's a reason why those constitutional protections don't apply here, and it's not because the people writing them couldn't imagine this situation.
> If conservative politics is directly linked to bigotry I see no reason we should support it. Perhaps the fiscally conservative, small government political groups should work to dissociate their ideas from intolerance.
All this does is create animosity with moderates who do not consider themselves linked to bigotry, and it does not advance your position, except among people who already agree with it.
If you don't want the support of these moderates then that is one thing. But that raises the question of why you would engage them, if not to garner their support.
Let's keep in mind nobody legally kicked him out. He left because he couldn't deal with the consequences of his actions. The law protects your free speech, but does not protect you from the consequences of it. http://xkcd.com/1357/
Also, let's not forget how nasty the whole prop8 campaign was... http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/04/04/brendan_eich_s... ....Eich could have donated to prop- 2,147,483,647, to ban interracial marriage. It would be his right, but I hope society would backlash at him the same way as prop-8 donation caused.
I just want to be sure I understand your calibration settings. If you think a prop on banning interracial marriage should be just as acceptable as what you seem to be saying for prop8, then I'm done discussing this with you.
In other words, how do you know views you hold today won't be considered the vilest bigotry in 30 years? Is your moral compass so special, that you would have fought for interracial marriage, even if you were born a white in the southern US in the 1800's?
Perhaps this takes this whole discussion to another level. Where does humanity's moral compass come from and how do we justify it as something worthy of being followed & upheld?
It did among the society composed of Mozilla supporters. This idea that society is not people you interact and work with (and in this case, even direct) but the random populace in your general geographic area was wrong before the Internet, and it's completely wrong today.
If he didn't realize that, I'd say his out of touch with the people he was supposed to work with.
Is your moral compass so special, that you would have fought for interracial marriage, even if you were born a white in the southern US in the 1800's?
What's with this topic and strawmen? Nobody demanded he fought for gay rights. Most people don't fight for gay rights, and you don't see them get criticized (in this community). Just not to invest his time and money to fight against it.
Regardless of either his ousting was justified or not (personally, I'm conflicted), most arguments here are terrible.
If you're a liberal : please explain why Mozillans don't have the right to their own political opinion, right to do whatever they want with their money, ...
If I ever met anyone who expressed this opinion to me, you or anyone else, I'd do the very best I can to remove them from my presence, company, sabotage their career, whatever I can.
And I'll feel as smug about it as you. I'm defending freedom and democracy by doing that.
If you want to make me into the enemy, go ahead, but you're the Quixote here.
But note that Eich supported stripping people of one of their constitutional rights. Prop 8's explicit goal was to remove the right of equal protection before the law.
And further, other people were exercising their political rights: freedom of speech and freedom of association. Having a fancy-pants CEO position is not a legal right. People are free to decide not to work with the guy.
And really, if you're defending using the ballot process to strip people of constitutional protections, I'm not so sure you're truly on the side of freedom and democracy. Prop 8 was mob democracy, a classic example of tyranny of the majority.
People who oppose gay marriage typically believe it would hurt "society" at large -- do you really want to say he should have taken an action (or inaction) he believed would generally hurt everyone in his political jurisdiction (which the vote was in), so that he could help his Mozillian sub-society? (The typical proponent response would be that it doesn't hurt anyone, but that's the crux of where people disagree.) What other areas does this reasoning extend to? Maybe I'm making a straw man here, but how is this sub-society argument different than "The majority of my employees are white people or supporters of white people, so I should vote and campaign to support white people even though I believe it would hurt others"?
For what it's worth, Mozilla reportedly offer healthcare benefits to same-sex couples[0], and I've read several reports that Brendan personally treated gay employees equitably. I recognize the difficulty of reconciling all this, the near-hypocrisy of campaigning to ban legal unions of people you're cordial with at work, but I can't find a way to support the idea that he should be accountable to them for his legal participation in a process that transcends Mozilla. Or if so, why to them instead of his (potential) gay neighbors, or any Mozillians that supported the same cause? Obviously there's no legal way to enforce that either way, so I guess I'm thinking of the ideal way people would self-police.
> Nobody demanded he fought for gay rights.
I didn't mean to imply that. Make it "Can you be sure you wouldn't have opposed interracial marriage with your time and/or money?", since that's the more apt analogy people are using. I'll grant you it may be an unobjective argument, but the point is to reflect on how the popular morality is a moving target.
> Most people don't fight for gay rights, and you don't see them get criticized
Well, I'm loath to even suggest this level of enforcement, but the cognitive dissonance here bothers me a bit. So Eich could have been aware there was a threat of oppression to his employees etc., to "strip them of their rights" (quasi-quote), and done absolutely nothing to help them, because you know, there's TV to watch and frivolities to buy instead, and that's totally OK? Come on -- it's either such a righteous cause/travesty of justice that even inaction is intolerable; or it's just a societal rift that will take a few decades to achieve consensus on, and shouldn't be punished any more than being discovered to be a card-carrying Republican or Democrat. I don't know, am I crazy here? My cynical feeling is that few would support such an extreme position, because secretly we are all at least silent witnesses, if not enablers, to bits of injustice everywhere. It's just that most of us aren't publicly accountable to internet hordes, and/or people buy excuses like "At least I wasn't actively fighting for <cause they believe is evil>!"
[0] https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2014/03/29/on-mozillas-suppo...
I don't know. All I said was, "society" can't be reduced to people living in a geographical area. The person who made a societal argument wasn't me, it was you.
People who oppose gay marriage typically believe it would hurt "society" at large -- do you really want to say he should have taken an action (or inaction) he believed would generally hurt everyone in his political jurisdiction (which the vote was in), so that he could help his Mozillian sub-society?
I don't know. All I meant was what I said - his vote can't be explained away just by saying "well, it's a product of the society he lived in". Nothing more.
So Eich could have been aware there was a threat of oppression to his employees etc., to "strip them of their rights" (quasi-quote), and done absolutely nothing to help them, because you know, there's TV to watch and frivolities to buy instead, and that's totally OK? Come on -- it's either such a righteous cause/travesty of justice that even inaction is intolerable; or it's just a societal rift that will take a few decades to achieve consensus on, and shouldn't be punished any more than being discovered to be a card-carrying Republican or Democrat.
People here seem to have their mind so formatted in a us-vs-them mentality that they automatically assume everyone who disagrees with a particular argument is a strong supporter of the opposite position. This is not the case.
I never said he should or not be tolerated. I didn't say I agree with what happened.
All I said was that factually, people who are simply inactive on the issue don't get called out, so it's incorrect to assume Eich was being demanded to act in support of gay marriage.
EDIT: Damn my poor English :|
Oops, the comments about inactivity weren't based on any assumptions about your position on whether he "deserved it" or whatever. For lack of a better place, I'll elaborate, but again I'm not talking about you. :) I'm wondering why so many other people can accept neutrality from anyone, when they simultaneously talk about how absolutely evil it was that people were actually stripped of existing rights (since gay marriage was legal in California before Prop 8.) I don't think it's fair to elevate it almost to the degree of re-enslaving Africans or something, and then not hold anyone accountable who did nothing. If it's not so evil that inaction is acceptable, than don't hammer so hard on anyone who took a legal action you didn't like.
I'm not saying he should be constrained; what I'm saying is that he's not "a white in the southern US in the 1800's". He's not a man who hasn't been exposed to different viewpoints or who needs a "special moral compass".
One of the societies he belongs to values and promotes gay marriage rights, so the choice he made was his own, and not a result of being immersed in a myopic society like the "southern US in the 1800's".
Oops, the comments about inactivity weren't based on any assumptions about your position on whether he "deserved it" or whatever. For lack of a better place, I'll elaborate, but again I'm not talking about you.
Fair enough, sorry for that, I was reacting as much to your comment as to the downvotes, which was unfair.
I don't think it's fair to elevate it almost to the degree of re-enslaving Africans or something, and then not hold anyone accountable who did nothing.
Point taken, but let me ask you: there are people being enslaved / trafficked in the world right now. Do you do much about it? I know I don't. Does it make me an hypocrite? Yes, probably. Does it mean I'm wrong to denounce people who actively support human trafficking? I don't think so.
(To everyone) By the way, I'm NOT saying that banning gay marriage is enslaving people! I'm just using the analogy put forth.
No. No, I do not.
Ah, the classic argument: if we can't have perfect right now, then we obviously can't work toward the good.
I would strongly oppose such a measure. But I would certainly respect the rights of others to support the opposing side and vote their conscience, and when the vote was over I would not go scouring donation records to figure out whom I should fire or force out of their jobs.
No such right exists in this context. A proposition to ban interracial marriage has nothing to do with people's consciences and everything to do with the letter of the law, where marriage is an established legal construct to which access is guaranteed under the 14th amendment. Voting to have rights stripped from other citizens for arbitrary reasons is not a protected freedom and such a proposition is patently unconstitutional on its face. You don't need to be impartial here.
Sure they do. Free speech applies even if what you defend is illegal or unconstitutional. Brandenburg v. Ohio made it very explicit.
Besides, while it may seem weird to Americans, constitutions do change. Ours is not yet 40 years old, and already we're speaking about changing it.
No, he was not. https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...
Brendan was not fired and was not asked by the Board to resign.
Brendan voluntarily submitted his resignation. The Board acted
in response by inviting him to remain at Mozilla in another
C-level position. Brendan declined that offer. The Board
respects his decision.Every single day, there is an employee going to work in a hostile environment, shunned by co-workers or left to sit in an empty room with no work to perform. Eventually they'll be forced to resign in order to save their own sanity.
I'm using facts to reach the conclusion that Brendan Eich wasn't forced out of his job. Your argument boils down to "Ahh, come on!".
Guess who wins? (SPOILER ALERT: Not you.)
All countries have some level of acceptable political intimidation; that you think otherwise just means your views are sufficiently mainstream. Try embracing more fringe ideologies in a public way.
I suggest supporting and donating to Wahhabist movements and seeing how it goes for you.
[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_for_Neighbourly_Love,_F...
This is incredibly misleading way of putting it. He left because he had no other choice, and an organized personal destruction campaign against him was what did not leave him this choice. Of course, you can claim this campaign was result of his actions, and it is true, that this campaign was triggered by his actions and wouldn't happen if he did not donate to what he donated. However, this campaign was not an inevitable consequence of his actions - it was a voluntary act of his political opponents, in order to send a message to him and his supporters and achieve political goals. It's like if somebody says something you don't like to you and you beat him up, the beating is a consequence of the saying, but it doesn't remove the blame of the beating from you, and you can't just say "he's in hospital because he couldn't deal with consequences of his actions". No, he's in hospital because somebody beat him up. And Eich left because of the campaign against him, despite no proof that his opinions have ever interfered with his professional judgement or that he ever did anything inappropriate. Except for expressing a private opinion.
But it was always recognized the culprit in this case was the board of directors who put him in this position, only to retract their support later.
Eich is a brilliant technologist, and that should simply have been his role. Becoming the chief brand embassador was never an appropriate choice.
I also don't get how you can equate this with a hypothetical where he is extremely liberal and is being attacked by conservatives. Supporting discriminatory laws is not even on the same plane as being "offensively" open-minded.
That's an obviously unfair polemic. It could be flipped around thusly (and would be just as invalid):
"Seeking to destroy the institution of marriage that has been consistently defined for centuries is not even on the same plane as being 'offensively' traditional."
Also, I understand that you downvoted me above, but going to my other comments in another thread and giving them the same treatment is abusive - especially since I'm a new user. You have single-handedly destroyed my karma balance. So I guess the message is that I'm not welcome here because I support equal rights?
The good argument on the side of opposing his CEO-ship was the concern that he would use his position to influence company policy and culture in a way that he couldn't do as CTO. Like most people, I don't know Eich nor have I ever worked at Mozilla, so this initially sounded like a very valid concern.
Eventually, though, it became clear that Eich had done a very good job of keeping his opinion out of the workplace. That's a difficult thing to do, and I don't think I and others were necessarily wrong, at first, to expect that he wouldn't be able to do it. But I read everything I could find on the case, and I never saw anyone even accusing him of intolerant behavior toward gay Mozillians, either in person or in policy -- and he was one of the drafters of the company's diversity policy.
Given that, I think it was unfortunate that the Board accepted his resignation. (It's particularly sad considering that they had talked him into taking the position in the first place.)
Had the Board told him "No, you can't quit; we're going to get you through this" I think they should then have tried to explain that his record on diversity was excellent, and that he and they both knew that the eyes of the world would be upon him, and that people should give him a chance.
The trouble with declaring something, as an individual in a HN thread, beyond the bounds of reasonable discussion is that it does not actually make it so - the bounds of reasonable discussion are set by what people in general are prepared to reasonably discuss. The obvious takeaway from the Eich affair - the best corporate diversity record in the world will not stop individuals from holding to the beliefs that they do. They will just hold them more quietly.
Finally - Eich being drilled out of the CEO position is not directly a suppression of his free speech or whatever; he is not being sent to jail for his views. The board of a company has the right to ditch a CEO for being 'embarrassing'. The trouble is that this is not somehow a radical blow for gay rights: indeed, closeted gay people not too long ago would find their positions untenable for exactly the same reason if their sexuality was discovered (it was embarrassing, etc).
In order to get to a situation where they could go about their business relatively unmolested, gay people had to fight against, among other things, exactly this sort of kneejerk corporate small-c conservatism. The progress we've made on this issue was not made one non-profit CEO at a time; nor was it through individual gays having great individual 'role models' (sorry Tim), but through prolonged political fights. I have little sympathy for Eich in this matter, but the idea that his being Mozilla CEO was a serious obstacle to gay rights was risible, and remains so.
Don't forget gay sex being illegal in the US up until 2003.
But the tendency to turn this into a question of political preference, one among a handful of hot-button issues that contemporary Americans can and should have differing views about, is wrong and destructive. This same argument, that a view does not appear preposterous to some part of the public, so it is therefor reasonable, doesn't really hold water. The obvious rejoinder is to look at the past, right? Slavery wasn't preposterous to half of the country, even during the civil war. I'm not saying a ban on gay marriage is anywhere near as awful as slavery, but rather that it's a clear example of something accepted and "debated" at the time, that we now know should never have been debated at all.
I don't care if people believe that somehow he should have stayed as CEO, maybe he should have. But eventually it will be clear that he stood on the wrong side of history, and actively supported a cause that is blatantly wrong.
I guess the thing to realize is that "declaring something within the bounds of reasonable discussion" is already a kind of violence, regardless of the attitudes of the people involved in the discussion. Put another way, I'm trying to say this: your statement, that people in general are prepared to reasonably discuss whether or not I should have basic rights, is a devastating indictment of "people in general."
No, it wasn't. Proposition 8 did not ban civil unions; it did not ban any marriage-like accommodation for same-sex couples (that would have been cruel).
>Eich's forced resignation was an offense against everything America allegedly stands for.
But what if the cause someone donates for, curtails the rights of someone else? Would you say the same thing if he had donated to a terrorist organisation?
That's a very poor framing of what he did. And you followed it with a lot of unsupported drama.
He didn't just donate to, say, a Republican candidate. He supported a campaign to strip gay people of the right to equal protection before the law. A successful one.
In the US, you can claim that gay people should not be full citizens and have that opinion protected under the first amendment. You can say the same thing about black people too, which is why we let the neo-nazis protest and even give them police protection when they do.
But the legal right to say something is not the right to freedom from social consequence. If he were a white supremacist and wanted to run Mozilla, a company with many non-white employees, would you really be outraged that people would fire him?
I'm hoping not. Free speech is an important right. But other people also get that right, and the right to freedom of association as well. If I were gay, I wouldn't want to work for a guy who believed I wasn't equal before the law. How could I trust him to treat me equally at work? And as a straight person, I wouldn't want to work for somebody like that either, so I'd take my freedom of association and walk right out the door. Why shouldn't Mozilla's board take account of whether or not people want to work for a CEO?
> How could I trust him to treat me equally at work?
You could see what he's done whilst at work. Apparently he helped create and enforce policies that protected minority employees.
The reason I'm uncomfortable with it is what happens if we switch the positions: Joe Bloggs makes a private donation to a bill supporting gay marriage. Years later he is appointed CEO of some org but the customers run a campaign to veto him based on his private political donation.
Isn't this precisely why voting is anonymous[1]? While Eich's views are repugnant he should have been judged on what he did in the workplace.
The other point is that US style political campaigning is clearly fucked.
[1] of course voting isn't actually anonymous in the UK. Some people still aren't aware of that.
It is the same person. If somebody wears a hooded sheet for evening rallies but a suit in the office, it is not unreasonable for black people to say, "Gosh, maybe I should work elsewhere." White people who are anti-racist might feel similarly. Freedom of association is also a right, and one you seem to be giving less weight. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences.
> The reason I'm uncomfortable with it is what happens if we switch the positions: Joe Bloggs makes a private donation to a bill supporting gay marriage.
That is not switching the positions. An equivalent position is, say, supporting a bill to strip Baptists of the right to worship. The sole point of Prop 8 was to remove a constitutionally guaranteed right, equal protection under the law, from gay people. If somebody was trying to strip a civil right from some right-leaning group, I'd say they also should not be running a large company containing those people.
> While Eich's views are repugnant he should have been judged on what he did in the workplace.
That might be another interesting world, but here people are judged on their out-of-work behavior all the time. Especially when that out-of-work behavior indicates something possibly relevant to work performance. Like, e.g., believing that a significant fraction of your employees are literally second-class citizens.
He cast a dollar vote in support of a proposition, same way any of us could give campaign donations to a candidate we liked. He participated in the political framework in a widely-accepted way, and the system failed to effect the outcome he seems to have voted for: democracy prevailed, the system worked, nobody was harmed.
You might as well round up every Republican who voted against Obama or Democrat who voted against Bush because they're clearly enemies of liberty. Be careful what you wish for.
The issue I have with the whole Brendan Eich situation was he was professing thru his right to free speech a profoundly held religious belief, I disagree with his interpretation of scripture, and conceptually that scripture should determine who can get married - but as gay male (who came out at 15, in 1998) I'd fight to the death for his rights to speak his mind.
I have an extreme distaste of Social Justice Warriors - there are people whom I firmly believe would never stand up to try to stop a gay bashing, but are more than content to stir up a huge ruckus online. Brendan Eich did the internet community a great service in his time - he didnt deserve to be drummed out for his beliefs, a thoughtcrime is not yet a crime, and I'd rather see him judged for his actions in his management roles not for just what he thinks.
That's not true. For several years, people in California were denied marriage rights because of Prop 8. It was judicially overturned, not democratically so.
He actually did limit their rights.
>That's not true.
that's not true. It is exactly the difference between democracy and ochlocracy - both are the rule by majority - that in democracy some minority rights are protected from even the majority rule, and such a judicial overturn is exactly a part of the democracy that ochlocracy lacks.
Thankfully we have constitutions and a judiciary that define and enforce these protections.
That being said—even if I'm wrong on this point—it's the third clause that I took exception with, that "nobody was harmed."
EDIT: I think maybe I'm being pedantic here. While a democracy doesn't automatically include these protections, you're certainly right that ochlocracy excludes them.
No, they weren't denied their marriage rights: under Prop 8, any unmarried lesbian was free to marry any consenting unmarried man, and any unmarried homosexual was free to marry any consenting unmarried woman.
The state did not recognise 'marriages' between men or women, but that's not denying anyone's rights, nor is it harming anyone. Pope Francis is not harmed if the State of California doesn't recognise him as the Vicar of Christ.
Even if the majority of people decide that jews need to be killed, I will still believe it's wrong.
The reality is that the gay rights movement did not have the unprecedented swiftness it did by alienating those who feel differently about homosexuality. It traditionally has been a movement predicated on the idea that people who didn't support gay rights could be converted if they could only be reached in the proper context. The effectiveness of this approach speaks for itself.
It's a shame and an embarrassment that people think it's appropriate or rational behavior to do what was done to Eich. If that type of behavior was the common reaction to someone who, privately I might add, had opinions counter to the movement then we would have been set back decades.
I never said that what people did to Eich is right, I currently don't have an opinion on that because I doesn't know enough.
We are all equals, we should have equals rights. Having equals right doesn't hurt anyone but having different rights does.
(1) The fact that Prop 8 won in the polls is irrelevant to the question of whether it was hurtful or not. To say (in effect; not quoting you directly) that "if a ballot measure passes, it must be harmless" is kind of like saying that there's nothing wrong with supporting, say, a racist demagog because after all, their rallies were always attended by thronging, jubilant crowds.
(2) What got Eich fired (or pushed into resigning, whatever) was not so much that he donated to a group supporting Prop 8 (by itself), but rather the bigoted TV ads ran by that group (which Eich apparently never distanced himself from). That was really the "clincher" that rallied people against him.
No, they didn't. 52% of those who voted on Prop 8 (about 79% of the ~17M eligible and registered to vote, which were themselves only about 45% of Californians) voted for Prop 8 -- so about 19% of Californians voted for it.
> so you could argue Brendan Eich holds a rather popular opinion.
Well, no, you couldn't make a good argument that he holds a rather popular opinion based on the results of an election 6 years ago. You could perhaps argue that he holds a view that was popular at the time of the election based on those results. After all, opinions change. [1]
[1] see, e.g., http://www.ppic.org/main/publication_show.asp?i=1012
At what point did Mozilla's mission for a free and open internet turn into one about social justice and identity politics?
It's wrong regardless of when it occurred.
> At what point did Mozilla's mission for a free and open internet turn into one about social justice and identity politics?
This lame attempt to dismiss equality won't fly.
The world is a big place with different cultures and different opinions.
You are making a giant assumption that your world-view is the correct one.
OTOH, if you condemn people for judging Eich, you are -- by so doing -- committing the same offense.
But it can be more or less wrong in specific circumstances.
You seem pretty sure that your opinions and actions will stand the test of time, just like countless people were in the past. So sure that now we are right, and amazed how they could be so wrong.
Well, I don't know the future, but see you in 30 years. Let's see what moral fashion will rule those times. Be prepared to be judged.
Eich had his chance. He declined and ran away instead.
I know my use of technology built in unethical conditions will be judged poorly, so I get the most out of tech and try to be pick the best companies to buy from when replacing it.
I know my difficulty moving past the gender binary will be judged poorly, so I learn about non-binary genders and people who exist outside gender entirely.
I know my past homophobia--even the internalized variety--will be judged poorly.
The list could go on for a long time, but the important thing is that I see where I fail and try to fix it. Supporters of discrimination are just as capable as I am of seeing past their failings. They choose not to.
So the rest were either not competent to voice their opinion (below voting age), did not have sufficient stake for their opinion to matter or have proved their opinion doesn't count (residents who did not meet local requirements for franchisement or whose franchisement has been revoked, e.g., convicted felons), or simply didn't care enough to go make their opinion heard. I'd say 52% is still a fair number to quote, even if it may not be literally true if you're counting babies and other persons who are legally ineligible from having an opinion.
>After all, opinions change.
Sure, but not all that much that quickly. The latest polls show 45% of the American population still opposes same-sex marriage. While the opinion has shifted from majority to minority after relentless media campaigning, much like that in the article, there are still a very large number of people that hold it; it's still a "popular opinion".
With recent big increases in support for
legalization of same-sex marriage, the
California public is now 61% in favor,
31% opposed according to a February 2013
Field Poll,
Since we're quoting statistics, here are some from the CDC.
Gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (MSM) represent approximately 2% of the United States population... In 2010, gay and bisexual men accounted for 63% of estimated new HIV infections in the United States and 78% of infections among all newly infected men.
http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/risk/gender/msm/facts/
In 2012, there were almost 9,000 cases of syphilis, and 84 percent of them were among gay and bisexual men
http://www.webmd.com/sexual-conditions/news/20140509/syphili...
My friends (who are gay) tell me there is a growing complacency amongst their younger gay friends, that HIV is seen as a long-term chronic condition rather than a killer disease. The results can be seen above.
Why does the issue of marriage dominate media headlines but not a peep about health? How much funding has gone into the campaign to legalise gay marriage versus educating people on safer sex?
The maximum sampling error estimates for results
based on the overall sample of 834 registered
voters have a sampling error of +/- 3.5
percentage points, while findings from the
random subsample of 415 voters have a sampling
error of +/- 5.0 percentage points at the 95%
confidence level.
FiveThirtyEight rates Field Poll (at least for political races) as being "A+": http://fivethirtyeight.com/interactives/pollster-ratings/
Your references to incidence of HIV and syphilis among gay and bisexual men are something of a non sequitur, and—I think—underscore the value of extending the institution of marriage given that one might reasonably expect that enabling an at-risk population to engage in a social institution commonly associated with monogamy should only serve to decrease rates of transmission.
My friends (who are gay)
Also, why would you want your friends to be deprived of a right you enjoy?
I regularly see billboards in my neighborhood targeting young gay men to be tested for HIV. I bet that risk of transmission would be further lowered if the stigma associated with being gay was further reduced or entirely eliminated.
Btw, if the campaign for "marriage equality" were truly about equality, it would also include polygamous heterosexual families in Utah looking for recognition in law, as well as religions where marriage partners can be under 18. Thus the campaign for "marriage equality" has a narrow definition of equality and should be renamed the campaign for "same-sex marriage".
Also, all 50 states allow minors to wed with parental consent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_marriage_in_United_State...
Thus the campaign for "marriage equality" has
a narrow definition of equality and should be
renamed the campaign for "same-sex marriage".
Yet individuals who are 16 or 17 years old, need parental consent, before getting married.
How is this "equal"?
Here was his statement about inclusiveness after his donation became an issue https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/ To me it looks like he was committed to keeping Mozilla inclusive and would have been a great CEO.
Furthermore, the exact amount of money that he donated is fairly irrelevant anyway. The donation, no matter it's magnitude, serves to illustrate what he believes. If I made a $1 donation to the local KKK group, would you make excuses for me because $1 is a trivial amount of money? Of course you would not.
Why you can't be the same?
Calling something "Ideology" is not a "get out of criticism free" card. You are free to have whatever political beliefs you desire, but we are all free to criticism you for your political beliefs. Our criticism of political beliefs is just as political as the beliefs that we are criticizing; it is fundamentally illogical to put political beliefs above reproach.
Of course. It is after all entirely different than:
Calling someone "Gay" is not a "get out of criticism free" card.
Or:
Calling someone "Jew" is not a "get out of criticism free" card.
Or:
Calling something "Black" is not a "get out of criticism free" card.
Or:
Calling someone "woman" is not a "get out of criticism free" card.
Or:
Calling someone "Muslim" is not a "get out of criticism free" card.
Right.
Obviously our public sphere is full of criticism of Islam (a.k.a. islamophobia), Black people (a.k.a. racism), women (a.k.a sexism), Jews (a.k.a. antisemitism), Gays (a.k.a. homophobia).
And YES I would take a racist for CEO - if he is more qualified than others - each and every time. Because I truly believe in a society where gender, sex orientation, race, religion, ideology - do NOT matter.
See, this is a paradox. You can't have that, and you just admitted it. Cultural Marxism is full of paradoxes like that. It's impossible to truly have society where gender, sex orientation, race, religion, ideology - do NOT matter. Thank you very much for providing evidence that you see a paradox there as well.
"Ideology" is too broad of a term the way you are using it: after all, believing that COBOL the ultimate programming language for all use cases could also be labeled an "ideology", one that would make somebody a poor CTO.
Similarly, beliefs that certain groups of people, based on unrelated criterion like gender identity, are inherently inferior to others or deserve lesser treatment, do materially impact the workplace.
Unlike the previous two examples, somebody's personal beliefs about things like religion or their cultural background have nothing to do with job performance.
Islamophobia, racism, etc., are not criticisms. Criticism is the application of reason and intelligence for the purpose of analysis and improvment. Bigotry is the assumption that "others" are worse simply by their being "other". Nothing you listed is criticism, it is various forms of bigotry. In bigotry there is no desire for dialogue, simply judgement and superiority.
> And YES I would take a racist for CEO - if he is more qualified than others - each and every time. Because I truly believe in a society where gender, sex orientation, race, religion, ideology - do NOT matter.
Those two sentences are incongruent. You cannot claim to champion a society where gender, race, etc., do not matter, and then turn around and state your acceptance of a racist CEO.
Gay parents would likely be fine with their children being heterosexual.
In six years time Brendan could have gone through a lot of experiences that changed his opinion on marriage and based on his statement I would have given him the benefit of the doubt.
If Brendan had publicly released a sincere apology I would consider forgiving him. All he did was issue a bunch of "It doesn't matter, you guys are wrong for caring" statements.
In the face of that, his repeated assertions that he can somehow keep his personal and professional lives separate (yeah, the human mind does not work that way) ring very hollow, at best.
Here is a person, incredibly talented, well paid for his work, that decides his personal beef with LGBTs takes precedence over his professional life and everyone else at Mozilla.
That, right there, shows a tremendous lack of decision making and prioritization skills. Kiss of death for a C-level position.
I think that if he hadn't resigned, he'd have eventually been asked to leave anyways. You do not, as a company, go out of your way to promote an image of inclusiveness and togetherness, and then hire an unrepentant bigot for a high level position. Mozilla would have lost huge amounts of credibility.
It does if that campaign ran hate ads on your local TV station. If you think that the issue around Eich is only about his support for a certain ballot issue (by itself), then perhaps you should look a bit more into bigger story behind it -- and what got people so angry.
The commercials sponsored by this group are freely available on YouTube. I suggest you go watch them, and then re-evaluate whether you feel the campaign doesn't qualify as a hate group. Violence is not the only or most important qualification in defining what a "hate group" actually is.
And the one with the mother is especially insane. Wouldn't want your kids to be taught facts that are uncomfortable to you, eh? What do you know, if your kids knew homosexuality was a thing they might like it and fall from grace.
Please post another story about the Eich issue and upvote it, and comment there. Bringing up his donation and the fallout here is just being deliberately provocative and borderline disrespectful. Please don't.
Do you hear that sound? That's the point whooshing majestically over your head.
http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140906052122/potcoplaye...
Nonsense; he did not take any action to remove any of their civil rights. One doesn't have a right to say '2 + 2 = 3' and have the state pretend that it's true.
Okay, so has anyone heard of gamergste?
If any of he women developers quit due to all of the harassment online, should we conclude that "the community has spoken"?
the only reason you have this opinion is because you disagree with his politics. You don't agree with the freedom for all, only the freedom for people with your opinions, which is not freedom at all.
you all should be ashamed of yourselfs for harassing this guy online and forcing him to quit, but I can imagine I will get down voted and I will see a bunch of people justifying this vile and evil behavior.
The hypocrisy is why I can't take this community seriously. It's just entertsinment
That said, public opinion is changing very rapidly. XKCD 1431 (http://xkcd.com/1431/) offers an interesting visualization and comparison between gay marriage and interracial marriage. According to XKCD's source, interracial marriage didn't reach majority approval until 1995, while gay marriage already reached majority approval in 2011.
Now obviously this rift could be the result of oddly-worded polls, data mis-interpretation or some other factor and it shouldn't be taken as a strict source, but I believe it speaks volumes all the same
I'm Asian and I married a white guy. It's only been seven months. I lost count of the number of people that raised their eyebrows because of my new European last name (less than the people surprised that he also changed his name!) and also lost count of how many people assumed my husband was Asian ~not~ a big white bearded guy. In SF Bay Area of all places. That's like the most common variety of interracial marriages here.
But... the best wrench I threw into the mix? I'm pansexual. If gay marriage has a long way to go still, understanding that I am personally no less attracted to women/others for having married a man is gonna take another 100 years. Even for gay/lesbian folks. It's very weird.
I think the problem is with the concept of names itself, if you're aiming for true etno-neutrality.
Are you sure you thought this through?
(In my native language, Dutch, it's common to refer to people of mixed race as having "mixed blood". I can find similar statements made in English on Google)
Just found out that mixed blood means mixed European and Native American ancestry specifically in the US (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-blood).
I don't know if it's racist but it's definitely racial :)
The biological correctness of it didn't even cross my mind; blue blood, for example, is the term we use when we talk about royal ancestry. It's not like we think that the blood of the royal family is actually blue, however the term does originate from a time where royals were lighter skinned than the working class of peasants, and thus their veins appeared to be more blue than others.
Bloodlines sound more like something from royal families and the aristocracy, of which we still have a select few in NL. Baronesses and whatnot. Kinda posh.
No 2 males could have a biologically conceived child (i.e. you must have a female carry your baby). I may be waaay behind on current reproductive technologies, so please correct me if I am wrong. Therefore, the 'blood' of the child (aka DNA) will be not be a combination of the parents (i.e. the people raising the child).
(The fact that OP is more concerned about the PC-ness of using "mixed blood" then understanding basic biology is somewhat alarming, but I will let that pass)
I suspect language around race will always be racially charged - even for native speakers - so long as there are racists. It's unfortunate, but I'm not sure there is a good solution.
[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=mixed+blood%2C...
TL;DR marginalized group ideology is strange
I think one can also see in this graph the effects of the determined efforts by the American right, over the last few decades, to influence the makeup of the judiciary.
Chances are, of course, that the graph reflects a combination of several factors.
While that may not have had a direct impact, most of the arguments against interracial marriage were thus demonstrably false, by looking to other countries, and a substantial proportion of the population of the US had come from countries where interracial marriage was legal and somewhat accepted when they emigrated.
Further, with interracial marriages, the marriages had the support of a far larger amount of churches, and legalisation happened amidst a general major push for equalisation of rights that had rallied a lot of people.
On the other hand, many of the same countries that have been liberal about interracial marriages maintained laws targeting gay people far longer, and both domestically and internationally there was not nearly the same momentum for gay rights.
Again consider the UK, where it took until 1994 for a serious attempt to reduce the age of consent for male gay sex to the same as for straight sex (from 21 to 16; bizarrely the UK did not have an age of consent for sexual acts between females). It took until 2001 for that to become reality:
The first attempt was defeated; a court challenge to the European Court of Human Right forced the UK government to try again; it was defeated twice more, and then the House of Lords dragged its feet long enough that the government was able to use Parliament Act to push it through with only the support of the House of Commons in late 2000.
As late as then, people seriously used as an argument that we needed to "protect the children".
So while the rapid change of opinion on gay marriage in the US is great, it is still I think a generational shift to get to the point where gay people won't have a greater than 10% chance that any random person they meet won't be deeply prejudiced against them.
Take pride in the things you do, the things you create. My only reaction to someone who takes pride in his or her race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation is quizzical indifference.
Proud to be White is leagues worse than proud to be American or Christian or Irish.
If there is a genetic (or at least embryonic) influence behind sexual orientation -- and I believe there is -- then why take "pride" in it?
That's hugely different than the white-pride loons.
Why? I think it's down to power and oppression. Black people in US society have been oppressed and marginalized for centuries. Decreasingly so, but it's still a big problem.
For me, black pride and gay pride are pushing for freedom. While the white-pride people are pretty explicitly pushing against freedom.
Own your opinions. Cloaking them in false objectivity makes you look ridiculous and removes the opportunity for discussion. You think it's obvious. I don't. I do think it's obvious that you're playing the game on easy [1], though, which is why your seems-obvious meter is poorly calibrated.
[1] http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-th...
Here's an idea: I'll use whatever words I want, and so will you, and we won't even ask about each others' race or gender. Because it just shouldn't matter.
Experience shapes ideas. Ideas are tested through experience. If you refuse to examine the things that shape your experience, some of your ideas will inevitably be poor.
Any racist will, of course, tell me exactly the same thing.
How many racists have told you that you should pay deep attention to your life experience and consider how it differs from that of others? Could you name some of them?
I've read a bunch of pro-slavery literature from the civil war era, and also a bunch of modern white supremacist kook literature. I have to say, empathy and consideration for people from different backgrounds was not the major theme you say it was.
But hey, if I can't trust some anonymous goof, who can I trust? So I'm sure you're right.
1. As a signal that you embrace your own identity, and are not ashamed of what you are, despite societal prejudice.
2. As a signal that you see yourself as superior.
Most of the time when you hear someone say they are proud to be gay, or black, or otherwise proud to be member of some other minority group, it is 1 they mean. Sometimes it is 2, but it is fairly rare.
Most of the time when you hear someone say they are proud to be white, it means they are white supremacists using it in form 2.
While it is certainly possible for members of majority groups to use it in meaning 1, it is incredibly rare, because it makes little sense: The point of using it in that form is to counteract prejudice. Pretty much the only members of majority groups that consider it necessary to counteract prejudice are racists that are paranoid that they are being pushed aside.
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/14/our_real_first_gay_president...
"Despite such evidence, one reason why Americans find it hard to believe Buchanan
could have been gay is that we have a touching belief in progress. Our high
school history textbooks’ overall story line is, “We started out great and have
been getting better ever since,” more or less automatically. Thus we must be
more tolerant now than we were way back in the middle of the 19th century!
Buchanan could not have been gay then, else we would not seem more tolerant now."In many ways it seemed to have very high hurdles. Homosexuality and queerness elicits an unexplainably intense anger in some people. It is potently threatening. On the other hand, overcoming homophobia had a relatively small hurdle to get over because there was no intergenerational complexity like racism and xenophobia or deeply rooted structural institutions like sexism. Homosexuals were already everywhere in secret. A homosexual didn't need to overcome to become CEO, he was already a CEO. He just needed to come out.
A part of the precess that I think is happening now nearer the cutting edge is post revolutionary normalization. After the gay parades and overt homosexuality that forced the issue into centre stage what is needed is a homosexuality that can be worn lightly outside of the spheres were it is naturally central (like romantic relationships).
Tim Cook is gay, but he's mostly the CEO of Apple. His gayness is not the central part of his public identity and not being public about it up till now is not being closeted.
It's really a great thing that happened, and is happening. I'm glad to be part of the generation that made it happened, a gift to those who will come after, to those who will not have to suffer.
I was in a similar boat. My first exposure to the term "lesbian" was a flash cartoon that had a throwaway gag about a butch woman who lived in the sewer and ate children—I remember going home and crying because I strongly suspected that that's what I was, once the other kids explained what the term meant, and I didn't want to end up having to move underground and away from all my friends once I grew up. (This is hilarious in retrospect, but at the time I was really distressed.)
It's really good that young gay people to have so many prominent and positive role models now, and easy access to information on the subject via the internet. Can't imagine my story happening to anyone today.
Agree! Though as an avid sports fan, I'm disappointed in the sports world for not embracing this topic. With so many professional athletes odds are in favour of many a house hold name being gay, yet there are only a small handful of sports people that are openly gay.
It is inspiring that Tim Cook has done this, and I really hope top athletes look to this and follow suit. Tim Cook will positively influence many, but not as many as say, Michael Jordan or Christiano Ronaldo.
I suppose this is yet another example of our industry being thought leaders.
I know what you mean. Lots of childhood things are silly to look back on. But "hilarious" is just not a word I'd use about a child terrified of her future, even if it was exaggerated.
As I am sure a lot of you know, the reality show Survivor features a male homosexual couple this year. Bravo! We watch the show with our kids every week. Yes, they ask questions. The little ones cover their eyes when anybody kisses on TV anyway. Seeing two men kiss on the lips and show affection is, well, weird to them. You just don't see that on mainstream TV these days. We simply tell them that what they are seeing is perfectly normal and that these are two people who love each other just as much as mom and dad do. They say "ok" and still go "ewwwww!" When anyone kisses on the show.
The part of Tim Cook's statement that is disappointing to me is where he says "I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me.". Of course, as an atheist I tend to be particularly sensitive to such statements. If we leave that aside, it is simply a fact that god and religion --world wide-- have been brutal to the gay community. Historically this has ranged from denouncement all the way up to torture and murder. And that stands on it's own, it's a historical fact that has nothing whatsoever to do with the messenger being an atheist.
Anyhow, I am glad he decided to come out as the role model he surely is. Society has far to go. This helps. Every little step helps.
I mean, its great that he chooses and advocates the view that homosexuality can be a 'gift'. That it can be a positive thing! Props for that!
But the phrasing...does he really believe that the imaginary being he worships chose for him to be gay? Like the creator of the universe is really sitting there saying "oh, I'll make this one straight! and this one bi! and this one gay!"
Are you saying that if someone wants to "know god", they are likely to conclude that god does, indeed, sit around saying "This one is gonna be gay! and this one will be straight!"?
The experience that you call "you" is the result of a direct, unbroken chain of physical chemical interactions all the way back to the beginning of time.
Religious people who think of the nature of things and remain religious call this complex interaction of the physical processes, this fundamental fabric of reality, "God"
If Mr. Cook gives the name "God" to this amazingly complex interaction of physical things that results in conscious experience, then it is rational for him to conclude that this process resulted in him being gay.
There is no big sky entity that points at a person and says "gay" or "straight", but there is a series of implications chained all the way from the beginning of things that directly results his homosexuality. And if you call that "beginning of things" God, then you get the conclusion he vocalizes, but with quite rational thoughts behind it: "I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me."
This stuff gets very vague or very abstract quickly. In general it's probably a good idea to assume that people's beliefs come from reasoned thought, though some probably start from axioms we might find irrational.
>> Religious people who think of the nature of things and remain religious
It sounds to me like you are trying to say that this is true for all people in that group, and I don't believe this is true. This is one method of rationalizing a belief in God, but not the only.
>> call this complex interaction of the physical processes, this fundamental fabric of reality, "God"
Some non-religious 'believers' may do this, but most 'religious' people do not. Essentially no Christian, Jewish, or Islamic fundamentalists thinks this way.
Obviously many new agers think this way, and there are some offshoots of the main religious who do, but on the whole its a rare viewpoint.
While some religious people believe that God continuously provides the means whereby the universe continues to act, most hold that the universe and God are separate. Its actually sacrilege to some to suggest that God is the processes of the universe.
Check out 'pantheism' on wikipedia, and contrast this with 'theism'.
>> If Mr. Cook gives the name "God"
Well does he?? Since Cook is an educated white male gay business leader in san francisco in 2014, I thought he was not religious. It turns out I was wrong.
Is Cook pantheist? I seriously don't think so. But then, I was completely wrong about him religious just a few hours ago.
>> with quite rational thoughts behind it: "I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me."
I'm not sure that would be both honest and rational, as the speaker should know that the Christian community will misunderstand their unqualified pantheist use of 'God' as a theist use of 'God'.
>> a good idea to assume that people's beliefs come from reasoned thought, though some probably start from axioms we might find irrational.
I tend to assume that everyone's beliefs are informed by both rational and irrational thought processes. Did say something to imply otherwise? Or did I miss your point?
In case it weren't clear, I don't believe in any of that.
I think it is savvy of him to meet it head-on, to prod people to maybe reconsider their reflexive religious beliefs.
Admirable is a moral judgment. Admired means that "the others" have drank the kool-aid. (Sheeple, etc. etc.)
If yes, well... okay then. I don't understand you, and I'll stop here.
If no, then maybe you can see how maybe you've not fairly contextualized the conversation? This list of 'admired' companies does, indeed, completely miss the original posters point.
After that, some happier stories started to appear. Eric Allman and Marshall McKusick dropped by the university queer room incognito. There were some movies, Beautiful Thing and Get Real, where people were gay and nothing much happened. That was a big deal then, but I assumed it would all sound corny 20 years later.
Really ? Did you have to say that to make your point ? What's so admirable about Apple ? Jobs has been lying constantly about competition, lied about being the first innovators in so many of their products, has pressured other companies to prevent poaching Apple employees to keep salaries as low as he could, and the list does not end there.
Fine, you can love Apple as much as you want, but calling it the "most admirable company" out there is rubber-breaking stretch.
Just today morning I read a news[2] that a software engineer working in Infosys was booked for Sec 377 and put in jail. In June 2014, seven people were booked under Section 377 by the Bangalore Police [3]. So far 200 people have been prosecuted under this law [4].
That's the reason I don't see any famous Indian, those who work in movies or HNI, coming out and accepting they are gay. I really hope people in other countries also encourage actions of Tim Cook so that people have freedom to express their wishes and sexuality.
[0] - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/05/india-health-minist...
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_377_of_the_Indian_Penal...
[2] - http://www.bangaloremirror.com/bangalore/cover-story/Sec-377...
[3] - http://www.bangaloremirror.com/bangalore/cover-story/Six-mon...
[4] - http://judis.nic.in/supremecourt/imgs1.aspx?filename=41070
It is as if India remains frozen in different centuries in different regions, ranging from the modern to the grotesquely medieval. If you ask your local hindu rightwinger, its of course all the muslim invaders fault that they have to keep continuing these practices. Hinduism of course has done nobody no wrong, just been stabbed in the back (this should sound familiar).
Anal sex (in fact anything apart from missionary position) continues to be a crime according to law but it is not something that gets enforced unless the enforcer has some specific axe to grind. That law certainly does not represent practice. Indian legal system is another weird thing. Most of the laws were set down by the colonizers, not to set a framework for justice but to facilitate control. We as Indians have done little to dispose that baggage, rather it has been actively embraced by those in power to exercise similar control, often with a lot of popular support.
Quite interestingly, a marginalized community would see nothing wrong in cruel treatment of another marginalized community, often happily taking the lead in the harassment. A low caste person in a caste'ist state would see nothing wrong in hounding someone just because he is muslim, or belongs to a caste that is even lower. A gay person in such a state may see nothing wrong in persecuting other minorities.
I really doubt this. Kissing in public is highly frowned upon for heterosexuals only and there will be a shitstorm if gay couple found openly kissing. Take this incident, happened in September 2014 in Mumbai/Bombay, two couples were harassed by police just because they hugged publicly[0]. Police harass couples all the time if they found indulging in PDA. Read this BBC news report for instance[1].
Wiki [2] says: "Public display of affection is regarded as unacceptable in India. Kissing and hugging are taboo."
[0] - http://www.mid-day.com/articles/mumbai-couple-harassed-fined...
[1] - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7871304.stm
[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_display_of_affection#Ind...
You have not been frequenting the right places then. Come to Bombay, come to Delhi, its a frequent sight outside the gay bars, more so in Bombay than Delhi. Have to admit that the first time I saw it I was indeed caught by surprise.
In some places you might get beaten up (yeah even possibly by the cops), or have acid thrown at your face (this punishment is reserved exclusive for women and applied mainly when they cut across caste or religious boundaries). According to many in the the current ruling political party, such acts of violence are eminently condonable and justified.
As I said, it is very high variance place, I am firmly in my thirties now and yet I never stop learning / experiencing something new about my country as I travel. The key is to cut across those invisible boundaries. Come to the North East its a whole different country, different value system different culture.
Given that you posted about Bangalore current events, I am sure you know of that sri ram sene idiot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Ram_Sena http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pramod_Muthalik
EDIT: Yep!! some downvotes on all of my comments on this thread. Those took a while to come, I am expecting more. The belief system that I am complaining about does have their champions, and at politically significant levels.
I downvoted you because mentioning how you've been downvoted is quite possibly one of the most dull things you can say on HN.
I downvoted you to agree with this sentiment.
Just the way white people saw native Indians as Savages it is easy for western eyes to perceive India as a very bad land but that is not the case, despite its flaws it is an extremely tolerant society with ability cope with very diverse way of living. Before the savages of west discovered that the idea of gender is not binary and can have multiple hues, that is how ancient Hindu thought described gender [1]. One of our major God is half man half women and entire mythology is replete with all sort of possible genders.
[1] http://swarajyamag.com/featured/hinduism-and-homosexuality/
While I somewhat agree with the gist of your post, you might want to reconsider this broad brush with which you're painting both modern "western eyes", and particular bunches of white people who genocided nearly an entire continent a few centuries ago.
Substitute nazis/jews/"German eyes" if you don't get what I mean (going to assume I'm excused from Godwin's law when the implied atrocity was in fact larger than the Holocaust).
Consider the California textbooks which paint Hinduism as worst savages. There is not even passing mention that the cool things like Yoga and Meditation are Hindu practices on the contrary outright false stories which I believe were put in my missionaries are taught as "Hinduism".
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_textbook_controversy...
In fact I am in complete agreement with the following characterization, quoted from the wikipedai page you linked to.
Dan Golden of the Wall Street Journal described the
effort of the two Hindu foundations, as similar to those
by Jewish, Islamic and Christian foundations. Each group,
claims Dan Golden, vie for changes in texts for elementary
and secondary schools to cast their faiths in a better
light or in sensitive manner before children.
I find a treasure trove of interesting things in the Hindu body of thought, yoga is not one of them, sorry. An over sold, over marketed artifact used to catch the gullible. To me striking things about its body of thought are its philosophical roots, the fact that they have been thinking deeply about such questions since antiquity, that not believing in any form of god is in complete harmony.
That said, for people coming from an Abrahamic religion, its a difficult thing to grasp. Hinduism is not 'a religion' if one goes by the notion of a religion in Abarahamic religions. It is worse than trying to map git commands to subversion. Its a very different beast, it is a meta religion (or more accurately a diverse collection of a very large body of thought and introspection, originating from a geographical region and built over time time, that visitors clubbed into a single pool because they werent sure what to make of it). It is more like a religion factory pattern for building your own religion that includes questions you should keep visiting in that process, and a more fundamental one, why at all (and when) should one even consider building one. It lays down thought processes, questions that one should consider and critique when one is forming ones own parameterized religion. People get confused whether they are talking about the polymorphic class or the object instance.
In context of its vast diversity and inclusiveness, Abrahamic religions would feel like that they are the same religion sans minor changes and all the fighting to be much ado about nothing.
Only handful of people like Dr. Arun Shourie, Sitaram Goel, Ram Swarup and Rajiv Malhotra now a days seem to have put some efforts.
"United States police is the most brutal police force which is racist and always uses excessive force. Black teenagers are shot for merely being a suspect of stealing candies from store. It is not uncommon for SWAT forces to break into home of innocents and shoot their dogs for no reason what so ever."
The BBC or Mid-Day type publications print whatever someone else is feeding them.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuggee
Didn't they go around stabbing and strangling people?
My point was that there have been many bloody wars fought by Hindu rulers motivated primarily / singularly by political ambition. Thus I find this much popularized universally pacifist portrayal of Hinduism a little dishonest. Short of political ambition, the subcontinent was rich in resources enough that there were no compelling reasons for large conquests and colonization of others. Had that not been so, no one knows how that would have played out.
Tim Cook says I'm gay -> it's difficult to be Gay in India -> It's not just Indian Muslims who are Anti-Gay, and by the way Indian (or is it Hindu?) society has lot of other faults -> Hindu rulers had fought wars, and some other thing about Hinduism is dishonest
... and that is exactly what scares the shit out of me. This is why I consider history a mandatory reading, more so a critical reading of history, with an eye for the tell tale signs.
Playing with elements of hate and is playing with fire.
You might recall that India and Pakistan were the same country once. Geopolitically they look different now, but I blame that on the butterfly effect of a few good decisions that leaders of India chose to abide by during its formative period (and stupid decisions on behalf of the Pakistani statesmen). What scares me is that this threat of a fascist future in India is not as ludicrous as I would like it to be. A few bad decisions, few people not choosing to stand up and India could be a non muslim version of the state of Pakistan now.
Just for clarification, I bear no ill feeling towards Pakistani people, but they did really mess up their country and to me it seems for no good reason.
Yes very much so. The initial condition and the differential equation were not that different for the two countries. The trajectory however turned out to be drastically different. The statesmen in charge during its formative period did not take steps which would have otherwise made such a scenario less likely. Small changes in courses of their actions early in its history, a decision here and there had major influence on how the country would shape up. They were not thinking ahead.
It was a mistake to put religion in the center of politics. It was a mistake to cultivate this identity of the wronged population. Likewise for the now popular narrative of competing to be the better muslim, the roots of that narrative go farr back in time. Although Zia is the popular choice to ascribe the blame to, it had started way before. Bhutto (the father and the golden liberal boy) was for example very much in the business of deciding who is a true Muslim and who is not, deciding that Ahmadias are to be persecuted for not being pure enough Muslims, passing parliamentary laws to that effect. Check out why does Abdus Salam's grave in pakistan says
"...became the first <defaced> Nobel laureate for his work in physics".
If Indian politicians play the same game, the consequences would be no different. We would get a non-muslim pakistan.
> And still you are more worried about fascism in India!
Yes and for a reason, because history does rhyme.
> Muslims in Pakistan regularly kill minorities
Perhaps you have a very cherry picked view of Indian history... since when has Hindu's in India not killed minorities. It seems to be a mandatory right of passage to take charge of national politics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_riots_in_India
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_India
For those who are not very familiar with India, if you look closely you will see that some regions are regular and repeat offenders in post independence India whereas others are not affected.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_religion
And when a state has a lot of people who believe sharia law should be the law of the land, the courts and politicians have to grapple with what are essentially 6th century moral and legal ideas. And not just 6th century in fact, but made by one of the only prophets who commanded an army, and went to war, and wrote things like this:
http://www.islamawakened.com/quran/8/67/
"It is not fitting for a prophet that he should have prisoners of war until he hath thoroughly subdued the land. Ye look for the temporal goods of this world; but Allah looketh to the Hereafter: And Allah is Exalted in might, Wise."
You'd be hard pressed to find Old Testament prophets speaking this way or being described in this way. In fact, the Jews are admonished for "killing their prophets" who basically went around speaking.
So the "differential equation with initial conditions" analogy is very much a big factor.
Judaism formed to have an exclusionary character - it's hard to become a Jew, and so the Jews were always a minority, never ambitious to make the whole world Jews.
Christianity formed with a "peaceful proselytizing" character, for one thing because when it formed the apostles were the ones being persecuted and they didn't have the power to raise an army and convert people by the sword.
Islam on the other hand was formed that way and the political character of Islam is hard to defeat by populations full of sharia law-abiding, devout muslims. Disestablishment of the Church took a long time, but ultimately there is far less in Christianity that says the Church and Government must be one. In fact, statements like this emphasize the separation of Church and State:
http://biblehub.com/mark/12-17.htm
So yeah founding conditions matter, and I think that's why you see so many Islamic states and why there are more Muslims around the world living in democratic countries who truly believe that if their society was transformed from a democracy into an Islamic state, everyone would be better off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYAcLudBbhg
Personally I think Islam is not alone. I think various forms of socialism (Communism, Nazism) are also like "mind viruses" or group memes that tend to want to take over the government. If you look at it epidemiologically, certain ideas simply take over the population (the vector of transmission is almost always primarily young men, especially in bad economies or situations, e.g. hitler youth, or hamas, or vietkong, etc.) and states built around these ideas are intolerant and squash dissent. In my opinion, the greatest political danger lies in ideologies whose proponents obtain power.
We wanted the situation to be fucked both in and between Pakistan and India as we are following from the Roman theories on empire that fostering group enmity makes it easier to impose control, the great game we are still playing today, like spoiled children furious that we lost our toys, despite the fact that these days the stakes are intolerable even if you win.
It used to be that murderous lunatics drunk on power could foster tribal warfare for relatively little long term risk to stuff other than screwing up their own empire if they miscalculated and generally pissing off a lot of people, these days you might end up with vast deserts of radioactive glass. And I suspect we may create a couple of them yet, if things carry on the current trajectory.
The British also helped establish the Saudi and Hashemite kingdoms etc. The Syrian King Faisal (someone I think was a really progressive guy) was also installed by the British in Iraq. And all of this happened after the fall of the Ottoman empire.
In that part of the world where religion is very strong, it's interesting to see that democracy always leads to a theocratic government (except in Indonesia where it's so far successfully been separated) and thus the constant struggle against violence, threats to usurp power and human rights oppression.
"It will form for England a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism."
I guess he was right about some of the similarity with Ulster, though perhaps not in the way he intended.
edit - as for democracy leading to theocracy in that part of the world, firstly Indonesia is almost 9,000 km away, and secondly I do not think there has been any recent time where external powers have not been massively fucking about round there, so you cannot really draw any conclusions about this being a feature of the local culture.
The Arab league policy is that granting Palestinians citizenship or otherwise integrating them in the population would effectively give Israel carte blanche to depopulate Palestine by driving the population into exile, and so it's strongly frowned upon, with the result that Jordan is the only country who have granted citizenship to a large proportion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_and_the_New_Testam...
Some inconvenient examples: Between 1290 and 1753 it was illegal for Jews to exist in England. Then until 1846 they had to wear special clothes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_England
And when you say "Semitic" you're probably not aware that the Arabs are actually Semitic too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_people
And the Muslim religon is very problematic because its founder was a warrior, and the religion texts actually promote the "war for religion" and also that other religions aren't "true."
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad
Finaly, Judaism is problematic too, as their belief is that they are "chosen people" by the God who assisted them in wars against all others.
Welcome to the world we live in.
Not so surprising that that Muhammed guy (peace be upon him! (0)) got inspired for his wars. Apparently he was illiterate, but it seems that somebody read him big parts of OT. Muslims believe it was an angel named Gabriel (3), not to be confused with Moroni (4) that appeared in the US. And when we're there, Americans should understand Muhammedans and vice versa, as the US president was directly instructed by God too (5) so much for the Separation of church and state (6).
-----
(0) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad
(1) http://www.hebrew4christians.com/Names_of_G-d/Adonai/adonai....
(2) http://www.bricktestament.com/judges/
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad%27s_first_revelation
(4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Moroni
(5) http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa
(6) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_church_and_state
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/Being-gay-...
Some 10 years ago it used to be a really nice newspaper though and I mean really good. Their editorials used to be held up as examples of good writing skills. Now you would find typos, grammatical errors, not to mention factual errors.
EDIT @zimpenfish > Murdoch paper, by any chance? Nope, at least not yet. Small mercies I guess.
Murdoch paper, by any chance?
Same is the case for a treatment for "women".. in india they are treated unequally.. the boy child gets all the care, education, preferences and most of all "FREEDOM" and girl cant even do anything of her choice.. india people still believe in child marriage..
I don't understand what makes gay people unacceptable? they are not hurting the society like the criminals do.. they are not disrespecting anyone.. they are simple believing on what they feel is right and who is to decide that being gay is wrong..
I am happy Tim is supporting the gay community because if 100 normal people claim and accept to gay it would have been neglected.. however Apple's CEO supporting the gay community should help a little..
There is one basic rule in life that "Be good, Do good.. Never dis-respect any human or animal"
This varies by region and sometimes quite drastically so. In India you do have matriarchal societies, although only in pockets. If a woman walks into a beer shop in Delhi and takes a swig, chances are high that it would attract some unpleasantness. If the same plays out in Kohima or Shillong ... people there couldnt care less. That aside, intrusion into women's freedom follows the same gradient as that of which century the region lives by.
On the rest, couldnt agree more even if I tried.
In India we have messed up things so badly we have scared away a lot of people from having girl kids. I'm not talking about female infanticide and foeticide(This kind of things do happen, even now). But, These days those couples who have the morality of not committing such inhumane acts don't even bother to have a second kid if the first kid is a girl. While I see couples who have boy as a first kid generally go in for a second kid.
This is creating a massive irreparable gender imbalance in the society. Only this time, no one is breaking any law or committing any unethical or immoral activity. They are merely exercising their freedom to not bear children.
For a country where people have so much hate towards same gender marriages, every parent aspiring to have only boys is sort of straight hypocritical.
(F,none): 0.5
(M,F): 0.25
(M,M): 0.25
The expected number of both F and M is 0.75
In expectation, the overall number of heads and tails will be the same - if you look at the system from the outside, it's just a bunch of independent flips with fair coins, the decisions of the participants have no effect.
In the real world. There are other factors that contribute to gender imbalance(Infanticide, foeticide, mortality etc). Plus also note that once the gender balance goes out of balance it continues get worse with every iteration.
So this basically works like algorithm which is continually trying to increase the count of M's above F's.
I think you switched "boy" and "girl" there.
India might have archaic and North Korea like laws but it also has a non-functional government and police force which is mostly busy with other trivialities so even though article 377 exists, I am not aware of any people being harassed for being gay by government or authorities. Gay parties are common and have known several gay couples who have lived safely together.
Even though 200 people are prosecuted under this it is less because for they being gay and more because of other reasons. For example it is very common of Indian politicians to put you in jail for any random reason. In most cases, 377 is applied along with rape, domestic violence or divorce cases as the opponent seem fit.
Of course, India is not SF either. I think Indian liberal in their zeal to simply prove themselves "liberal" they are beating up the homosexuality drum needlessly in India. I think this is going to be counter productive and various political factions especially the Islam leaning parties might see an advantage in making life of Gays a bit more difficult.
There are undoubtedly many people who will no longer purchase Apple products because of this, and I don't know society can fix this with anything but time.
I'd prefer specific examples rather than just handwavey nonsense.
Have not see Maleficent, but I have heard nuts claiming Frozen was some kind of pro-gay film. It is resolved by (non-romantic) love between family members. I saw the movie twice in theater with my kid and couldn't find ANY indication of gay-ness. Anna ends up going after a man. The main plot is about self acceptance and embracing who you really are. While that metaphor can easily be applied to being gay (in todays world), I suspect the only people who instinctively made the connection are either gay or terribly anti-gay.
Gotta love Elsa, her and Merida are the best.
I didn't read into it that at all. I don't know which intended meaning Disney had when they adapted the story into a script and animation; but it seems to resonate with different people differently (as is often the case with movies).
I saw it in staunch contrast to the historical Disney "Princess" narrative, where happily-ever-after doesn't mean marriage, remarking how they openly mocked the idea of falling in love with someone and marrying them after a single day.
I'd have to ask him directly, but he could have easily seen the movie from Elsa's perspective, the woman imbued with a gift, or curse. Both perspectives are presented in the movie, if memory serves me, and it entirely depends on the person speaking at the time. The parents thought it was a curse. The trolls saw it differently. Whatever the reality of her situation, she fled, and then accepted who she was, and eventually defeated the parts of her gift that had made it so sad to have.
Perhaps, then, it is both. It was a movie that was a push away from the 'True Love's Kiss' story of Disney olde, as much as it was a story about accepting who you are. And the whole story is bound together by the very real presence of the two sister's familial love for one another.
Close enough. Life is about reproducing, or else we would not be here. +1 for impressionable young girls.
Agenda? People only use that term when they're trying to imply something is somehow pushing homosexuality on the weak minded.
a) "they're trying to convert our children!" paranoia
b) general disapproval.
There are at least two more:
c) dispassionate acknowledgement
d) outright support
I absolutely, strongly support the LGBT community's agenda of making gay marriage legal, everywhere.
Just because one hateful group of people uses a phrase in one particular way, doesn't mean we need to give them ownership of it, nor assume that everyone using the same term feels the same way they do.
edit: I just realized I got dragged way off topic by a troll. Whoops.
The fact that some religious groups have taken a particular stand doesn't make it "not pushy" to force other groups to follow.
EDIT: for example, a lot of religions don't have a problem with pork, but some do. It would be pushy to require a kosher or halal deli to serve pork. Likewise, there are some who want to require, say, Southern Baptist churches to perform same-sex weddings; that's pushy.
The original comment I responded to was someone claiming there's no "pushing" going on. As you clearly demonstrated, you're willing to "pressure" religious groups -- there's nothing wrong with that, but more people should be honest about it. From my perspective, the appropriate types of pressure are internal pressure (ie, members changing the group's ideas) or competitive pressure (other organizations that already are on the opposite side), not tax pressure.
I definitely feel like there is some amount of "pushing homosexuality on everyone" that has been going on the past five or ten years. It's no longer socially acceptable to think that homosexuality is wrong or an unhealthy sexual expression. Even donating to an anti-homosexuality lobby can get you pressured to resign [1]. Depending on the state you live in, you may have to accept gay marriage, even if it violates what you feel like marriage is. I don't know if sex-ed in schools is teaching it yet, but if not, I assume it is just a matter of time. If homosexuality is an unhealthy expression of sexuality, you won't want your kids exposed to that, but, no choice.
For people who agree that LGBT is acceptable, this probably feels like progress. For people who view LGBT as unhealthy sexual expression, the net effect feels a lot like "pushing homosexuality" on us.
[1] Brendan Eich, former Mozilla CEO
Due to this change in society, it is difficult and becoming more so to marry in the older sense. The more people who adopt the latter meaning, the fewer will retain the older. And even those who think they do are inevitably influenced by the rest.
I don't care much more about two homosexuals claiming to have married one another than I do about someone claiming to be a prophet or the reincarnation of Galileo; what worries me is the continued removal of any meaning from marriage.
Also, the lifelong nuclear family is something that only really appeared after the wars. Pre-war there was no antibiotics and the rates of female death were so high that single parent families were much more common than they are today. If your worries about developments in marriage are that it will reduce the stability for the upbringing of children, I would like you to consider which eras you are choosing for comparison, as we are now living in an era that supports longer childhoods than seemingly at any other point in history.
edit - for the complaint that it is difficult to find more traditional people as spouses, may I point out that there are a number of other people who seem to be making that complaint. Presumably you could find their parental address, so that you can appear in person to make a formal request to their father to begin courting. Oh, and remember to bring some cattle.
"that's why there is a word for it" Well that particular word actually is far younger than thousands of years: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/homosexuality/
Kinda makes you wonder a little bit our current distinctions and their actual relevance to the human condition.
"you may have to accept gay marriage, even if it violates what you feel like marriage is" What you feel like marriage is has nothing to do with what it actually is, which is a very well-defined legal construct outlined by the state. Your feelings are valid in a different context perhaps, but when it comes to the legal definition it's not a compelling part of the argument. In that context, a great many arguments have been heard in court and gay marriage bans have been roundly rejected, many in a bipartisan decision.
"If homosexuality is an unhealthy expression of sexuality, you won't want your kids exposed to that" Kids are going to be exposed. Gay people exist, and kids will and do meet them. Some 2-6% of the kids in that sex ed class are going to be gay themselves. Not saying parents shouldn't have a voice in this, just pointing out that prohibition is dangerous. You can't hide the word gay from children, and denied knowledge often only serves to generate greater curiosity. I would hope some clinical information about how to be healthy and gay isn't asking too much of these fragile creatures, but perhaps heterosexuality is really hanging from a thread? Somehow I doubt that.
I suppose it does. But if one of your children should happen to be gay, you've left no question, from what you've written, that you won't hesitate to push heterosexuality on them.
We care more about them finding a path to self-acceptance than we do about your prejudice.
I doubt anyone can do anything to change a paraphilia; pushing normative sexuality on someone is unlikely to be productive.
But I don't think self-acceptance is a good goal either. There are many unhealthy things in each of us; we shouldn't accept them, but rather should fight against them. I'm naturally lazy; I like to eat a lot; I'm selfish; I talk over others—I have to struggle against each of those deficiencies.
If one were to say, "I support legal equality for LGBT couples compared to straight couples", as well as "I question the health of LGBT acceptance in society", would you find their opinion repugnant?
If so, then you're pushing LGBT on everyone.
For the record, I truly support legal equality, and don't see how accepting LGBT in society is harmful. But the above example is a reflection of many more people than the echo chamber at HN would like to acknowledge.
1. What I find repugnant doesn't push anything on anyone.
2. My comment had nothing to do with what you or I do, it had to do with the above comment about Disney and Coke showing LGBT people in shows and ads.
By this logic, your logic, they have been "pushing" straight, black, hispanic, white, Christian, Jewish, youth, and elderly on us for years. Having the individual (or couple) on the show/ad does not in and of itself "push" anything. That's absurd.
[ Did you read (critically) the comment I was responding to?
I mostly agree with your statement, except for the implication you may be making that agenda always has this pejorative meaning. It simply doesn't. If you want to understand people, you should not assume that it always does. And we should not police people for choosing to bring the non-pejorative acknowledgement of the fact that groups have purposes and goals.
If LGBT groups did not have agendas, they would not be worth supporting. ]
Writing is an act of art, and reading is an act of interpretation. These secondary definitions come into play when determining what someone means. Agenda is not purely pejorative, and it's true LGBT groups have agendas - they have plans of things to be done - they have motives - reasons for doing something. However, these attributes of LGBT groups could also be described with words that do not have any negative aspects, such as goals, plans, purposes, etc.
>If you want to understand people...
I assume people understand the words they use and intend to use them. If people use words without precision, how can they expect to be understood?
As for etiquette... no idea ha. Made the same mistake myself.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Most individuals have agendas, and all organizations have (or should have) agendas.
We should all be able to talk honestly about various agendas without having to toe some manipulative lines concerning presumed hidden meanings.
Just because many homophobes, rightwingers, etc constantly harp on the 'homosexual agenda' as if its some scary monster, doesn't mean that LGBT rights organizations don't have agendas.
Had a Swedish guy (shop owner) living with another guy and they both had a bunch of kids. Described the other guy and kids as his "family."
See point #5 in this article's list: http://mic.com/articles/79455/7-moments-that-made-frozen-the...
Just a heads up so you don't make the mistake in less forgiving Scandinavian company next time ;-)
This is quite a stretch. As the father of a young child I have seen Frozen more times than I am proud to admit, and while it could be that the large man in the sauna is the shopkeeper's husband, he could just as easily be the shopkeeper's son, while the smaller woman in the scene is the shopkeeper's wife.
Even if you assume this to canonically be a gay relationship in a Disney movie (and it would, I suppose, be the first), it's a tiny throwaway moment in the life of a minor character which is easy to miss completely. This is hardly "taking a stand" as the grandparent post suggested.
This is the example being used to show Disney is "progressive"? An ambiguous possibly gay family that gets less than 5 seconds screen time?
Saying that this miniscule gesture is hetter than nothing is missing the big point. It's the twenty first century - Disney should have had gay characters and even gay leads by mow.
And for all its progressiveness Frozen still has a scene where mental illness is linked to danger using stigmatising language.
And with your presumption that the answer you're likely to get on HN might be "handwavey nonsense"?
Or are you implying that Fantasia's Sorcerer and Micky Mouse are gay just because they wave their hands around to conjure up colorful butterflies, broomsticks, comets, waves and storm clouds?
People have been accusing Disney of "pushing the gay agenda" (negatively) for years -- but those same people have not been able to point to concrete examples of people with same-sex attraction, they've only been able to point to BS like Mickey Mouse having a high voice. Now in this thread people are suggesting Disney is "taking a stand" (positive phrasing of the same issue) -- but they still seem to be lacking concrete examples. It seems inappropriate to credit Disney for "taking a stand" (or to criticize them for "pushing an agenda") without being able to point to an unambiguous, romantically-involved same-sex couple.
I suspect DanBC is like me -- I'd like to see an unambiguous example before categorizing Disney as "taking a stand".
On the flip side, anything perceived as anti-gay in business blows up with negative press and talks of boycotts. With Apple's demographic, this will definitely be considered a plus.
That's one of the greatest shame of UK,it symbolizes bigotery in its purest form.
It was absolutely stupid and unjust (since most upper classes were involved in buggery in school anyways) - but calling it bigoted is like saying 'it was so yellow of them to do'.
"That's one of the greatest shame of UK,it symbolizes bigotery in its purest form."
but I accept I might have read stronger sentiment into that than was intended.
Prime Ministers Apology: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/11/pm-apology-to-a...
Royal Pardon: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/10536246/Al...
(Thanks to gpvos for the correction of faith->fate. )
That's a rather inaccurate, cringe worthy and generic statement. If your saying only one person contributed to the field of computers in 2014, that's sad.
We tend to glorify individuals in the eyes of media and forget [1]others who contributed to where we are today in technology.
[1] http://www.computerhope.com/people/ - list of people who have contributed to computers.
Edit: Thanks to oneplusone, I realised that he was speaking about Alan Turing. But why base a field on only one person regardless of sexuality. Why is sexuality the issue in the first place?
Because Alan Turing is the father of computer science. Basically everything that came after depended crucially on his work.
- To name a few great contributors. Yes Alan Turing is considered the father of computer science but with out the knowledge of others before him (and even during his time) we could be living in a different world right now.
Even the late, great Isaac Newton said - [1]"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g...
In this light, it seems the original comment is correct.
What do you think would have happened if Turing had never been born?
Perhaps we would never have had a single individual who contributed as much, all at once, as Turing did... but the sum total of his contributions WOULD have been made by other people, eventually.
And yet, he was born, and he did contribute, and we remember him for that, and we remember what his peers did to him in response. And we learn a lesson from that.
Why is this controversial?
The only thing which might be controversial (but really shouldn't be) is the observation that people make foolish and illogical claims when they let their passions drive them to hyperbole. For example, claiming that computer science NEEDED Turing. That without Turing, we would not have computer science.
Its simple. Worship him all you want for what he actually did, but please don't fall prey to the belief that "without so-and-so, X would NEVER have been developed". Or "without so-and-so, we would still be doing Y".
Nonsense. Some other person or group of people would have made those contributions.
This has nothing to do with how horribly he was treated. And if you want to highlight the sickness of the world by pointing out the genius of one of the victims of our diseased culture, that's cool, but we can do that without going off into a fantasy land where some individual was uniquely, in all the world, uniquely capable of making the contributions they made.
https://www.googlestore.com/Google+Redesign/Brands/Android/A...
Quick, homophobes! Burn your Android phones!
Do you agree with all of the life choices made by every innovator throughout the centuries, many of whom were very religious and almost assuredly would've been anti-gay had such a movement existed in their time? It may make sense to deprive these people of money now if you disagree with them, but it doesn't make sense to discharge all the output of their life's work once there's no more threat of them actually receiving direct monetary aid from your purchases, and it doesn't make sense to denigrate the product on its own basis, independent from the behavior or ideals of the original creator. We should recognize good wherever we can find it.
I disagree. First, I think it was widely assumed that he was gay, and if it wasn't, he was accidentally outed during a live TV broadcast a few months ago by a CNBC reporter [1]. Second, the people that think this way probably already avoid Apple products, as both Tim Cook and Apple have been vocal on gay rights for quite some time. Finally, the one thing that these kinds of people hate more than those that disagree with their worldview is being personally inconvenienced. If they're already invested in the Apple ecosystem and are used to the iOS UX, they're going to keep paying Tim Cook for a new device every year.
[1] http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000288253 - about one minute in
If you had read the article it should become quite clear to you why quite a few people knew and some people even wrote about it.
Since in general journalists will avoid to publish the sexual orientation of someone unless that person made public statements about it, most journalists just didn’t write about it. (I think that’s exactly the right guideline to follow. It is awesome when people come out to help others who are struggling, but this is still a personal decision and I don’t think journalists should make that decision for people. There should never be an obligation to come out.)
Is it criticism? Because if it is, it's misplaced. I did read the article. I am myself gay. According to the other answers, it seems it was known "in the scene". Do you mean everyone who's gay should either be in the scene or stop asking questions?
> it should become quite clear to you why quite a few people knew
It didn't become clear to me. Does that mean I don't get social clues? Does that mean I'm not fluent in English? Does that mean I miss a brain cell? People are different, we don't all understand things, so even if it seems unbelievable to you, please still answer the question.
There once was a time where, if you were gay, or were close to people who were, you'd pick up hints about others who were gay. These hints would come from others who were gay, or gay-friendly. And they would be passed along like that.
As you moved closer to circles of power, you'd know more and more powerful people who were gay. But there was a code: you didn't bring it up publicly, or with outsiders. (Unless you wanted to be cruel.)
With this knowledge came power. You could read people and situations, understand hints and special relationships. It's a kind of x-ray vision.
But, if you were not gay, and were not close to people who were, you would be completely unaware. You might assume you didn't know anyone who was gay!
Such people were surprised when Rock Hudson (who everyone knew) was outed as gay just before he died of AIDS in 1985. They were surprised when other public figures were outed the same way, even (seriously!) "obvious" cases like Liberace.
We are now somewhere between that world (which was complex and had fascinating intrigues) and a different world (which is more open and fairer).
Source: before I met my wife, I didn't know anyone who was gay. But in fact, I was just ignorant that I already did.
I never really questioned it, because... because it was common knowledge. No one ever mentioned that he wasn't out, so I wrongly assumed he was fully out until I heard about that newscaster who messed up.
I figured (wrongly) that the reason it was never mentioned publicly was because no one thought it was comment-worthy. I naively thought "oh good, look how far we've come".
http://www.npr.org/2014/06/13/321778926/letters-the-world-cu...
That's where I learned it. I didn't know for a few weeks later that it was supposed to be a secret we didn't say.
I guess I could be wrong, but I know I certainly won't to exchange my Xperia Z3 for an iPhone just because Cook came out.
By who, Apple fanboys? Your average person probably doesn't even know who is Apple's current CEO let alone that he's gay.
Two links from April 2014: Out Magazine - http://www.out.com/out-exclusives/power-50/2014/04/15/what-d...
HuffPo (about the same) - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/27/out-power-50-most-p...
I'm gay, politically aware, and posting on HN on a MacBook and had no idea, though frankly I also don't browse LGBT power lists.
I actually can think of one co-worker who might have some difficulty with this news today...
Time does appear to be healing cultural wounds, even if not quickly enough.
I think purposely conflating gay rights and feminism is more than a little disingenuous. LGBT movements empower both genders, feminism empowers only one.
I think its very possible to be socially progressive in thought but not be a cheerleader for the modern feminist agenda. These things don't necessarily contradict each other.
So, there are some bad feminists around. [1] When people are absurd, feel free to 'absurd' right back at them (i.e. "Sure, I'm a potential rapist - as much as you are a potential murderer!").
"Dropping sympathy" for the feminist movement as a response a few bad feminists that you've encountered is not really justified, or rational.
> I think purposely conflating gay rights and feminism is more than a little disingenuous. LGBT movements empower both genders, feminism empowers only one.
I'm not following the reasoning here. Both movements are about equality; one focuses on gender, the other on sexual identity/orientation. They are very much two sides of the same coin (the humanEqualityCent).
[1] "Are You a Good Feminist or a Bad Feminist?" - Shane Killian https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axuz3JlZIbk
When you are made to feel unwanted, excluded, and otherwise not welcome it is natural to go elsewhere in search of inclusiveness. This is a far more common reaction than that of adopting sympathy for those excluding you. No aspect of this should be surprising to a feminist.
Sure, but the GP wasn't talking about a particular group rejecting them, but rather "stop sympathizing with the entire modern feminist movement". That's an extreme reaction to disliking a subset of the movement's followers.
> This is a far more common reaction than that of adopting sympathy for those excluding you. No aspect of this should be surprising to a feminist.
Nobody's asking for personal sympathy or contribution, but rejecting Feminism due to a few bad Feminists is stupid. Especially if you claim to have been aligned with the Equality argument beforehand. How does that even work?
(attempt to reverse engineer a thought process leading to this)
1) thinking "Hey, men are dicks towards women. That ain't right. We need to equalize things as much as possible!" 2) meets bad feminists, receives abuse 3) thinking "Fuck it - Equality, yes, but not for you; I don't like you. NVM on the whole Feminism issue."
Absurd. You didn't really believe in equality in the first place. Demanding and supporting equality should have nothing to do with your personal likes and dislikes.
Why do you expect otherwise? Why do you feel compelled to couple it with insults?
But Feminism isn't a group; it is an idea. If some of the followers misbehave, you should still be able to believe and support in the idea.
To me, supporting ideas only when you "like" the (majority of?) people supporting them is akin to supporting free speech but only for the positions that you believe in.
(edit)
> Why do you feel compelled to couple it with insults?
I'm not sure where you're reading that. The "You" at the end was directed at the fictional person that I'm attempting to emulate with the 1/2/3 reasoning, not you.
Most people will also wonder if something about the idea turns people into abhorrent people or if something about the idea is only attractive to abhorrent people. In either case, it is not something to which our notional person is likely to be attracted.
In short - the people who adhere to an idea are seen as commentary on the idea.
I would have thought that everyone who believes in gender equality is implicitly a Feminist..
> If every single adherent of an idea you encounter is an abhorrent person
Are you exaggerating for the sake of argument (perfectly valid), or is it that bad for some people?
Both.
Too many people who call themselves feminists actually do not believe in equal rights, and present feminism as a justification for bad behaviors.
If this is how you experience feminism, this is going to influence your notion of what the word feminism actually means, in practice.
Is this not the case?
In the real world, it can be used as a fig leaf to justify a variety of abusive behaviors. For some people, that encompasses the whole of their experiences.
We disagree that this actually changes the meaning of Feminism.
Yes, some horrid people need an excuse to dish out abuse and Feminism often becomes that excuse (I'm thinking about everyone who's ever used the potential-rapist argument).
Does this taint Feminists, the group? Maybe a little, yes.
Does this taint Feminism, the idea that genders should be as equal as possible? Well, IMHO, no.
Feminism was about seeking equal rights and equal opportunities for women. In the West it largely achieved that goal (we're not there yet, but consider where we started). Thanks to tumblr, twitter and the blogosphere echo-chamber, the feminism most people become aware of online is very different from that.
Worse yet, there is no such thing as "the feminist movement" (anymore) by a long shot. It's become a broad term that encompasses everything from egalitarians to misandrists. And any criticism of the later group is always portrayed as a criticism of the former (which is why we end up with this entirely pointless MRA/SJW shitstorm-on-demand situation we have now).
Nobody is forcing egalitarians to call themselves feminists. But clinging to that label and pretending it hasn't changed its meaning is no different from trying to distance your communism from Stalin or your nationalist socialism from the Nazi party.
I prefer that definition, yes. But the important part of my sentence was "locked in". I was referring to people who are incapable of acknowledge that the word feminism is abused, not just by anti-feminists, but also by some self-proclaimed feminists.
If someone really thinks that feminism can only mean 'equal rights', period, end of conversation, talk to the hand - then conversations with people pointing out problems in the feminism movement will suffer from equivocation fallacies.
It should be the case. In practice, it is often not the case. If you doubt this, search 'feminist' on youtube, watch a dozen random videos, and try to identify the issues and beliefs which the speaker sees as intrinsically 'feminist' ones, and ask yourself whether those issues and beliefs are really in support of equality. Its a bit of a mixed bag.
I'm not trying to attack feminism, as I strongly believe in equality and we have a lot of work to do. And obviously there are anti-feminists who have always tried to distort the messages of feminists, and fabricate their own. But these days, those manipulators don't have to try very hard.
I don't see how we can fix this, though. The commercial approach to a similar problem would be absurd in this case: creating centralized certification body regulating which 'feminist goals/speakers/blogs/books/lines-of-argument/etc' are deemed 'truly feminist'.
I don't follow his reasoning either, as stated, but there is a question of subcultures, subcultural values, specific ideologies within the movement, and most importantly: composition.
There are many ways that these two movements differ. And while both movements attract some unpleasant people who damage the reputation of the movement as a whole, the way this plays out in feminism is a little different from how it plays out with LGBT rights.
So its not surprising to me that some people might (based on their personal experiences) think that one is toxic and the other isn't.
I suppose this is a common misconception, but it is not true. Feminism also frees men from restrictive gender roles. It is feminism that says that men are allowed to cry, to hug one another, to have dreams and hopes and fears.
Giving up some privileges -- privileges which are not right for us to have anyway -- is a small price to pay, I believe, for becoming whole human beings.
She calls herself feminist and is responsible for the women’s' network's equal rights week at my university this year.
Three days ago, the Court of Appeal has just judged the law was conform to the constitution, because everyone is guaranteed equal rights no matter their sex, race or religion, and this doesn't include sexuality.
The Straits Times: http://www.straitstimes.com/news/singapore/courts-crime/stor...
The original judgement: https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1348...
We may disagree with Singapore and think that most sexual acts shouldn't be illegal. But how can we go around saying law can't regulate behavior? This is one of my big problems with the gay "rights" lobby of today -- they're trying to make it illegal to legislate basically anything. If you disagree with the law, change the law, don't codify sweeping generalizations that set a precedent of "I was born this way and I can't control it" as an excuse for any illegal behavior.
Only the most basic principles are protected by things like the American Bill of Rights, and the specific behavior must be tested by the courts to see if it conforms to the principles enshrined as fundamental rights.
I didn't say the Singaporean law is stupid or retarded. I'm underlining the huge leap.
It's up to the reader really to forge an opinion. Let's not forget that Singapore is a very developed country, has major exchanges with our other countries of the western world, include trade, research, patents, high-educated migrants both ways and we have influence both ways. And yet, they don't guarantee some citizenship rights (aka: immediate arrestation and 2 years jail time) on the basis of what you would do in a private room between two consenting adults. Up to the reader to make an opinion.
In the U.S., the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment prohibits a state from denying any person "the equal protection of the laws." This would appear to forbid discrimination based on any characteristic at all. Of course, governments make distinctions based on people's characteristics all the time. These range from the mundane (persons with poor vision can be required to wear corrective lenses while driving) to the highly consequential (American citizens of Japanese ancestry can be interred during a war against Japan).
The history of the Equal Protection Clause, then, is a long and messy process of sorting out what kinds of discrimination are permissible and what aren't. And there has been a lot of movement, especially during last few decades. Consider that during the lifetime of George Takei, the EPC was interpreted to permit the internment of his family (Korematsu v. United States, 1944) and giving him the right (in California) to marry his husband of the same sex (Hollingsworth v. Perry, 2013).
The current standard is that that you can discriminate on a basis other than certain "suspect" classifications if the discrimination is reasonably related to a legitimate government interest.
In the recent Windsor case, the Supreme Court concluded that the federal Defense of Marriage Act failed to meet even that minimal standard. Many lower courts have invalidated state same sex marriage bans on the same basis.
You can argue that it is the place of the legislature to decide what classifications it can use in lawmaking, but that raises two problems. First, the clause is part of the Constitution and it must impose some limit on the power of state legislatures, and there needs to be a process for interpreting what that limit is. Second, history has shown that the political process doesn't always protect unpopular minorities (though there are also good arguments that courts are not that much better).
The law that exists states explicitly that anal and oral sex, only between members of the same sex, is illegal. Both of these acts have been specifically made legal for a heterosexual pair.
The only difference between these two scenarios? The gender of one participant. A woman may receive anal sex from a man, but a man may not. Discrimination based on gender.
Besides that I generally approve your comment, let's quote the section that was judged by the Court of Appeal 3 days ago as conform to the constitution:
""" Article 377A
Any male person who, in public or in private, commits, or abets the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to 2 years.
"""
"No troops quartered in your house", "you get a jury trial if it involves more than $X", and "powers not taken by the feds are granted to the states" don't seem like 'basic principles' to me. They seem a bit more complex and somewhat arbitrary.
... I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me.
I recently spoke to some gay religious people and it struck me as very odd. I'm biased, of course. I tend to think religion gets far more forgiveness than it deserves in a huge number of contexts. It was interesting though, in a bunch of ways.
When I hear a statement like this it makes me think of Africans converting to Mormonism or Jews joining European far right movements. I realize that there are perspectives through which this is not contradictory. Mormonism had views of Africans that only lagged behind mainstream opinions by a decade or two. The far right parties are more interested in Islam or African migration these days…
Still, I can't help it. It give me the heebie jeebies.
Calling it a "progressive social experiment" gives it far more forgiveness than it deserves in my opinion...
From which I conclude that it's easy to forgive when we basically like the idea/movement/etc., and easy to see undeserved forgiveness when we basically dislike it.
I think there's a related point though where socialism or any political ideology never really got near religion: becoming part of people's identity. People without a shred of personal beliefs nearer to Catholic cannon than to Protestantism or secular perspectives will continue thinking of themselves as Catholic.
If you are Catholic it's easier to forgive Catholicism than it is to forgive The Church. Nationalist creed (I am French or American) is the only thing that comes close.
I think there's also a taboo about criticizing people's religious identity and by extension their religion that was learned many wars. Stalinism is publicly criticized in a ways that Christianity or Islam would never be.
But regarding this comment, it's the personal level that gets me. Homosexuals place in 2014 was achieved despite objection and obstruction of the overwhelming majority of our religious institutions and text. They are now partially and begrudgingly coming around to where the public already is. They are being patted on the back for any lukewarm embrace of homosexuals. Gays taking them back is offensive to me. It's like a wife embracing an abusive husband that almost killed her when he gets out on parol.
I think the key is that the 'fundamental' people you often hear about that think 'homosexuality is an abomination' are a small minority. The people who are fine with it usually aren't seen on the news because their opinion isn't inflammatory.
If that's what it takes to get people on-board this generation, I don't mind. But I hope lines like that can be omitted one day. Doesn't it just look incredibly silly?
Maybe he didn't want to omit it. Maybe it's not PR, but instead his actual feelings. Maybe he is religious. So, it's all cool and all that he's gay (which it is), but he mentions God and now you're all "Why can't he just keep that to himself?"
That seems a little hypocritical to me.
That said, it wasn't exactly a secret that Tim Cook is gay. Though it was always handled as more of a "this is something that can inform your understanding of him as a business leader" as opposed to "omg it's a scandal! He's gay and running the biggest company in the world!" His sexuality is probably a bigger deal among Alabama boosters than the tech community though.
Is it different in US?
The first is just a frivolous small talk type comment. Non-religious people would say this. It's part of the common US vocabulary. The second is much more serious, and the speaker is actually thanking God for how he is. A non-religious person would never say it.
Religious people do this type of thing all the time in the US. Just look at 1 example- sports. The amount of American pro-athletes who are religious is astounding. Many athletes will seriously thank God after doing something well in a sporting event.
I'm very very anti-theist and I still have a lot of Christians on my Facebook, and some of them are constantly thanking God or praising Jesus for some good thing that happened in their life.
The amount of cars that have religious stickers on them is incredible. Crosses, the Jesus fish, some Biblical reference, a Christian brand, etc- you see them constantly. Maybe it's not like that in the Bay Area, but that is an exception. I live in Germany now and I've counted a total of TWO cars in 2 years that had any kind of Religious sticker.
So, yeah, Christianity is everywhere in the US. I pray for the day that this is not true.
This is just a very clever thought pattern to confirm the American mythos of the self-made man and avoid giving credit to teammates, coaches, etc. "God made me great" is a way to take credit for yourself while maintaining the appearance of humility (no one can really call you out on it, either, because it's just your religion). Politicians use it all the time too.
FWIW you will see plenty of religious displays in European soccer. Look at the biggest sporting event in Europe this past week: El Clasico between Real Madrid and Barcelona. Watch when Neymar scores a goal and kneels down on the ground and points up at the sky and says thank you (or something like that). Unfortunately Messi didn't score, but he would have done something similar though less dramatic. Granted these guys aren't Europeans, but they're not North Americans either. And other European footballers do similar things.
quick google: http://www.albatrus.org/english/religions/pagan/origin_fish_...
To whom? lol
You can be an adulterer and a Christian. You can commit any sin imaginable and still consider yourself a Christian. Homosexuality is no different.
A Christian is just someone who believes in Jesus Christ as a messiah. You are referring to something much more specific.
Being homosexual or lusting after a women in your mind are equally damning, but rejecting these thoughts and actions and leaving them at the Cross is the message of the Bible.
Also, how does Red Lobster do so well in the south, let alone pork products...
right before that, in Leviticus 18:19, "'Do not approach a woman to have sexual relations during the uncleanness of her monthly period."
and right before that, in Leviticus 17:15, "'Anyone, whether native-born or foreigner, who eats anything found dead or torn by wild animals must wash their clothes and bathe with water, and they will be ceremonially unclean till evening; then they will be clean."
and my Favorite, Leviticus 19:19 (one page after homosexuality): 'Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material."
That Cotton-Polyester blend you're wearing? You might as well be having gay sex, as far as The LORD is concerned. All of the above are hellworthy trespasses.
so with the above in mind, everyone is ignoring the basic tenants of what the bible says. Therefore, using your logic, you must have a hard time viewing just about anyone as Christian.
"For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.
Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.
Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.
They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones.
In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error."
Though this category in Corinthians is about who will not inherit the kingdom of god, and then in Timothy it is describing who the law is written for, so in either case it is not distinguishing categories of sins, but merely listing them.
Elsewhere in Paul, homosexuality is equated with the greedy, the sexually immoral, thieves, drunks, slanderers, idolators and swindlers, but makes no mention of murderers.
edit - the passage in Corinthians is also interesting as it is in the context of a wider passage banning recourse to civil law in secular courts between believers.
That's a pretty intense bastardization of biblical theology. It's fun to snicker and say things like that but your logical gymnastics are quite embarrassing to those who understand the correlation between Christ, the Old Testament, and covenant theology.
But speaking to the correleation between Jesus and the Old Testament, everyone should also read Isaiah 52:13 through 54. This is the savior foretold in the old testament, and where matthew/john/paul/ringo draw most of their confirmation of Jesus' credentials. Does this sound like the Jesus we all know?
"You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below."
However you can rape the wives of your defeated enemies after battle, which the vast majority of Christians would find horrifying:
"When you go to war against your enemies and the LORD your God delivers them into your hands and you take captives,
if you notice among the captives a beautiful woman and are attracted to her, you may take her as your wife.
Bring her into your home and have her shave her head, trim her nails
and put aside the clothes she was wearing when captured. After she has lived in your house and mourned her father and mother for a full month, then you may go to her and be her husband and she shall be your wife.
If you are not pleased with her, let her go wherever she wishes. You must not sell her or treat her as a slave, since you have dishonored her."
There's a lot of basic tenets of the bible that Christians ignore. Wearing mixed fibers, eating shellfish, donkeys and oxen co-working in agriculture.
If you go by basic tenets of the bible, most Christians don't seem to even know what they all are, let alone follow them.
See, for example, Tina's, Jonah's and Blake's testimonies:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA4gpJUpvpc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbAqzGsjl30
Those videos are featured by the Courage apostolate:
http://couragerc.org/courage/#testimonies
This comment is not intended to be inflammatory; my intention is simply to share an alternate perspective.
And fair play to them if it is what they believe.
It doesn't work for everyone though, as is eminently obvious if you look to scandals over the years across all religious groups who swear selected members to chastity.
But this also makes sense from a PR perspective because according to American political polls being an atheist is "worse" than being black, gay, a women, etc. It's apparently largely unforgivable to be godless.
So, some may be surprised to learn he's gay, but then take some solace in the fact that he still praises the same god they do. In a way this is the perfect way to assuage the exact audience this revelation might offend because, you know, God loves all his children.
This really won't be a big deal. Some extreme groups will make some noise, but that's about it. I was in the Marine Corps when they repealed Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Everyone thought it'd be a big deal. They repealed it...nobody cared.
I'm a little amused by you guys trying to work out all the "PR" angles Cook could be trying to exploit by mentioning his faith without even considering that it's is a genuinely important part of who he is.
A Gallup one recently: http://www.gallup.com/poll/155285/atheists-muslims-bias-pres...
Maybe I'm just being pedantic but I don't think a poll about how people would vote for the president is a good indicator of how people feel about atheists in comparison to other groups of people. I don't even think the latter is quantifiable.
People have tried in comparison to other religions:
http://www.pewforum.org/2014/07/16/how-americans-feel-about-...
And:
http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/section-3-political-p...
I'm an atheist and a gay man. I think being gay is a good thing in my life. That is to say, if there were a pill I could take that would turn me straight, I wouldn't take it.
Despite harassment and discrimination (which still happens, even in happy tolerant cities like London—most recent incident, 3 weeks ago, someone shouting "queers!" out of the window while I was walking down the street late at night holding hands with a guy), the point is that in spite of huge amounts of cultural and religious programming to the opposite, a lot of gay people have found themselves embracing their sexuality and considering it not just a not-bad thing but an actively good thing in their life.
That's what Cook is getting at: that sentiment can be expressed in secular terms (like I just have) or in religious terms.
The world has a wide range of people, and they don't fit into neat little boxes.
Jesus Christ, atheists are the worst (as can be seen here in this thread). And I say that as an atheist …
That being said, it is really difficult for most people to get past the cognitive dissonance that comes from being mass-denied "salvation" by the followers of a religion (Islam, Christianity, Hinduism) for being a homosexual, and yet, still believing in the invisible man in the sky that supposedly dictated these edicts.
Disclosure: I'm LGBTQ, athiest, and will defend to the death the right for anyone to believe in things I do not.
For the record, I am a strong atheist, and I think people should be able to speak about ideas freely, including ideas I disagree strongly with, but I'm not willing to actually die for someone else's right to speak a bunch of nonsense about a man in the sky and how many raisins you get for following him. :)
I think we know the rest of it. suffice it to say that I react violently to a censorship of belief, even if I do not share them. I'm a little saddened to think that I might be in a minority.
Someone in the thread actually claimed this:
> I am also an atheist which, today, in the US, is worst than being gay in some circles.
They're not even remotely close in terms of persecution. And I use that word lightly when referring to the modern atheist.
It seems like Tim Cook isn't under any pressure to publicly announce this, so it seems he's doing it as a way of leveraging his position to help others who are experiencing adversity. Some will say this is a stunt for Apple, and no doubt it does draw attention to Apple in a way, but I think you'd have to be pretty cynical to say that this is anything more nefarious than an admirable gesture.
I'm surprised that a story that was on Techmeme at that time, did not get broader attention, until now.
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/08/25/dont-ignore...
However there is the Nick Denton school of thought.
Denton ( of Gawker Media ) routinely shames public personalities for being clandestine about their sexuality.
The rationale for doing so is such that if no one calls them out, that the worldviews these public personalities profess never get the perspective, those views deserve. The backdrop of the person's sexuality and the influence it had on the shaping of those views is lost, Denton believes. [1]
[1] Gawker Kicks Open the Closet, but Its Disclosure Barely Reverberates
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/28/business/media/gawker-kick...
For people who aren't doing anything particularly wrong, though, especially those in positions where being openly gay is severely against the norm (as with Cook, who is, I believe, the first openly gay Fortune 500 CEO _ever_), it seems inappropriate. Say Cook had been outed back when he was COO; would he have become CEO? I'd like to say yes, but it would have been a brave move for the board.
This. It doesn't matter at all. Its great that people are embracing their sexuality, but there was no need to come out to the press about it. It doesn't change the way I see Apple as a company or even Tim Cook. He is still the same person before and after this article.
Sure there was. Here's Cook on why it was worth caming out to the press about it:
"So if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy."
I think it's very understandable to underestimate the degree of suffering involved, and how much this can be improved over time through publicly voiced support, especially when it comes from influential figures.
Many of us make this mistake in regards to women or ethnic minorities too. And those of us who are good looking do it to those who are less pretty, and those who us who have always been popular do this to the unpopular.
The best kind of empathy, I believe, concerns not just your feelings toward others, but also the context that these others are in.
Let's hope that this will help many more people understands that there's nothing abnormal with having another sexual orientation.
Tim Cook
The only reason to put forward such effort to make it important is because the practice of identity politics is too moot any opposition by branding it all within the identity of the being criticized. Hence someone cannot complain about a policy of the current President because the only reason they do so is racism. Hence if you do not support the position of someone who happens to be gay well you are now a homophobe.
Lists solve nothing and reveal little.
About 2% of people self-identify as gay. So 10 people on that 500 list are likely to be gay, give or take.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014...
Is your theory that the remaining nine should issue press releases? How do you know others aren't openly gay with the only people that matter: friends, family, loved ones; as opposed to feeling the need to broadcast it to the media.
Straight people don't go around declaring their sexuality, nor ever feel the need to. Gay people shouldn't feel the need to either. That is a critical hallmark of equality.
Do I have to email the press to declare that I'm openly gay and running a Fortune 500 company?
Should I declare that I'm openly straight and running a Fortune 500 company?
It's an absurd premise, and it presumes that we all need to be declaring our sexuality. That another person has a right to know my sexual orientation. It's not only false but disgusting.
Is that a problem too?
I wonder what the ratio of male/female food servers is? If they are roughly equal, would you say we have true equality among food servers or is something else going on?
Nobody wants women to be pushed out by force or denied opportunity to reach their deserved position. But is that really happening whenever we see more of one gender in a particular role than another? I don't think so.
I remember in highschool (20 years ago), only 2 girls were in my electronics class. Those 2 girls were not given any special treatment, or picked on, or anything. It was simply how the cards fell for that class due to most girls in the school NOT being interested in electronics.
I suppose we could've started a campaign designed to attract more "women in electronics". Okay, but they were never unwelcome in the first place. They simply didn't enrol in that course.
It seems likely that the fact that so few girls expressed an interest in electronics is a result of differences in the way society treats men and women. Whether or not this is inherently a bad thing is something I think can be reasonably debated (and at great length), but ultimately I think it is.
It almost certainly does not present as "perfectly equal percentages", but such radically unequal percentages are at least suspicious, especially because the professions you listed pay unusually poorly compared to jobs of similar skill and education levels.
In my country this ratio is slightly better: 88-12
And it is widely seen as a serious problem.
Straight people don't declare their sexuality because everyone is assumed to be straight until proven otherwise.
Have you ever seen wedding photos? Never heard a man refer to his wife or a woman to her husband? People can, and should, disclose their orientation all the time.
I guess I live under a rock. Good thing I get HN under here.
(I think that is a not-so-funny version of a joke a comedian told, but I can't for the life of me remember which one...)
http://www.out.com/out-exclusives/power-50/2013/04/10/power-...
I think it was one of those things where everyone knew it, but no one talked about it because it just wasn't that big a deal.
Injustice won't be over the day little black boys and girls and little white boys play together. It will be over the day anyone even thinks anything of it. Unfortunately, we have both overt and covert (even accidental) discrimination still to deal with.
But our grandparents faced firehouses and dogs, while we face op-eds and Twitter feeds. For the first time in history we have the communications technology to bind humanity together into a single global people.
Someday there will be a gay president. Someday there will be a black female president. I hope that by the time that day comes, it will be little noted nor long remembered.
Agreed.
But I think his message is aimed at younger people. "I'm a mellow kinda guy who is respected in the world of business. And i'm gay." You don't have to fit the stereotype of being flamboyant , out, loud and proud to be gay.
You and I know that. Any functioning adult in a largish city knows that. Maybe some kids in isolated communities without personal role models (family, family friends, teachers, etc., who are gay and run-of-the-mill kinda people) don't know that.
Edit: The top comment says it better than I can: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8532962
At least I know I'm not crazy now and that it was in magazines and such at least a year ago.
Heh, I thought this was a joke at first. It's kind of funny that lots of people didn't know, yet he has literally been featured as #1 in Out Magazine. I guess it does still fit, that he hasn't personally, publicly acknowledged it, even if others have acknowledged it publicly.
Now, I'm not saying that isn't an important announcement. I have to admit that even Mr. Straighter-than-Straight over here found his eyes kind of welling up while reading Tim's words. Powerful stuff, and a great example for those coming of age while dealing with who they are. But as a person whose portfolio is weighted way too heavily in AAPL, and an owner of lots of stuff with apples on them, I no more care about who Tim Cook shares his bed with than I do about what sports team he favors. That's his own business, and doesn't affect me in the slightest.
In summary, not everyone knew it if only because some of us don't care enough one way or the other to find out.
"His truest loyalty, beyond even Apple, may be to the Auburn Tigers football team, whose memorabilia is said to stud his home and office."
...says Gawker. So now you know that too.
Our lives would be different if we were born a generation ago. Thank you MLK and Tim Cook.
On the other hand, there were occasions complete strangers (usually older) have said very nice things to us in public. These positive experiences greatly out number the negative.
What a shame.
You might have missed the part where he said he lives in Texas.
The United States constantly labels itself the best country in the world, the pinnacle of democracy and freedom, etc. when unfortunately the reality for millions of people is not so good.
The reality is, tribalism and convenient categorization is everywhere, and the United States is not immune. Just because there might be a legal system in place to address discrimination in its various forms does not mean you won't run into close-minded, hateful individuals as you walk down the street. As Bruce Hornsby sang years ago, "Because the law don't change another's mind When all it sees at the hiring time Is the line on the color bar"
Of course not. This is not black-or-white, all-or-nothing. There are shades in between.
When a country makes discrimination illegal, it forces people to stop doing it and slowly over time their minds will change, because otherwise they'll run afoul of the law. These days discriminating against a gay person in Canada is akin to discriminating against someone because they're female - it's unheard of, and you'd be quickly silenced and given a stern talking to, if not disciplined (if it was in the workplace)
If the US would hurry up and make discrimination of gay people illegal, the mind-set of people would slowly change. Maybe it would take a generation (or even two), but it's better to start that process now than x years from now.
Could anyone provide details? I wonder whether it is an explicit "Being gay is grounds for firing" or rather just plain lack of protection from firing for being gay?
It doesn't miss it, that would imply an unintentional oversight. There might have been a time when it was just not something people thought of including (although the fact that homosexuality was often explicitly criminalized also suggests that was not the case), but by now there is no state where there has not been an effort to get such protections on the books, so it is, in every case where it is not explicitly protected, a deliberate exclusion.
It makes all those "protections" completely toothless.
In order to win a case, you would need to provide extensive documentation, probably collected via clandestine recordings, that would be able to convince a jury by preponderance of the evidence that you were fired for a protected reason, and not simply because the company no longer wanted to pay you for your work.
Besides that, one of the selling points of "at will" was that making it easier to fire people would make it easier to hire people. Anecdotally, I have not found this to be the case. Companies simply find it easier to discriminate based on things like race, gender, perceived sexual orientation, weight, religion (or lack thereof), disabilities, appearance, or age, because it is easier for them to deny that those are the factors that they consider in hiring and firing.
As Apple execs engaged in collusion with other companies to weaken workers as a class via an anti-poaching cartel, Tim Cook is hardly able to take a non-hypocritical position about sexuality discrimination in the workplace. When all workers are weakened, the ones that are most often discriminated against often suffer the most, because they are the marginal hires in more places.
Sexual orientation isn't a protected class under Federal law. (See: http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/ )
State Human Rights Law in some states expands to incorporate other protected classes, including sexual orientation and transgendered status.
Yes, a lot of reasons to think he would most likely be completely non-religious, if not atheist.
I didn't know he grew up in the south, though.
This is no different than believing in Santa Claus and we're all distracted by what kind of sex he likes to have. I've never heard of a war started by gay people. Being religious is being complicit in that religion's wrongdoings.
Also I'd say it's strange that a gay person is religious. Any person holding a non-mainstream position ends up having to do a lot of thinking and reading before accepting oneself for what they are. In that process they usually become a lot more rational. Didn't work for Tim, though. Weird.
Americans are so weird.
I didn't think it would matter to read this from Tim Cook but it turns out I feel very encouraged by his words. When he says "engineer" among his attributes, well, I'm also an engineer and it gives me a sense of possibility.
That's why if we want to be successful in diversifying the world of programming we need Tim Cook to come out, we need successful women and minorities to be vocal about their passion and work in our field (much more so than the usual narrative of "tech discriminating against X").
It's very practical and convenient to just decide that material existence is the ultimate objective reality and I don't blame anyone for taking that route - but for a lot of people it's much more complicated than that (and fun to think about!) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existence
Interesting given the article we're all commenting on!
[I]f hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.
Announcing that you're straight is never going to be controversial, but we're currently in a cultural stage where announcing things like this continues to normalize the reality of diverse types of sexuality and, ironically, over time that should make it less of a big or negative deal to some people.
...or husbands, but that's the least of your problems.
Here's just one example: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/16/business/la-fi-0416-...
Do you really need a list?
This is important because gay people have not been allowed representation or public acknowledgement. Until this month there were 0 openly gay CEOs but hundreds of openly straight CEOs in the public eye.
Well done Tim Cook, and my personal thanks.
But, I agre otherwise with your point.
As someone who has come out, I'd like to note that I was never "pressured" into publicly acknowledging my sexuality. In fact, the general message from the wider culture was "please STFU and don't talk about it".
No, I looked at history, saw that coming out was an important and useful thing I could do to contribute to the movement aimed at getting equal rights for gay people and that formed part of a pretty rational decision to do so.
The lies and bigotry aimed at gay people thrived for so long precisely because nobody knew any gay people. That's exactly why coming out was (and still is) necessary. One of the reasons the gay rights movement has been so spectacularly successful over the last 40+ years is because the lives of actual gay people is a living testament to the falseness of the vicious stereotypes spread by homophobic pricks.
You don't see straight people coming out because they don't need to. Gay people came out because the alternative is persecution, mixed with a whole lot of personal misery.
This will definitely cost me some points, I know, not being gay and not promoting them is just dreadful.
> I truly hate the Gay Pride in our country. I think it is pathetic to be proud of your sexual orientation and feeling a need to show that off.
The notion of "Gay Pride" exists to specifically counter the widespread notion that being gay is something to be ashamed of. Countering shame with pride is way more effective than countering it with "meh, it's not relevant to my identity".
There are other, more subtle aspects of identity politics at play too, but I expect those would sail way over your head.
To run with the logic you present here, since Tim Cook has been a part of a pride parade, are you suggesting him an idiot and you yourself smarter?
Pride - in race, in sexuality, in gender, in whatever else - comes from ostracism and marginalization. You band together, develop a group identity, form communities, etc, because the world treats you poorly. Gay Pride is a development out of necessity, not just for parade floats.
This goes beyond sexuality - there is a massive "geek" community out there that gathers for conventions, concerts, and whatever else you can think of. Much of this community formed as a result of ostracism, both real and perceived.
Ditto race. Blacks, Asians, and Latinos band together - both formally in organizations, or informally in communities - to combat the racism its members experience, and support its victims.
When you find any description of people marginalized, odds are you will find communities and organizations that have formed around it. Pride is a natural response - a collective "there is nothing wrong with being us!" is a natural response to a society that tells you that what you are is wrong.
Now, to address your context of your comment - you're incredibly lucky if you don't "get" gay pride. I think most marginalized people would like to live like you - never having to belong to a collective to defend your being, or having society treat you like an individual instead of a constant outsider. To be in a position where this marginalization is invisible to you is a fortunate circumstance indeed.
So it's particularly annoying to those of us who are still marginalized in society - in whatever ways - that you've turned this around to play the victim. You live an enviable life, where you don't need to band together with other marginalized people out of desperation or necessity, yet you have the gall to turn it around as if you're being punished for it.
Most gays hate Catholic Church. Do they believe in freedoms that they demand then?
What makes you think that?
Coming out takes balls. Someday, it won't make the news. I think we are only one generation away from equality in America. In other parts of the world, it could take a long time.
On this level both extremes are similar :)
Which I think is were we are now.
The people who really had the guts, "came out" when it really mattered and made a difference, back in the seventies and eighties.
Like Cook points out, the US is still country in which gay people are subject to life-altering discrimination all the time. Most other countries are even worse.
I suspect you're overestimating how accepted homosexuality is outside of your bubble.
What you see in mainstream media is the mainstream-approved version, but it's nowhere close to representative. Queer As Folk had more diversity in representation in a few seasons than the decade of culture that followed it.
And also a country where if you get that you can be settled for life with suing them for their houses and cars.
The thing is, this "life-altering discrimination" is not unique to gays in the US. You can get it by being different in all kinds of way. Seems like a lot more crackpots than usual (that what you'd get in Denmark or Belgium) operate in the society. I mean, bombs in abortion clinics? Seriously?
>I suspect you're overestimating how accepted homosexuality is outside of your bubble.
Maybe, but my point was Cook's an even more protected bubble. Hyper-rich, CEO of the biggest (or close) company on earth, Valley-based, ...
A month or two ago some journalist accidentally said it on air if I remember correctly.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/cnbc-panel-goes-awkwardly-silent-...
That sums up the whole NBC network for me.
Frankly,nobody cared about Jobs sexual life,and he did a good job at shielding his family from the media frenzy.
Uh, yeah they did. The Lisa Brennan-Jobs paternity thing was a serious black eye for Steve.
Of course with all due respect to Tim Cook which opened for the first time and will probably inspire other people.
But to me everything is connected.
EDIT: For those who downvoted please explain what's wrong in this comment.
your personal life, keep it personal, its no one's business and it certainly is not something to exploit for personal gain or to guilt another with
I'm glad the culture around him reached the point where he felt comfortable and safe being out. Hopefully this will be a kick in the pants to the culture around me. It's hard to date when most people are in the closet.
EDIT: Thanks for correcting me, sorry. Just to put things in the right context, for me homophobia is unacceptable, so I would never misspelled his surname for a joke or alike.
Edit: I can't comment due to rate limits, but a poster below hasn't read what I wrote above and is suggesting I am saying the men grew up in different times. I am suggesting the exact opposite: they grew up in the SAME period/culture.
Off topic, it kind of bothers me that I got mischaracterised and couldn't reply for such a long time due to the silly HN rate limit.
How is that even possible? How is enforcing legal restrictions against a minority class of people not inherently discriminatory?
Marriage comes with specific rights and obligations (like, presumably most controversial, adoption and "importing" spouses into the country). Somehow society makes rules for who gets those rights and obligations. Would you say for example everybody should have the right to import people into the country? For example why don't I get the right to bestow citizenship onto people whom I really like - do I need to fuck them to prove I love them? Isn't that discriminatory? Or why stop at gay marriage - what about polyarmory?
I am not against polyarmory, but suppose I have 100 lovers all over the world and I want them all to become US citizens? Why can't I just marry them all?
Maybe it would be fair if every citizen would get the license to bring n people into the country, no matter if married or not?
Again, I am not against gay marriage, I just want to demonstrate that there can be aspects that can be argued about.
I don't know enough about adoption to comment. Can everybody adopt children? Or do you have to prove you are a healthy couple, or wealthy enough, or whatever? Personally I think once you argue homosexuals are not fit to adopt, you would have to consider all other sorts of criterions as well (for example surely many heterosexual couples are not fit to have children, or less so than some homosexual couples). Adoption is complex, though.
So this in itself is not an argument; while I acknowledge that this is something that can be argued about, a lot of the arguing on this subject is extremely bigoted and misinformed. As is illustrated by this trio's harsh encounters with a number of government agencies that stick their heads into this arrangement and meet them with an incredibly hostile skepticism.
I wonder how many kids live with two dads, one of them their biological one? I would expect the circumstances leading to that situation to be very rare.
Anyway I don't want to argue in favor of the anti-marriage crowd, just point out that some arguments can at least be related to, even if they are misguided. Unfortunately we can not shut misguided people out of politics (or so it seems).
That's begging the question: you're assuming that failure to recognise a homosexual relationship is a legal restriction, which really doesn't make sense. I can declare myself King of England, no-one in America will recognise me as such, but that doesn't impose any legal restriction on me.
There's the side issue of all the other things which 'marriage' acts as a legal shorthand for, but that is a side issue.
You're also assuming that discrimination is an inherently bad thing; it is, of course, not. Discriminating between a green and a red light is a pretty useful survival skill whilst driving, for example. Discriminating between reproductive and non-reproductive relationships is also useful; there's a difference.
My own personal view is that marriage is a religious matter, and that the State should no longer recognise it at all. If two men want to say that they're married, that's their right, just as it is mine to declare myself Grand Vizier of the Martian Republic—and no-one should be compelled by violence (which is what the law ultimately is) to heed either them or me.
How does adoption in general work? For example it can happen through "natural causes" that a child has only one dad and no mother. It seems likely that having two dads would be better than just one. But if somebody wants to adopt, they might have to be "better than average"? Like would a single dad have a good chance of adopting? Or does some office consider the likelihood of a child's wellbeing in a family - so presumably they would try to find two parents, not just one, which is discriminatory against singles? And then if the "adoption office" (or whoever is responsible) has the choice between a heterosexual and a homosexual couple, things become difficult?
My cousin has 4 kids, and is married to the love of her life Lisa. Their kids are certifiably the kindest, most considerate kids I know. There's been no psychological damage, at least not at their hands. Ignorant outsiders may say mean things but to blame that on these excellent parents would be twisted logic.
Anywho, the decision about adoption is so far down the road from marriage as to be a red herring.
But I think you are wrong about adoption. I think it's one of the main concerns opponents of gay marriage have. What other rights would people be concerned about? The other one I can think of is the right to bring your spouse into your country.
Are people going to the barricades because they don't want gays to be able to visit their partners in hospital? I rather doubt it. Adoption is one of the big issues.
I think, because the argument is thrown up semi-randomly - See! They might adopt! That would be awful! Just another red herring, saying anything at all that might convince a voter to strike down the right to marry.
People who continue to make this argument are ignoring a very well-established conclusion in the social science research.
I'm not really well versed in the typical pro and contra arguments, so this made me curious.
The moral argument against homosexual pseudomarriage is that it represents a fundamental misunderstanding about marriage. Marriage is not about a couple's (or a group's) feelings about one another. It's not a way that society shows approval. It is, rather, the formation of the most basic unit _of_ society (I'd argue that the individual is not really a unit of society), and is the means by which children are produced and brought up.
(And yes, there's plenty of heterosexual pseudomarriage too)
But, given that these are all moral arguments, my preference is for the State to absent itself entirely rather for it to take a side and do further damage to an almost destroyed institution.
In fact, if marriage is 'almost destroyed' as you posit, then we need more, new styles of family if kids are to have a chance to grow up fed and clothed and loved enough.
When it is a product of specific exclusionary provisions of the law, in the application of legal recognition of a relationship defined in law, then it is a legal restriction.
> I can declare myself King of England, no-one in America will recognise me as such, but that doesn't impose any legal restriction on me.
The rules governing the manner of succession to the British crown and the people who are eligibile to that succession most certainly are legal restrictions, and they most certainly are legal restrictions on most of the people in the world (even if it is a restriction where most of the restricted people don't care.)
> There's the side issue of all the other things which 'marriage' acts as a legal shorthand for, but that is a side issue.
Er, no, its not. Marriage is a legal status. The legal effects of the status are central to the issue, not a side issue.
> Discriminating between reproductive and non-reproductive relationships is also useful
Perhaps, but (a) why should we believe that in the general case, and (b) given the legal effects of marriage, why is marriage specifically an appropriate and valuable venue for such discrimination? About the only legal effect of marriage that is specifically directed to reproduction is the legal presumption of parenthood in which a spouse is presumptively (either rebuttably or conclusively, depending on jurisdiction) assigned parental responsibility for any children produced by the other partner. Arguably, the value of that is largely in providing an assurance that dual parental legal responsibility will be assigned in the absence of any effort to establish (in rebuttable presumption jurisdictions) or independently of (in conclusive presumption jurisdictions) the facts of biological parentage, which is as valid in a same-sex partnership as in an opposite-sex partnership.
Its also kind of interesting as a libertarian view, since marriage is essentially just a convenient prepackaged contractual relationship regarding property rights in the broad sense, and recognizing and enforcing contracts and their impact on property rights is one of the few things that libertarians generally agree is a proper role of government.
What were the right-libertarian views on marriage in the US prior to that? I'd be surprised if there were libertarians with radically different views.
> Its also kind of interesting as a libertarian view, since marriage is essentially just a convenient prepackaged contractual relationship regarding property rights in the broad sense, and recognizing and enforcing contracts and their impact on property rights is one of the few things that libertarians generally agree is a proper role of government.
I think the general view is that those contracts should not require a "stamp of approval" from the government and should instead be done privately and be enforced like any other contracts. Of course, in practice, a lot of laws would have to be rewritten to get rid of marital status.
Personally, I was struck as much or more by this statement. This certainly does not follow the standard political & business script that we are force feed in the USA. I look forward to hearing more from Cook speaking to social issues.
It's great that he has gone on record to officially address this. I'm curious though if there will be any repercussions from much less tolerant countries around the world. Hopefully not, and hopefully this opens up a new era of acceptance, although some countries that outlaw homosexuality might do stupid things. Thank goodness they are small and insignificant for the most part, although the reaction from countries like China and Indonesia worry me.
If I were a young closeted gay person and someone said, "Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, just came out as gay," I wouldn't jump for joy for the future of gay people in technology. I'd instead make damn sure I didn't carry any Apple products in public for fear of some stranger connecting the dots and bullying me. But, hell, I grew up in a very oppressive town. (I also don't own any Apple products.)
What matters more is that Tim Cook is not the only one to speak up about this. I'd like to hear more CEOs come out without fear.
This makes little sense in a world where every second device you see is an iDevice.
I can guarantee, however, that there's some bully somewhere using the fact that some poor kid owns an iPod as today's premise for insinuating that his victim is [insert homophobic slur here]. More than likely, this is happening in my home town. (Fuck that place.)
I jest. This is a momentous announcement. But, I look forward to the day when being a gay CEO (politician, sports figure, etc.) is not newsworthy.
It has nothing to do with Microsoft or Apple. It is identity politics pure and simple.
Of course, this is not politically correct (because only gays are allowed to make such a statement).
Did you note anything?
So if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.
"It’s also given me the skin of a rhinoceros"
And doubly well done for rejecting the skincare regime stereotypically associated with his sexual orientation.
I'm 100% behind this, it's a great article with a great motive but this struck me as a curious note. What do you think he's getting at?
However, I can't agree with putting it in "that" way ("among the greatest gifts God has given me"). Even taking into account how much such a thing will shape a person, it seems exaggerated (to me). It sounds like he is who (and where) he is because of his sexual orientation. He was, however, born in a developed (and rich country); he had food, parents and housing; he also education (and a good one, in great schools) and the privilege of working at IBM and Apple.
Clearly there were a lot of things that put Tim Cook in the position that he is, far, far, far more important than his orientation; I.E. the fact that he is on earth, that he is human, born after 2000 BC, etc... are all more significant, but now we're going down a different rabbit hole than your original comment.
The evidence seems to be against you.
Surprisingly, HN - atheists included - is both capable of celebrating people's happiness when they express views on the amazing "god-given" nature of their romantic relationships, like Tim Cook did, and disapproving of people making statements to the effect that other people's romantic relationships are wrong, like Tim Cook didn't.
Equating the two is a desperately poor excuse for an argument.
That includes Alabama where Tim Cook was born and attended university.
I don't like that statement.
Replace gay with one of white, male or straight and see how it sounds.
I don't care that he's gay, and it's nice that people can be who they are and not be persecuted for it. However, other countries do far worse than vent their frustrations about the morality and social pioneering of it all on messageboards. You're not wrong for asking who really cares in the least bit. It's actually kind of nice that you don't care. Not from an apathetic standpoint, but that it's so little of a deal to you that you remain wholly unaffected.
As weird as this may sound, I wish more people were like you.
What's so special about 2014?
And this should be everybody's reaction, IMO. I'll explain momentarily.
Being gay isn't easy if you aren't in a supportive environment. Hell, being gay will get you killed in some cultures and countries. In some places you'll merely be shunned and disowned by your family and friends. As a straight guy, I know this. How?
Because for the last 20 years or so, I've heard this again and again. The LGBT movement is nothing if not vocal and persistent, even to the point of being heavy-handed. I'm not saying I'm unsympathetic, I'm just saying that if there's a target demographic for "awareness", I haven't classified to be in that group for years.
So when Tim Cook officially announces his sexuality, I'm well aware that this isn't something as casually mentioned as being left-handed, having AB- blood type or a peanut allergy, preferring cats over dogs, or liking the color yellow. I'm also aware that for LGBT folks who haven't come out, seeing a successful person do so can be encouraging and inspiring.
Now regarding my "big deal" reaction...
While civilization will never be without bigots of one form or another, if we as a society are ever going to get past racial/gender/sexual issues, then disclosures like Cook's need to be unremarkable. Comparing America's reaction to Billy Crystal simply playing a gay man on "Soap" in the 80s to today, it seems like we've come a long way in a relatively short time compared to other social movements.
By the same token, an incident earlier this year demonstrated that the tech industry is probably the one of most gay-friendly business sectors to be in. Ironically, Brendan Eich was attacked, ostracized and shunned for his beliefs because they weren't gay-friendly. As an outsider, it does not appear that being a gay CEO in the California high-tech industry is as much of a burden as, say, a restaurant owner in Istanbul.
Finally, Tim Cook is worth upwards of $400 million. Like all wealthy individuals, he is generally insulated from contact with the rest of us simply because of his lifestyle: he doesn't take the bus, doesn't live in an apartment or typical suburban neighborhood, and certainly doesn't work in a cubicle. He likely won't encounter hate unless he tries to personally negotiate the opening of an Apple store in Moscow or Tehran. He's not a monster because he's rich (as far as I know he might be a really nice guy), but he's hardly an "everyman". For what it's worth, I had a similar reaction when many people were showering Mark Zuckerberg with praise for learning Chinese: hell, if I was that rich, I'd have time (and money) to learn Chinese from the best tutors.
In short, anyone announcing that they're gay should garner a "so what?" reaction because as a society we should be moving towards a person's actions being more important than their appearance, beliefs, or sexual orientation. And a multimillionaire making such an announcement today should elicit yawns because he is not representative of a typical person.
Edit: Not surprised by the downvote without explanation. Congratulations, sir or ma'am: you're part of the problem.
Anyway good for him.
Epigenetics is the science of how our genes express themselves. They can be altered by many factors. Environmental, even certain strains of bacteria.
So being gay is actually not the intent of genetics, but an error in the expression on the sexual orientation gene. This will become very public and irrifutable in the next decade.
There will literally be a pill that will turn a gay person straight. Where will the debate lead then? It doesn't really matter. Within two generations, there will no longer be gay individuals (from erring epigenetics) in first world countries.
There is a second means of being gay. Neurol pathways are formed which redirect certain thoughts and impulses in a different way. These are strictly experience based anomalies, usually caused by trama or desperation/rationalization. These comprise only a very minor number of the homosexual population.
Does this change your opinion on anything?
Tim Cook is a exceedingly boring man talking about the most boring/banal/useless topic there is: sex preferences. Get out of my face identity pols!
Or they think that other shareholders will think that and lead to a drop in the share value.
I think the type of people that would boycott Apple over this, have already boycotted apple over the other things.
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/10/29/end-of-qe3-means-f...
Mozilla as a company fights for privacy and creates a lot of free software for the general good. But people couldn't stand it's CEO being anti-gay. Now we have the most dangerous (imo) company of all time whose CEO is gay.
Ah, good times.
Which is advocating for not providing that right to same-sex indviduals. Which is anti-gay.
If the ballot measure said, "Only votes cast by a white person are valid or recognized in California", and someone donated money to support that measure - it would be reasonable to expect that they don't believe that non-white individuals should have the right to vote.
Suddenly being "gay" is cool and being "hetero" is not cool ?
Put another way - Tim Cook believes in God, which is fine, that's his prerogative. However, if he started donating money to anti-atheist groups, now he's actively working to disrespect the opinions of those who are atheists.
Note that this passage:
> Brendan never expressed that he was against gays or even hated gays. He was just against gay marriage.
Is basically identical to what many many people said about miscegenation/mixed-race marriage:
> (Brendan/whoever) never expressed that he/they were against blacks or even hated blacks. He was just against mixed-race marriages.
But in retrospect, it's really hard to look at that statement and not see it as an expression of bigotry. If you're "okay with gays" and "not okay with gay marriage", it really means that you're not okay with gays.
> Suddenly being "gay" is cool and being "hetero" is not cool ?
Seems weird to say that being gay is cool when we're arguing about people donating money to stop gay people from having the same rights as hetero people.
That's not true. You're stretching a line between two distant things in hopes of having a nice neat world of bigots on one side, and everyone else on the other. "You're either with us, or you're with the bigots".
That's an unreasonable ultimatum that I don't subscribe to.
I might be "okay with gays" but I might be "not okay with the annual mardi gras." It's a festival that closes down the streets and has stupid giant penises and vaginas on floats to represent the "gay community"? If I were gay I would distance myself from that crap.
In your world, I'm a bigot because I HATE that overly-camp, sledge-hammer decorative approach with men in g-strings running around in heels and pink fluffy decorations everywhere and don't forget the awful gay dance music. That's what it is to be gay? I don't think so. The mardi gras (at least the one where I live) needs to die. But I can't say that because I'll be "anti-gay". I'm not anti-gay, I just hate the annual celebration of the "gay community" by erecting giant penises on floats and broadcasting it all on live TV.
Do you see the problem? Just because you see gay marriage as something only a bigot would oppose, doesn't mean you have the right to drag everyone else into that binary mindset.
I'm not, I assure you. Especially when your subsequent example is:
> In your world, I'm a bigot because I HATE that overly-camp, sledge-hammer decorative approach with men in g-strings running around in heels and pink fluffy decorations everywhere and don't forget the awful gay dance music. That's what it is to be gay? I don't think so. The mardi gras (at least the one where I live) needs to die. But I can't say that because I'll be "anti-gay". I'm not anti-gay, I just hate the annual celebration of the "gay community" by erecting giant penises on floats and broadcasting it all on live TV.
You're entitled to that belief. It doesn't (necessarily) make you a bigot. Lots of people hate annoying parades - I myself found myself trapped a few months back trying to get across 5th avenue while the gay pride parade was going on and was incredibly annoyed.
So there we go - we share a common ground of annoyance towards loud, over-the-top parades.
But I presume that if another group had a similar parade, you'd be equally annoyed - that it's not the fact that it's gay people having the parade, it's the fact the parade is loud, decadent, over the top, with awful dance music (and giant penises on floats).
That's what makes it different than the example I gave. Your example (annoying, over the top parades with penis floats) is more akin to people who are against marriage entirely - they don't want anyone to get married, gay, straight, black, white, whoever. That's a position I can respect, even if I don't agree with it, because it's at least equally applied.
Gay marriage, though, is a situation where you have one group of people having a bigger, broader set of rights than the other group of people. That's a bigoted view of the world - for some reason these people over here can get married, but these other people over here can't.
If we were to apply it to your example, if you were only annoyed at the mardi gras because there were gay people involved - if straight people, puerto ricans, professional basketball players, whoever, threw the exact same parade and you were fine with it, then you'd be bigoted.
I'm all about a level playing field. Either everyone gets to get married, or no one does. Either everyone gets to have a loud, annoying parade with giant penis floats, or no one should.
Your example just doesn't apply here. I'm not dividing the world into neat examples of bigots and not, because people can have a broad range of emotions about a wide variety of things. And certainly, you can dislike aspects of gay culture without being bigoted as long as you'd dislike those aspects if they were present in other cultures. But when you single out one specific group as having diminished rights compared to the others, that's some level of bigotry for sure.
If my position on gay marriage sits firmly atop my less than enthusiastic position of marriage in general, the burden of convincing any participant in the debate that my position is not fuelled by hate towards gays is not on me.
In other words, if you go into the debate primed with the objective of weeding out homophobic views by aligning anyone against gay marriage with homophobia, you've de-railed the debate before it's begun.
Many people don't care either way and are sick of the gay marriage debate taking up so much attention. It's not a pressing matter for the world in my opinion, and I don't sign petitions when hassled at the train station about it. I also don't sign petitions against gay marriage either, but I will enter a debate here online about it.
Some believe that "marriage" in and of itself doesn't need to be extended beyond heterosexual couples. When asked why, an increasing reason might be this collective foot-stomping campaign insisting that anything reserved for heterosexual couples must also be extended to gay couples or else there is some moral corruption happening. I don't believe there's a corruption of morality in reserving "marriage" to heterosexual couples. A substantial part of that position comes from my view on marriage in general - its origins, its contractual formula, its roots in the church, even the cost of marriage and the industry around marriage... It's not something built for 'expandability'... But anyway, thanks for replying, I'm sure the debate will continue.
This is the tricky thing about this debate. I don't equate such benefits with marriage. That's a detail for the country and state. I prefer to argue for equivalent or largely similar benefits for gay couples. That in my mind would be the more appropriate way to achieve equality.
The analogy I outlined was about having an opposing opinion on something that is "owned" by the gay community, such as mardi gras, and expressing that opinion without being labelled a bigot. That's all I was doing there. Society's current obsession with political correctness prevents opposing expression of views from attracting accusations of deeper animosity.
I find the racism debates equally stifling. I could list a lot of admirable qualities about Chinese people and their culture. But can I list things I don't like without being called racist? These days you end up accused of being the "I'm not racist but..." guy if you happen to mention anything that isn't tightly wrapped in political correctness, or bundled in skilful parody and comedic wit - which is out of reach for most of us. So we end up just sounding racist if we say we don't like X, Y or Z about this or that country or this or that community.
Apple has a big garden.
And in general, I think it's inappropriate to mix personal views with business matters. No body fucking cares if your gay or what color you are. If they do, then they are not people I would want to associate to begin with. What we do care about, are your products the company produces, support, what you're doing to fix bugs, etc...
Stop bringing personal BS to the business tables. Cook is way out of line for using his position at Apple (iPhone6 in the background) as a stage to push some personal gay message about himself.
The tech community needs a good hard look in the mirror. Most of us are white, straight and male.
And it has positive social consequences to boot.
Is it OK to be proud to be a gay white man?
If you answer one question with yes and one with no, there might be a problem.
Do you not see a difference between being gay and being white? Really? Is it not obvious that one group has been historically repressed, attacked, discriminated against, etc. by its 'counter group', whilst the other has been the oppressor? These are about the most simplistic facts in social history, so I find it very difficult to believe you unaware of them; it seems more likely that you're choosing to ignore them in order to push some bizarre agenda. Just be honest and state the point you're actually trying to make.
Realistically, it doesn't make much sense to be "proud" of being gay, just like it doesn't make sense to be "proud" of being white.
It makes sense to be proud for staying strong in the face of discrimination and hate speech, but being gay itself is not worthy of any pride.
No one ever thought being white was something to be ashamed of.
After all, these atrocities were not an effect of being white as such, unless we somehow internalize a notion than whites are in some way genetically inclined towards committing genocide etc.
Exactly. If you are an aging gay man who has experienced repression and discrimination and lived your life to the fullest in spite of these challenges, you can be proud.
If you are a rich white man in Silicon Valley who happens to be gay, well ... hooray for you, I guess.
This is old news. Felix Salmon spelled it out in no uncertain terms when Mr.Cook was first named CEO, in 2011. [1]
The best place to hide something - not that Mr.Cook himself wanted his sexuality hidden; he merely did not want it to grab all the attention, away from Apple - is still in plain sight.[2]
This also begs the question, if enough vested interests or powerful people want something not to be talked about, is the fact still worthy of its truth value?
This applies to the trivial case at hand - of Mr. Cook's sexuality - as it does to the countless secrets of great gravity that were largely ignored - concerning at least a dozen nations not including the U.S. - that Wikileaks exposed.
[1] Don’t ignore Tim Cook’s sexuality
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/08/25/dont-ignore...
[2] The Purloined Letter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Purloined_Letter#Plot_summa...
What reason would you have to find even this observation disagreeable?
It's almost as if they'd rather hide their prejudices, than have their prejudices be brought to light.