The Proposition 8 campaign was actually successful in re-prohibiting gay marriage in California for about four years before it was overturned, meaning four years of legal limbo for already-married couples and four continued years of second-class-citizen standing for gay couples looking to get married. It also pushed out some incredibly offensive TV ads, claiming the marriage equality movement wanted to use schools to turn children gay and other nonsense. You can understand how someone affected by that proposition, and the decades-long fight before it, might not be so quick to say "oh, you rascals, let's let bygones be bygones;" even if marriage was legalized in the end.
I honestly don't know where I stand on Brave. I hate our current ad-supported world, and it's an interesting alternative to that. On the other hand, I loath Eich and have no interest in supporting him financially after what he has done. Mostly I just stay silent; my feelings aren't strong enough to actually oppose other people using it, but I won't use it myself.
Note that I never said anything about Brave one way or the other. My response was simply that Eich's donation was not simply "free speech," it was a sincere and successful effort to enforce his personal religious views on others, and that it's perfectly fine to oppose that behavior.
You can use whatever word you like, but you used your money and influence to cause incredible amounts of harm to your fellow citizens and previous employees through your bizarre need to use the government to enforce your personal religious views on other people. I don't know the right word for that kind of behavior.
So you concede your assertions about "legal limbo" were false -- good. That's progress.
Moving on to assert "incredible amounts of harm" as caused by me among a majority of Californians who supported both Prop 8 and the prior work of Mark Leno et al. on Domestic Partner Law, California's form of civil unions -- which as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_partnership_in_Califo... says, and as Leno said at the time, ensures equivalent positive rights under state law for all -- is nonsensical.
We were allies when we supported civil unions. Obama was on side of civil unions in 2008, and likely strategically lying that he believed marriage was one man and one woman. Then the goalposts moved, and incredible yet heretofore invisible harm was being done? Nonsense.
Fixating on "religion" is also nonsense. Theft is against the law. Major religions teach that theft is sinful. Does this mean religious people are enforcing personal views on other people? Of course not. Atheists (I know some; neo-Darwinian evo-biologists) supported Prop 8. People who didn't like the Foucauldian agenda behind the whole thing, or the judicial overreach, or mayors like Newsom overreaching, supported Prop 8. For many and usually coherent reasons, religious or not.
It shows either ignorance or ill will to dismiss both group diversity of thought and individual integrity of thought by labeling views you dislike as "religious", and therefore somehow illegitimate as the basis of action in the public square. Frankly, it is un-American.
You are entitled to your own opinions, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan quipped, but not your own facts. The fact is Californians including me who supported Domestic Partner Law did not do "incredible amounts of harm" up to May 2008. We did not suddenly start doing harm in June 2008 when Prop 8 got on the ballot. We did not do harm when the majority passed it.
Federal law, DOMA -- an unconstitutional power grab against the states by congress and a pandering president -- caused hardships for Domestic Partners in Californians, but Californians could do nothing about that Bill Clinton era law.
As my search link shows, you've been calumniating me on HN for years, while trying unsuccessfully to stay silent on the topic. I'm not optimistic you'll stop now, but that search also shows I've tried engaging in good faith. Here I am again. Instead of silently dropping refuted assertions and moving the goalposts, e.g., to vague "incredible amounts of harm" imponderables, how about making an explicit statement of whom I harmed, how I harmed them, and how I can make amends.
The anti-gay community has a long, long history of belittling and harming gays[1,2]. Prop 8 was a continuation of degrading behavior towards gay people. Advertising claims that gay people want to harm or abuse children directly leads to anti-gay sentiment, which leads to closeting, bullying, and abuse. The campaign you donated to aired these kinds of advertisements[3] and the proposition itself was a direct attempt to maintain gays' second-class citizen status.
I do want to sincerely apologize if I've been misrepresenting your viewpoint. If I have, it was unknowingly. I assumed it was religious, because that's by far the most common objection to it. In all our years of sparring, you still haven't explained why you're opposed to gay marriage, to my knowledge. You always dance around the issue. If you tell me that it isn't based in religion, then I apologize and will immediately stop making that claim. But then what is it? If you're not actually opposed to gay marriage, but rather something like judicial overreach, was the continued harm to gay people worth whatever point it is you wished to prove?
> how I can make amends.
I can't speak to others. For me personally, an apology for supporting the campaign and a statement in support of gay marriage would shut me right up.
(Did you miss the "Update, April 23, 2014" at bottom of [3]?)
I never bullied anyone, so leave that out. Be careful arguing that I'm responsible for others' actions due to systemic problems and biases. That fallacious line of argument cuts in many directions.
Your whole approach, asserting religion only and as if illegitimate, asserting incredible harm ascribed causally to me personally, then moving on after rebuttal without any amendment to your assertions, shows ill will. I'm not going to "dance around" anything with you, and we are nowhere near a common understanding of all our priors.
The best I hope for is try to find common factual ground, which we are doing, slowly.
However, if you can only keep assuming your conclusions and smearing me by association with groups or people I didn't and don't support, I'm out. If you see no way for civil society to function without all the dissenters --
religious or not, we are many -- toeing your line and apologizing for their heresy, then we are definitely done. We can agree that "Error has no rights" and stop now.
I may not agree with you on everything you stand for (or against) but I feel for your position the more I read comments that speak ill of you.
If nothing else, these people come off as sociopathic and it makes me wonder if they are in opposition to you because they feel something immoral has been committed or simply because they just want to let out their hatred into the world.
Why not both? Jonathan Haidt, http://righteousmind.com/, goes into depth with moral psychology on why it feels good for many to vilify, call out, hate-mob, etc., and why we're seeing more such strife in the US, e.g., on campus. Recommended.
I had a response all typed up, but I wiped it, because I'm being unproductive by trying to argue. I should be trying to understand.
My viewpoint is that the only reason to oppose gay marriage is because you believe that gay relationships are inferior to straight relationships. Can you please explain to me a reason to oppose gay marriage other than that? You listed a few earlier:
> People who didn't like the Foucauldian agenda behind the whole thing, or the judicial overreach, or mayors like Newsom overreaching, supported Prop 8.
I don't know what "Foucauldian agenda" means. Sorry.
"Judicial/Newsom overreach" don't make sense to me in the context of a public referendum. These people voted against something they wanted just to prove a point about something else(?); and then what, they were going to vote in favor of it again sometime in the future? Okay, but that's pretty baffling behavior.
I just have a hard time believing anyone in support of gay rights would choose to vote against gay rights and support anti-gay organizations. Maybe you can explain this more for me.
"These people voted against something they wanted" -- no, people objecting to judicial and mayoral overreach voted to override that overreach. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12721928 on judicial restraint. I'm baffled you got my point exactly backwards, so pausing here.
But people have all kinds of ideas about what constitutes "proper and fair". Some people feel differently about marriage and being gay than you do (Or I do). They might come here and argue about perversion and degradation of society and and what their kids are exposed to. And what can and can't be tolerated as far as behavior. And how marriage is such and such and doesn't apply etc. etc. And, they feel every bit as strong about it as you do. This isn't a wacky fringe view (yet) and it isn't considered "discriminatory" by the people professing it.
As far as I know Eich doesn't condemn gay people for being gay. He just apparently has certain views on what constitutes marriage. And he isn't alone in these views. I don't agree. You don't agree. The Supreme Court doesn't agree. But the public crucification of the guy's professional work because of these beliefs (which as far as I know he kept private) is to me 100 times worse than the views he holds. And it's a dangerous stance to take. We've been here many times before. Moral crusaders (of all stripes) out to improve the world who do little but cause destruction. At some level we have to accept not everyone shares our backgrounds or political beliefs and work with this fact in a constructive, civil and reasonable manner. It's part of becoming an adult in a multicultural society.
I appreciate you aren't trying to knock his work, that was OP. My only complaint is your original over the top rhetoric, other than that fine, I understand you have a different view than Eich. But you can not like an idea a person has without personally hating a person for having the idea. And that is the right thing to do.
I honestly don't know where I stand on Brave. I hate our current ad-supported world, and it's an interesting alternative to that. On the other hand, I loath Eich and have no interest in supporting him financially after what he has done. Mostly I just stay silent; my feelings aren't strong enough to actually oppose other people using it, but I won't use it myself.
Note that I never said anything about Brave one way or the other. My response was simply that Eich's donation was not simply "free speech," it was a sincere and successful effort to enforce his personal religious views on others, and that it's perfectly fine to oppose that behavior.