As has been said many times in this thread, Yarvin is free to say what he believes, and I am free to say what I believe, and organizers are allowed to do what they want. This is how a free market of ideas is supposed to work.
Not that it matters, but you palmed a card there by equating holding the same position on gay marriage as Barack Obama in 2008, or wearing a tacky bowling shirt, as "reactionary." It kind of seems like anything which disagrees with a microscopic sliver of online activists is reactionary now.
"Forced to make a tearful apology" Rather say that he made a tearful apology, because he regretted his wrong action and felt apologetic. Or, if you have access to some sort of privileged information and actually know that he was forced, I've got another rejoinder: forced to apologize!? No! The humanity.
Nominal.
There was no big ruckus when he was the CTO for the Mozilla Foundation, either. But when you become the CEO of an organization, you become its public face in many ways. And he had some baggage, there. Like it or not, many corporate CEOs are held to different standards of public discourse by their employers, because companies generally don't want to risk alienating consumers.
Now, I don't know that it was right for him to lose his job. That was probably the wrong thing to happen at this point in time. I have big problems with companies being able to exercise control over people's expression of their political beliefs and actions. I feel bad for him losing the position, I really do. On the other hand, if he was not going to be able to effectively run the foundation and there were schisms forming in the community that's so essential to the continuation of the foundation's work...what are you, as Mozilla, to do?
I mean, if you had a corporate leader who came out publicly and said, "I don't think mixed race couples should be allowed to marry," she or he probably would not last much longer in that position. And I'll bet most people would not have much of a problem. In fact, I don't have to bet about a situation like that — nobody shed too many tears for Donald Sterling.
It's a complicated issue. I'd strongly suggest reading (or listening) to the things that Dan Savage and Andrew Sullivan (both gay writers with very different political bents) had to say afterwards. Savage pointed out, very interestingly, that this ouster, while pinned on the "gay mafia", was really something that came from other large tech companies, from online journalistic enterprises, and from inside Mozilla itself. It may just be the first pang of society saying, "Bigotry against gay people is not socially acceptable, just like many other forms of bigotry." Again, like it or not, society does this all the time. See, again, Donald Sterling for a case study in it.
He also apologized repeatedly for offending his coworkers, so it's incorrect to say he "expressed no regret."
In fact, I think the vilification of Eich neatly demonstrates why Proposition 8 won at the ballot box. Religious people were frightened that their religious beliefs would first be rebranded as bigotry, which would then give their ideological opponents the opportunity to punish them. The fate of Eich seems to confirm these fears.
We hear this a lot, but I have to wonder to what extent the schisms would have formed if Mozilla had firmly said that people's political views outside of the workplace are irrelevant, rather than looking weak at the first breath of complaint.
I do agree with you that society does this all the time but many of the things society does are counterproductive, and this is little different. Is Mozilla stronger now that it's made clear that it views half the population of the United States as an active enemy, purely on the basis of their political views?
Those who would say that are enemies of intellectual life. Can you safely express ideas outside the Overton Window, for curiosity's sake, on your own time? No, they shout in unison!
But now, for any intellectual worthy of the name, the Overton Window is narrow and constraining. If you fancy yourself an intellectual and you think that the present Overton Window is a big enough sandbox to play in, you are not very much of an intellectual. If noting (for instance) that different people are different is outside of the Overton Window, the sandbox is tiny indeed.
This is emphatically not how the free market of ideas is supposed to work.
I don't think you appreciate what the "free" in "free market" refers to...