Hacker News Reader

Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

I don't believe in the cause that Eich donated to. But taking away someone's job over a political donation is preposterous and disturbing. If he had donated to a liberal cause and was forced out because conservative employees had a problem with it, the entire media would have come down on Mozilla like a ton of bricks. Instead his resignation was celebrated.

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.

View on HN

I don't agree with anyone who says this was an easy call. I think there are very good arguments on both sides.

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.

I tend to think most people look on something like that as an opportunity to score a win for what they believe in rather than genuine concern at his actions as CEO. Some of the decision to let him resign must have come from the lack a successful strategy to respond to it though.

>>I don't believe in the cause that Eich donated to. But taking away someone's job over a political donation is preposterous and disturbing.

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.

He was forced out, as everyone is well aware. You are advocating for a society where political intimidation is acceptable. There are many examples of such countries around the world. None have worked out well.

If I understand your position correctly, then if there really was a prop to ban interracial marriage we should all be okay with that? I don't see any difference between a ban on gay marriage and a ban on interracial marriage.

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.

Since you linked xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1431/ It's easy to look down on interracial marriage bans from our oh-so-enlightened modern view, but it took a long time to even get there. You have to look at these ideologies in the context that they were formed in. If the graph is correct, then when Eich donated, same-sex marriage didn't have majority support. (Setting aside what California's specific numbers were.) This isn't to say that "might makes right", but that Eich expressed his vision for how society should be, and it's only fair to also consider how the rest of the society felt about it.

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?

I have no way to argue against your comment. You're completely right that our moral compass is not static. So I can only say that I hope society overall always moves towards accepting humanity & life in all the shapes and forms it presents itself. I have no way of justifying that belief; it's just something in my core being. It's in the same part of me that has decided kicking puppies and other animal cruelty is not good. Anyone publicly supporting animal cruelty I think should be publicly shamed. I don't know how to justify that either.

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?

If the graph is correct, then when Eich donated, same-sex marriage didn't have majority support.

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.

I find this extremely hypocritical. Does this justify obstructing his career and publicly nailing him to the cross ? NO.

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.

I specifically said that I'm divided on the issue and I haven't taken position one way or the other, I just disagree with those particular arguments.

If you want to make me into the enemy, go ahead, but you're the Quixote here.

Nobody's denying Eich's legal right to have a political opinion, or to act on it within the bounds of the law.

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.

Interesting society argument. For sake of argument I'll just talk about Mozilla employees. Does being a CEO require you to take political actions to support (or at least, not hurt) your employees in their outside lives, over other local political concerns? As a citizen, is that ethical?

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.

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 :|

Sorry I misunderstood the "society" stuff. I still don't understand this: "his vote can't be explained away just by saying "well, it's a product of the society he lived in"' I read this as saying that because his "Mozilla society" predominantly support gay marriage (presumably), he can't claim his opposition is a "product of society." He is a member of several societies with probably conflicting values in some areas though, any of which could oppose marriage equality, so I don't see why he should be constrained to choose Mozilla's. I've probably read the wrong thing from that quote.

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.

He is a member of several societies with probably conflicting values in some areas though, any of which could oppose marriage equality, so I don't see why he should be constrained to choose Mozilla's. I've probably read the wrong thing from that quote.

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".

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.

> You have to look at these ideologies in the context that they were formed in.

No. No, I do not.

> how do you know views you hold today won't be considered the vilest bigotry in 30 years

Ah, the classic argument: if we can't have perfect right now, then we obviously can't work toward the good.

>If I understand your position correctly, then if there really was a prop to ban interracial marriage we should all be okay with that?

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.

Nobody did that, you're inventing a straw man. The results were published on the website of a well-known newspaper[1] in a format that Google could parse. It was only a matter of time for it to be found out and spread.

"I would certainly respect the rights of others to support the opposing side"

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.

No such right exists in this context.

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.

Free speech != voting to legislate away the rights of some minority. This is a rampant conflation.

Wasn't most of the criticism due to Mozilla having policies that seemed to directly contradict the views his donation implied? I have no problem with the Koch brothers donating to climate change deniers, but I can see why that same action, if performed by, say, the President of Greenpeace, might make their position untenable.

> He was forced out, as everyone is well aware.

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.

I can't believe that anybody would be so naive to believe that Brendan wasn't forced out.

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.

People keep claiming Mozilla employees weren't hostile to him, and wanted him to stay. You can't have it both ways. Which is it?

> I can't believe that anybody would be so naive to believe that Brendan wasn't forced out.

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.)

You are advocating for a society where political intimidation is acceptable. There are many examples of such countries around the world. None have worked out well.

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.

If you donate to organizations that are not linked to terror, exactly nothing would happen to you. If they are linked to terror, it's completely different league.

So you could support an hypothetical local pedo party[1] and be CEO of a company? Sorry, but I don't believe it.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_for_Neighbourly_Love,_F...

>>> He left because he couldn't deal with the consequences of his actions.

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.

The two sides you paint are not at all equal. Political discourse gets thrown out the window when you are working towards the suppression of the rights of a group of people. 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.

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"

This entire response essentially says that you disagree with his position on the issue. I also disagree with his position on the issue.

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, and the rest of the liberal lynch mob that forced him out, are doing nothing more than suppressing his rights.

You have to admit, using your rights to take someone else's rights away.... is a dubious position to hold.

He has the right to be a racist, homophobe, Nazi or whatever. That doesn't mean he can lead a company.

Please read the other part of my comment, wherein I claim that he does not have a right to suppress rights. The context is extremely important: totally uncritical tolerance is not useful to society, and erodes tolerance. We need to be able to defend society against intolerance in order to maintain tolerance.

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.

You cannot divorce the actual issue he is expressing his opinion on from the fact that he is expressing an opinion.

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.

It is not at all one of the fundamental tenets of our political system. You have to take social context into consideration when generating social laws. People in oppressed and minority groups need more help because they are starting from a position of less privilege. And this is what we do: Laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 exist solely to protect the rights of people who are being oppressed and to restrict the rights of people doing the oppressing. Society acted to defend against intolerance, by being more intolerant of intolerant people.

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.

There are no carved out exceptions suspending constitutional protections for really bad opinions.

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 Democracy will end because a bunch of bigots ended up with their panties in a knot, then Democracy was never meant to last. Let it end.

The nature of politics is that if we want to accomplish things, we have to work together. When you throw out statements like

> 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.

The premise that fundamental rights for minorities is or could be the subject of reasonable political debate is preposterous and disturbing. The cause he donated to was not merely "conservative" and was not decried because it was insufficiently liberal. It was cruel and wrong.

'Preposterous'? Really? It's - what - 6 years since Prop 8 went through; evidently a debate on this matter was not preposterous to Californians then. And it's only 18 years since DOMA, which made this tortuous state-by-state guerrilla war necessary. And it's only 28 years since homosexuality was removed from the DSM. That's just the States - see elsewhere in this thread re India; in Britain we had Section 28 on the books until recently, and got equal marriage (sort of) last year.

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.

> 'Preposterous'? Really? It's - what - 6 years since Prop 8 went through; evidently a debate on this matter was not preposterous to Californians then. And it's only 18 years since DOMA, which made this tortuous state-by-state guerrilla war necessary. And it's only 28 years since homosexuality was removed from the DSM. That's just the States - see elsewhere in this thread re India; in Britain we had Section 28 on the books until recently, and got equal marriage (sort of) last year.

Don't forget gay sex being illegal in the US up until 2003.

I'm not saying I have an opinion on whatever mysterious thing happened behind closed doors at Mozilla; I don't know or care about the specific dynamics of that case.

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."

> The cause he donated to was not merely "conservative" and was not decried because it was insufficiently liberal. It was cruel and wrong.

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).

We've seen how separate but equal plays out.

His resignation was not celebrated here as I recall. Many found it regrettable (and rightly so in my opinion) that he was nominated for the position in the first place, considering what a symbolic figure the CEO of a foundation is.

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.

"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."

I disagree, because actively supporting limiting the rights of minorities over what amounts to an appeal to religious tradition seems more than a matter of opinion to me.

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?

> But taking away someone's job over a political donation is preposterous and disturbing.

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?

I generally agree with what you say.

> 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.

> You could see what he's done whilst at work.

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.

>But taking away someone's job over a political donation is preposterous and disturbing.

>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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com