Andrew Sullivan argues that Brendan Eich, the former Mozilla CEO, was hounded by mobs and pitchforks.
Will he now be forced to walk through the streets in shame? Why not the stocks? The whole episode disgusts me – as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society. If this is the gay rights movement today – hounding our opponents with a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else – then count me out. If we are about intimidating the free speech of others, we are no better than the anti-gay bullies who came before us.
Nope -- this is a matter of market forces at work, as reader skohayes in my previous diary noted:
These companies who are high tech progressive companies don't want neanderthals like Eich at the head of their tables anymore. Their customers don't want them, their advertisers don't want them. It's the free market at work.
The right treats the market as just as authoritative as the Bible. It explains their excuses against any sort of progressive piece of legislation on the environment, for instance. But the problem is that when the markets that they so champion suddenly go against their values, they see it instead as an attack on the First Amendment. Nope -- they can't have it both ways. If they want to be champions of free markets, then they need to do so when it works against them.
The fact of the matter is that Eich was victimized by the bottom line. Too many customers and advertisers who were essential to Mozilla's bottom line were no longer willing to do business with them because of the conflict of interest that his ascension caused. And there was another factor at work; most Internet companies and people are against any form of police state mentality. That goes for both attempts to infringe on Net Neutrality, NSA surveillance, and homophobia.
But subsequently, Sully doubled down on his critics, comparing them to Animal Farm.
As I said last night, of course Mozilla has the right to purge a CEO because of his incorrect political views. Of course Eich was not stripped of his First Amendment rights. I’d fight till my last breath for Mozilla to retain that right. What I’m concerned with is the substantive reason for purging him. When people’s lives and careers are subject to litmus tests, and fired if they do not publicly renounce what may well be their sincere conviction, we have crossed a line. This is McCarthyism applied by civil actors. This is the definition of intolerance. If a socially conservative private entity fired someone because they discovered he had donated against Prop 8, how would you feel? It’s staggering to me that a minority long persecuted for holding unpopular views can now turn around and persecute others for the exact same reason. If we cannot live and work alongside people with whom we deeply disagree, we are finished as a liberal society.
But the problem is that it's a matter of conflict of interest. If I were a Black man working for XYZ and my CEO were to give money to skinhead and KKK causes, then I would have good reason to wonder whether my boss would be objective in deciding whether to promote me or keep me in the event of downsizing. Money is now free speech in the Brave New World of John Roberts. Since money is now a form of free speech, Eich became the victim of the very sort of corporate police state that he championed with his money when he supported the forces of Proposition 8. His contribution became public knowledge and he was forced out.
Since money is now free speech, Eich's contribution stated loud and clear that he was prejudiced against gays. The right can't have it both ways. They can't say that money is free speech and then turn around and complain when people decided that Eich's free speech meant that he was not fit to be a CEO at a major company. If Sully is against this "McCarthyism," then let him join us in seeking to get rid of Citizens United and getting money out of politics. It is not a matter, as Sullivan argues, that we can't live and work along side people with whom we deeply disagree. It's a matter of said positions being directly related to the job.
What if an employee went to a demonstration that his company found objectionable? Would that be a reason to fire him? What we have here is a social pressure to keep your beliefs deeply private for fear of retribution. We are enforcing another sort of closet on others. I can barely believe the fanaticism.
It depends on the case. If it affected his ability to perform the job, then yes. If one of my employees went to a KKK rally on their own time, I would have a serious question, for instance, about their ability to interact with Black customers. But this is the world the right has created. Since corporations are people according to the same people who created separate but equal and since John Roberts believes that they represent the highest form of good, then it follows that corporations can decide who they want to represent them.
A little history lesson. Not so long ago, many in the gay community itself – including large swathes of its left-liberal wing – opposed marriage equality. I know, because I was targeted by them as a neofascist/heterosexist/patriarchal “anti-Christ”. Yes, I was called precisely that in print for being a conservative supporter of marriage equality and for ending the ban on openly gay people in the military. And I’m talking only a couple of decades ago. And now, opposing marriage equality is regarded as equivalent to the KKK? And neo-Nazis?
Times are changing. The markets have spoken. You either adjust to what the markets are saying or you perish. That is one of the top commandments of the Brave New World where only the markets are authoritative. If you try to sell IBM shares for $200 when the market will only pay $70, it is delusional. It is becoming less and less socially acceptable to make homophobic remarks. Eich could have admitted he was wrong on gay rights and gotten another chance, but he chose not to take that chance. Something about "Stay the Course (TM).
Let's suppose that Eich never discriminated against a gay person. Even the appearance of conflict of interest is going to have a chilling effect in attracting gays in working for your company. It's not a matter of McCarthyite forces taking over Mozilla; it's a matter of people seeing a potential conflict of interest. It's not always fair, but it's a fact of life.
Sullivan concludes with a straw man...
Yes, it was broader than that. It was a coalition of those, gay and straight, who do not believe that people with different views than theirs’ should be tolerated in a leadership position. It’s a reminder of just how closed-minded and vicious so much of the identity-politics left can be.
And an ironic remark.
There you have the illiberal mindset. Morality trumps freedom. Our opponents must be humiliated, ridiculed and “isolated as perverts”. I mean “bigots”, excuse me.
If your views are not related to the performance of your duties, then nobody cares. If your views will affect how you perform your job, then that is a conflict of interest. Somehow, I don't think Sully would have shown the same outrage had Eich been a member of the KKK and was forced out. But the irony of his close is that
throughout the Proposition 8 campaign, gays were portrayed as perverts who were unfit to be in mainstream society or associate with your children. Mark Joseph Stern of Slate:
The view that Eich was just expressing his opposition to marriage equality, a common stance at the time, strikes me as naive. Because Prop 8 is now dead, and because its passage was largely overshadowed by President Barack Obama’s election victory, it’s easy to forget the vicious tactics of the pro-Prop 8 campaign. Or, I should say, it’s easy to forget them if you’re not gay—because almost every gay person I know remembers the passage of Prop 8 as the most traumatic and degrading anti-gay event in recent American history.
The tactics used by pro-Prop 8 campaigners were not merely homophobic. They were laser-focused to exploit Californians’ deepest and most irrational fears about gay people, indoctrinating an entire state with cruelly anti-gay propaganda. Early on, Prop 8’s supporters decided to focus their campaign primarily on children, stoking parents’ fears about gay people brainwashing their kids with pro-gay messages or, implicitly, turning their children gay.
And Josh Marshall explains that being a CEO is much different than being a rank and file employee.
Gay rights is at the forefront of our political consciousness and struggles today. And Mozilla lives at the heart of an industry and a part of the country where full equality for LGBT Americans is a near sacrosanct part of the culture. I doubt there's any other industry or subculture (that is big time in economic terms) that has more advanced views on LGBT issues than tech. What's more, Mozilla is a nonprofit - essentially an activist organization - built around open-source-ism and the distribution of information. Its values are at the core of its existence, not profit like a for-profit corporation.
But even if it weren't a nonprofit, being a CEO is different. You represent the company. To a degree, you are the company. And there's little doubt that having an apparently anti-gay rights CEO would be a bad thing for a tech company in terms of its market as well as in terms of the competition for programmers and engineers and more. I think most of us do or should agree that as a matter of political culture, if not strict political rights, you should be able to do your job and fulfill your responsibilities and not worry about being punished or fired because you have heterodox political views. But being a CEO or having other super prominent positions is a bit like being a celebrity or rock star. There's no right to be famous - who you are, what you think and what you say are all part of the gig. Being a CEO of a major company is kind of the same, and largely for good reasons.