8 ms·

I find the entire Eich scandal disheartening. A man lost his job (one he was undoubtedly qualified for) because people find it easier to heap hatred on someone

I find the entire Eich scandal disheartening. A man lost his job (one he was undoubtedly qualified for) because people find it easier to heap hatred on someone they've never met, than to act with dignity and respect. We have some serious issues in this country, and our inability to compromise or respect a person we don't agree with is frightening. Life is filled with shades of grey, compromise is not "that nice thing your kindergarten teacher told you about" it's a critical aspect of a functioning democracy. One we seem to be losing.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Karunamon 12y ago
>because people find it easier to heap hatred on someone they've never met, than to act with dignity and respect. Turn it around. Eich found it easier to treat millions of people he's never met as second class citizens, than to act with dignity and respect. There are two sides to this story, and you seem to be very eager to tell the one and handwave the other for a "why can't we all just get along" platitude.
- anonbanker 12y ago
  and yet, all these testimonials came out from LGBTQ*'s working at Mozilla, with Brenden Eich, saying that he treated them as equals. Perhaps you could elaborate on when Eich said they were second-class citizens. you know, so you aren't accused of putting words in someone's mouth.
  - seertaak 12y ago
    As Karunamon states, no more evidence is needed than his financial support for a bigoted law, and his subsequent failure to rescind this support. It's kind of sad that this needs to be repeated so often, but Proposition 8 was an attempt to limit the rights of a minority of the population (a minority I happen to belong to, as a bisexual man). It is an unprovoked act of aggression -- bullying, if you want. If Eich had donated $1000 for a law seeking to prohibit marriage between Jews, would you still be asking Karunamon to "elaborate on when Eich said they were second-class citizens"? I just want to add that I applaud Karunamon's cogent and spirited defense of LGBT rights.
    - anonbanker 12y ago
      So, I can interpret your reply as "no. I could not find any examples of Brendan Eich saying that gays were second-class citizens." I appreciate your agreement in this.
      - seertaak 12y ago
        I do agree and I think it's really swell that you appreciate my agreement.
  - dfc 12y ago
    I am not familiar with the asterisk variant: LGBTQ*. Initially I thought it was a italic formatting error but you have used it in a number of places in addition to lgBtq. What does the added asterisk represent? And is there any significance to the capitalization of "lgBtq"?
    - anonbanker 12y ago
      in recent years, most pride marches and supporting organizations have adopted the asterisk to handle the inclusiveness of all those that aren't neccessarily "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, genderQueer", but still fall under the umbrella of the movement. Recently, this has included Genderfluids, Furries and the Polyamorous as well. I capitalized the letter in which I personally identify. though I can't capitalize the asterisk. :)
    - scarmig 12y ago
      I think it's just bash globbing.
- briantakita 12y ago
  > There are two sides to this story, and you seem to be very eager to tell the one and handwave the other for a "why can't we all just get along" platitude. We should treat people with respect. Not create a sensationalist backlash. Not punish people for having their opinions & being politically active on a gray area. Most of all, a rational discourse should take place. Not these sensationalist headlines that are designed to manipulate people's unnuanced emotions.
  - Karunamon 12y ago
    I'd say a fundamental portion of respect is not encoding your personal beliefs of other people's personal lives into law. If you want to make the purely numeric argument, Eich's behavior impacted a hell of a lot more people than the backlash did.
    - waterlesscloud 12y ago
      And yet elsewhere in this thread you're saying a man who literally made laws negatively affecting gays should be able to keep his job because hey, the economy. There's some serious cognitive dissonance here.
      - Karunamon 12y ago
        If you'd stop willfully misinterpreting my posts, you'd know that was not what I was saying at all. The whole point there was that certain things are more important than other things at certain times. And I did say five years ago, which you conveniently omitted from your little summary here. I am not a single issue voter.
        waterlesscloud 12y ago
        But you're single issue on Eich. Who wasn't actually making laws against same sex marriage, but instead made open source software that improved the world.
- bluntly_said 12y ago
  I'm not qualified to tell the other side of the story. I don't know why Eich made that contribution. Neither do you. It might have been family pressure, it might have honestly been that he's religious and doesn't believe the word "marriage" can be applied to same sex couple (who had Domestic partnerships available in California, which provide the same legal rights as marriage, so I find the "second class citizen" argument entirely lacking. [although now I'll wait to be attacked for simply stating that, even if you have no idea what my personal beliefs on the matter are]) Again, life is filled with shades of gray. Hell, maybe mozilla even benefited from the donation in ways that aren't clear (and they didn't want to put out in the media) You just don't fucking know. Instead you've decided this man should lose his livelyhood based on hearsay and rumor, and outrage on the internet. That's fucking PATHETIC.
  - scarmig 12y ago
    We have public information. The public information is damning: he donated to an organization that ran a campaign of hateful slurs against gay people in order to permanently deny them their human rights in the California Constitution. I guess there might be some private exonerating information, but I have a hard time imagining what it might be.
    - bluntly_said 12y ago
      Again, the "deny them their human rights" argument fails to pass the bullshit test. The had domestic partnerships, they had the full legal rights marriage granted available. Prop 8's entire quibble was over the word marriage, so was the pro-gay rights movement. Both sides are trying to codify belief into law, both are wrong.
      - scarmig 12y ago
        So, two points. The first is that you simply have your facts dead wrong. Domestic partnerships did not grant all the benefits of marriage. The federal government did not recognize them, and other states didn't recognize them, and other countries didn't. The only way Californians could fix that inequity was through supporting marriage. Two: if this was such a quibble, why did Prop 8 proponents feel the need to spend tens of millions of dollars attacking gay people with dark and disturbing allegations? If it's just a matter of terminology, why be so hateful and angry about it? And just a reminder, if you weren't there: here are some of the ads that Prop 8 supporters ran. If you think those are full of love and caring, well, I don't know what to do for you. http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/04/04/brendan_eich_supported_prop_8_which_was_worse_than_you_remember.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/04/04/brendan_eich_s...
- aryastark 12y ago
  > Eich found it easier to treat millions of people he's never met as second class citizens You act as if Prop 8 didn't pass by 52.24% of the voting public, or by 7 million people. But no, Eich was dictator of California, enslaving millions of gays. Or whatever.
- crusso 12y ago
  You're demonstrating the exact problem the person to whom you were responding was discussing. You can take a "damn them all and defeat them at all costs" stance if you want to. There's always something that "the other side" did at some point that you can avoid looking past or working with. Grind that axe forever, I guess... but as the previous poster said, that level of intransigence is disheartening.
rimantas 12y ago
Would your attitude be the same if the issue was not same sex, but interracial marriage?
azinman2 12y ago
OR... You could recognize that his action stands directly against the values of Mozilla and will only lead to less diversity at the top of Mozilla, which even further runs against it's values. Not to mention his politically impotent non-appology appology, where he neither stood up for a separation of personal views nor identified his reasoning and how it has or hadn't changed.
- zobzu 12y ago
  i don't get that sort of thinking. nobody even suspected he made this donation until someone digged through the records. he founded mozilla among his peers for fucks sake. FOUNDED. he was there for the manifesto. He was there when Mozilla compensated lgbt couples and the law/taxes didn't. He was there helping them daily. And all of a sudden, he's fucking satan because his personal views on marriage were different. Views which he never let into his professional world. And for the other side: because he's not as strong as some, he resigned. So that must be bad too. it must be mozilla who fired him and thus don't accept diversity. Are you all fucking nuts?
jerryr 12y ago
I'm gay, and I would classify my feelings towards Eich more as fear than hatred. Eich very directly donated towards a cause that was bent on restricting my rights. Though fear often breeds hatred, I truly don't bear Eich ill will. I'm not happy to see him lose his job--on the contrary, I share your sadness that a talented, qualified man lost his job. However, I am relieved that a man who feels that I should not be allowed to marry is no longer in a very influential position at an influential company. Now, whether or not OkCupid should have been casting stones is another matter. But that seems to have been thoroughly discussed, so I'll end this here.
- baddox 12y ago
  I'm seeing a lot of disagreement over the facts of Proposition 8. Several people are saying that homosexual couples in California already had a legal partnership with all the same rights as "married" heterosexual couples.
  - jerryr 12y ago
    Okay, let's take the facts in question off the table and say that there are absolutely no differences between marriage and domestic partnerships besides the name. At best then, Prop 8 kept us "separate but equal". History has shown that doctrine to be discriminatory and oppressive. There's an inherent inequality in my inability to say that I'm married.
    - bluntly_said 12y ago
      And I think the separate but equal problem is a very compelling reason to remove rights from marriage entirely. Codifying religious beliefs into law shouldn't be accepted. Trying to redefine religious beliefs in law stirs up more controversy than it should. Amending the law to force all couples to get the equivalent of a civil unions satisfies both camps. Further, once marriage holds no rights, the government cannot stop a gay couple from getting married if a nice tolerant church wants to marry them (of which there are plenty). The issue is solely religious at that point. And "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ..." Just like the government can't force a church to marry someone, or force a very intolerant religious community to accepting that marriage.
dubfan 12y ago
You might find this essay by Jonathan Rauch to be interesting reading: http://reason.com/archives/1993/04/01/the-truth-hurts-the-humanitari http://reason.com/archives/1993/04/01/the-truth-hurts-the-hu... The book this was derived from, "Kindly Inquisitors", was recently reissued, and what a timely reissue!
ufmace 12y ago
From everything I've read, he voluntarily stepped down, without any pressure exerted on him by anyone above him or who otherwise has direct power over him. Has anybody seen any indication otherwise? In this case, I'm more inclined to see it as a good move overall. He isn't a backroom coder or language designer or something, whose opinions and PR profile don't really matter. As CEO, his whole job is to lead, set the direction of the company, and be its public face. This issue, and his handling of it, seem to show that he isn't really cut out for the job and shouldn't be doing it. It was probably a mistake to take it in the first place, but I don't think he could have a good career just moving to a lower position at the company now. I will say that I respect him more for stepping down on his own, and for not pulling some bullshit PR move like apologizing or making a token donation to some pro-LGBT cause. That always seemed so slimy to me - like saying "I probably still believe what I always believed, but I will kowtow to the PC gods and make a PR move to save my job without ever actually standing up for what I believe."
r0s 12y ago
> people find it easier to heap hatred on someone they've never met, than to act with dignity and respect. Please explain how criminalizing gay marriage is somehow different from this claim. Compromise or abstraction away from the root issue to serve some hazy point about moral uncertainty is dishonest.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

Karunamon 12y ago

>because people find it easier to heap hatred on someone they've never met, than to act with dignity and respect. Turn it around. Eich found it easier to treat millions of people he's never met as second class citizens, than to act with dignity and respect. There are two sides to this story, and you seem to be very eager to tell the one and handwave the other for a "why can't we all just get along" platitude.

anonbanker 12y ago
and yet, all these testimonials came out from LGBTQ*'s working at Mozilla, with Brenden Eich, saying that he treated them as equals. Perhaps you could elaborate on when Eich said they were second-class citizens. you know, so you aren't accused of putting words in someone's mouth.
- seertaak 12y ago
  As Karunamon states, no more evidence is needed than his financial support for a bigoted law, and his subsequent failure to rescind this support. It's kind of sad that this needs to be repeated so often, but Proposition 8 was an attempt to limit the rights of a minority of the population (a minority I happen to belong to, as a bisexual man). It is an unprovoked act of aggression -- bullying, if you want. If Eich had donated $1000 for a law seeking to prohibit marriage between Jews, would you still be asking Karunamon to "elaborate on when Eich said they were second-class citizens"? I just want to add that I applaud Karunamon's cogent and spirited defense of LGBT rights.
  - anonbanker 12y ago
    So, I can interpret your reply as "no. I could not find any examples of Brendan Eich saying that gays were second-class citizens." I appreciate your agreement in this.
    - seertaak 12y ago
      I do agree and I think it's really swell that you appreciate my agreement.
- dfc 12y ago
  I am not familiar with the asterisk variant: LGBTQ*. Initially I thought it was a italic formatting error but you have used it in a number of places in addition to lgBtq. What does the added asterisk represent? And is there any significance to the capitalization of "lgBtq"?
  - anonbanker 12y ago
    in recent years, most pride marches and supporting organizations have adopted the asterisk to handle the inclusiveness of all those that aren't neccessarily "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, genderQueer", but still fall under the umbrella of the movement. Recently, this has included Genderfluids, Furries and the Polyamorous as well. I capitalized the letter in which I personally identify. though I can't capitalize the asterisk. :)
  - scarmig 12y ago
    I think it's just bash globbing.
briantakita 12y ago
> There are two sides to this story, and you seem to be very eager to tell the one and handwave the other for a "why can't we all just get along" platitude. We should treat people with respect. Not create a sensationalist backlash. Not punish people for having their opinions & being politically active on a gray area. Most of all, a rational discourse should take place. Not these sensationalist headlines that are designed to manipulate people's unnuanced emotions.
- Karunamon 12y ago
  I'd say a fundamental portion of respect is not encoding your personal beliefs of other people's personal lives into law. If you want to make the purely numeric argument, Eich's behavior impacted a hell of a lot more people than the backlash did.
  - waterlesscloud 12y ago
    And yet elsewhere in this thread you're saying a man who literally made laws negatively affecting gays should be able to keep his job because hey, the economy. There's some serious cognitive dissonance here.
    - Karunamon 12y ago
      If you'd stop willfully misinterpreting my posts, you'd know that was not what I was saying at all. The whole point there was that certain things are more important than other things at certain times. And I did say five years ago, which you conveniently omitted from your little summary here. I am not a single issue voter.
      - waterlesscloud 12y ago
        But you're single issue on Eich. Who wasn't actually making laws against same sex marriage, but instead made open source software that improved the world.
bluntly_said 12y ago
I'm not qualified to tell the other side of the story. I don't know why Eich made that contribution. Neither do you. It might have been family pressure, it might have honestly been that he's religious and doesn't believe the word "marriage" can be applied to same sex couple (who had Domestic partnerships available in California, which provide the same legal rights as marriage, so I find the "second class citizen" argument entirely lacking. [although now I'll wait to be attacked for simply stating that, even if you have no idea what my personal beliefs on the matter are]) Again, life is filled with shades of gray. Hell, maybe mozilla even benefited from the donation in ways that aren't clear (and they didn't want to put out in the media) You just don't fucking know. Instead you've decided this man should lose his livelyhood based on hearsay and rumor, and outrage on the internet. That's fucking PATHETIC.
- scarmig 12y ago
  We have public information. The public information is damning: he donated to an organization that ran a campaign of hateful slurs against gay people in order to permanently deny them their human rights in the California Constitution. I guess there might be some private exonerating information, but I have a hard time imagining what it might be.
  - bluntly_said 12y ago
    Again, the "deny them their human rights" argument fails to pass the bullshit test. The had domestic partnerships, they had the full legal rights marriage granted available. Prop 8's entire quibble was over the word marriage, so was the pro-gay rights movement. Both sides are trying to codify belief into law, both are wrong.
    - scarmig 12y ago
      So, two points. The first is that you simply have your facts dead wrong. Domestic partnerships did not grant all the benefits of marriage. The federal government did not recognize them, and other states didn't recognize them, and other countries didn't. The only way Californians could fix that inequity was through supporting marriage. Two: if this was such a quibble, why did Prop 8 proponents feel the need to spend tens of millions of dollars attacking gay people with dark and disturbing allegations? If it's just a matter of terminology, why be so hateful and angry about it? And just a reminder, if you weren't there: here are some of the ads that Prop 8 supporters ran. If you think those are full of love and caring, well, I don't know what to do for you. http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/04/04/brendan_eich_supported_prop_8_which_was_worse_than_you_remember.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/04/04/brendan_eich_s...
aryastark 12y ago
> Eich found it easier to treat millions of people he's never met as second class citizens You act as if Prop 8 didn't pass by 52.24% of the voting public, or by 7 million people. But no, Eich was dictator of California, enslaving millions of gays. Or whatever.
crusso 12y ago
You're demonstrating the exact problem the person to whom you were responding was discussing. You can take a "damn them all and defeat them at all costs" stance if you want to. There's always something that "the other side" did at some point that you can avoid looking past or working with. Grind that axe forever, I guess... but as the previous poster said, that level of intransigence is disheartening.

rimantas 12y ago

Would your attitude be the same if the issue was not same sex, but interracial marriage?

azinman2 12y ago

OR... You could recognize that his action stands directly against the values of Mozilla and will only lead to less diversity at the top of Mozilla, which even further runs against it's values. Not to mention his politically impotent non-appology appology, where he neither stood up for a separation of personal views nor identified his reasoning and how it has or hadn't changed.

zobzu 12y ago
i don't get that sort of thinking. nobody even suspected he made this donation until someone digged through the records. he founded mozilla among his peers for fucks sake. FOUNDED. he was there for the manifesto. He was there when Mozilla compensated lgbt couples and the law/taxes didn't. He was there helping them daily. And all of a sudden, he's fucking satan because his personal views on marriage were different. Views which he never let into his professional world. And for the other side: because he's not as strong as some, he resigned. So that must be bad too. it must be mozilla who fired him and thus don't accept diversity. Are you all fucking nuts?

jerryr 12y ago

I'm gay, and I would classify my feelings towards Eich more as fear than hatred. Eich very directly donated towards a cause that was bent on restricting my rights. Though fear often breeds hatred, I truly don't bear Eich ill will. I'm not happy to see him lose his job--on the contrary, I share your sadness that a talented, qualified man lost his job. However, I am relieved that a man who feels that I should not be allowed to marry is no longer in a very influential position at an influential company. Now, whether or not OkCupid should have been casting stones is another matter. But that seems to have been thoroughly discussed, so I'll end this here.

baddox 12y ago
I'm seeing a lot of disagreement over the facts of Proposition 8. Several people are saying that homosexual couples in California already had a legal partnership with all the same rights as "married" heterosexual couples.
- jerryr 12y ago
  Okay, let's take the facts in question off the table and say that there are absolutely no differences between marriage and domestic partnerships besides the name. At best then, Prop 8 kept us "separate but equal". History has shown that doctrine to be discriminatory and oppressive. There's an inherent inequality in my inability to say that I'm married.
  - bluntly_said 12y ago
    And I think the separate but equal problem is a very compelling reason to remove rights from marriage entirely. Codifying religious beliefs into law shouldn't be accepted. Trying to redefine religious beliefs in law stirs up more controversy than it should. Amending the law to force all couples to get the equivalent of a civil unions satisfies both camps. Further, once marriage holds no rights, the government cannot stop a gay couple from getting married if a nice tolerant church wants to marry them (of which there are plenty). The issue is solely religious at that point. And "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ..." Just like the government can't force a church to marry someone, or force a very intolerant religious community to accepting that marriage.

dubfan 12y ago

You might find this essay by Jonathan Rauch to be interesting reading: http://reason.com/archives/1993/04/01/the-truth-hurts-the-humanitari http://reason.com/archives/1993/04/01/the-truth-hurts-the-hu... The book this was derived from, "Kindly Inquisitors", was recently reissued, and what a timely reissue!

ufmace 12y ago

From everything I've read, he voluntarily stepped down, without any pressure exerted on him by anyone above him or who otherwise has direct power over him. Has anybody seen any indication otherwise? In this case, I'm more inclined to see it as a good move overall. He isn't a backroom coder or language designer or something, whose opinions and PR profile don't really matter. As CEO, his whole job is to lead, set the direction of the company, and be its public face. This issue, and his handling of it, seem to show that he isn't really cut out for the job and shouldn't be doing it. It was probably a mistake to take it in the first place, but I don't think he could have a good career just moving to a lower position at the company now. I will say that I respect him more for stepping down on his own, and for not pulling some bullshit PR move like apologizing or making a token donation to some pro-LGBT cause. That always seemed so slimy to me - like saying "I probably still believe what I always believed, but I will kowtow to the PC gods and make a PR move to save my job without ever actually standing up for what I believe."

r0s 12y ago

> people find it easier to heap hatred on someone they've never met, than to act with dignity and respect. Please explain how criminalizing gay marriage is somehow different from this claim. Compromise or abstraction away from the root issue to serve some hazy point about moral uncertainty is dishonest.