If he was a developer, architect or something else like that, I'd generally agree.
However, he is now CEO. Imagine just how many people he'd alienate inside Mozilla by basically saying "I don't think you should have the same rights as me".
This is not just another political topic, no matter how people would like to frame it that way. This is about treating people the same. You can still think that homosexuality is wrong and support gay marriage. But someone who goes so far as to say no to gay marriage is basically saying they view that group of people as less than another group of people and should have less rights.
C'mon. In 2004 and 2008, with this very much a live issue, something north of 90% of American voters voted for a presidential candidate who professed to be against gay marriage. You are getting and will continue to get the social change you want, but it's crazy to ostracize someone for having the same political view as 2008 candidate Barack Obama. Try to be graceful and persuasive.
Are you saying that a boss of gay people shouldn't get called out for effectively saying, "Hey, you people don't deserve the same civil rights the rest of us do"? That he should be able to just coast along?
Because that sounds like horseshit to me. That gay people can now get married in some minority of American states is progress, sure. But I'm not seeing why that means people, gay or straight, can't call a bigoted action a bigoted action. If somebody is obligated to be graceful and persuasive here, surely that's Eich, who started this out by doing something a lot of his employees find obviously hostile.
He didn't say that at all. You are reading a whole lot into a simple transfer of money about which Eich has said hardly a word. You have taken something that is barely an identifiable stance — and certainly not a public one — and turned it into a declaration of extremism.
An equally plausible read would be "Eich belongs to a religion that holds marriage as a core tenet and was encouraged by his pastor to donate along with the rest of the congregation. He actually wants gays to have equal rights and believes treating gays well is the right course for any business entity, but his personal religious beliefs — which he keeps strictly separate from his official duties — have certain hooks in the word 'marriage'."
Fun fact: Many churches were actually telling their congregants that without Prop. 8, the state would require their church to perform gay marriages, and that they should vote for Prop. 8 if they wanted their church's religious freedom to remain intact.
He did effectively say that, because that was the practical effect of passing Prop 8, something he helped pay for.
If he was misled on this topic, all he has to do is say, "Hey, I was wrong: I thought this was about free speech, but it turned out that wasn't the case. I had also confused the notions of religious and civil marriage. Mea culpa. I fully support the subsequent court decisions recognizing that all my employees have the right to be married to the partner of their choice."
Instead, he's chosen to stonewall. Which means that the most plausible reading is that he still believes in what Prop 8 was plainly trying to do: strip civil rights from gay people.
Really? I don't see any reason to suspect his intentions were any more sinister than my friends and family members who supported Prop. 8, who generally had much less interest in stripping gay people's rights than they did in protecting a religious institution that is very important to them. A lot of the people I know who supported Prop. 8 have actually spoken out against homophobic rhetoric they've come across, because they sincerely do care about gay people — but they still supported Prop. 8, because they felt more like their religion was under attack than gay people.
I'm not saying that it was all because of the flat-out lies like the state forcing gay marriages on churches, either. I was just giving that as an example of how hard churches worked to tie Prop. 8 with being a good religious person. Not everyone who supported it did so because they personally have it in for gay people.
It seems to me to come down to the same thing. Either Eich was misled, in which case he should apologize. Or he was trying to strip a civil right from gay people for his personal reasons. Whether that's anti-gay animus or just believing that his right to religious freedom trumps other people's civil rights seems irrelevant.
Either way, I think he owes an explanation to the gay people he will soon be managing, and to Mozilla's many gay and gay-allied business partners and donors. Like it or not, the CEO personally represents the organization. His saying, "Gosh, my reasons for oppressing gay people are personal and complex," doesn't wash with me, and it surely won't with a lot of other people.
ha, this is a laughable anti-apologetic defense. replace "gay" with "black" or "women" and laugh along.
edit: as i reread this an hour later i can't help but feel more strongly. i was originally laughing at the ignorance on display but it's probably more harmful than funny.
"...people in any group or project of significant size and diversity will not agree on many crucial issues unrelated to the group or project." ... "Not only is insisting on ideological uniformity impractical, it is counter-productive..."
this sounds like a defense out of American History X.
Obama also (deeply incoherently, I might add) opposed Prop 8, while Eich actively funded it.
Obama's position was cowardly, but pretty much every knowledgeable Democrat and Republican believed and knew that he was just cynically posturing. He was a supporter of gay marriage in 1994, for Christ's sake. How many social liberals went through the past two decades and became less supportive of gay marriage? Only to switch their mind three years later?
Trust me, I'd be the first to point out that there's a whole lot to criticize Obama for in all of this. But believing he's a homophobe instead of a cynical liar is a bridge too far.
Looked at from another angle, it's actually quite democratic for a candidate for public office to shift his or her platform away from their personal beliefs and towards the beliefs of those they're attempting to represent.
But all he ended up representing was incoherent and incompatible policy preferences. I might agree that represents public opinion well, but it's nothing to be proud of.
If you replaced the word "gay" with the word "interracial", would you be receptive to the argument that we should excuse this sort of bigotry because in the past many Americans thought that way?
Of course you wouldn't, so don't try to excuse it in this case.
Correct or not, that's irrelevant to the point I was making. The farthest he has ever gone against gay marriage is to say that he personally believed marriage was between a man and a woman. He never campaigned against it and even when personally opposed to it, consistently said that legislation like DOMA was unnecessary. That's hardly equivalent to giving $1000 to prop 8.
Yes because we all know statements made on the campaign trail meant to appeal to both sides are a 100% accurate portrayal of the candidate's actual position.
At some point Obama might have to take an actual stand on something, and then follow up on it. Him being a politician doesn't absolve him of his uselessness.
Last example: ooh Putin, you're going to face costs for these shenanigans!
Is being graceful the same as being against other people having loving relationships that are different than the majority? Because Obama was against it? I really do not understand this perspective.
You seem to be either implying or assuming that not supporting gay marriage necessarily means believing homosexuality is wrong, but in my experience, that is false and only the converse is true. The people I know who don't support gay marriage have no problem with homosexuality or homosexual people (that is, they have no problem with people identifying as gay nor having gay sex), they just believe that allowing gay marriage would be redefining "marriage". (Which I believe is a bigoted opinion, but I am sympathetic to their ignorance and fear.)
I don't believe this is sampling bias on my part; in fact, I thought that was exactly the position on gay marriage taken up by both Obama and McCain in 2008, I specifically remember there was some debate or joint interview or something where Obama opened by strongly asserting that gay people deserve all the same rights, and McCain opened by strongly asserting that he doesn't believe in "redefining marriage", and they proceed to find that they completely agree with each other.
Gays and straights are treated the same - both are free to marry people of the opposite sex. Gays may prefer not to do that, but they do have the legal right.
As for finding your preferences are not legally favored, that happens to lots of people. I prefer to have no fixed address, which is NOT a legally favorable preference to have (try opening a bank account, etc). I prefer not to buy insurance covering procedures I will never need [1].
Are laws preventing me from satisfying my preferences on these matters all unacceptable? If Eich favored Obamacare or "Know Your Customer" banking laws, would that also be unacceptable?
"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." -- Anatole France
Your notion of "treated the same" matches approximately nobody's, aside from a handful of wordy bigots. More importantly, it doesn't qualify under the 14th amendment, which is the standard that matters here: http://www.freep.com/assets/freep/pdf/C4220110321.PDF
You can demonize me all you want, but you've still provided no philosophical justification for the viewpoint that penalizing preferences in general is acceptable except for gay sex preferences. Citing an activist court opinion (which totally misuses the rational basis test) is not a substitute for thinking through your own views.
If your actual opinion is merely "gays are on my team, therefore I support them", that's fine. But don't couch it in abstract principles like "treating people the same.
"Activist court" used to have a pretty specific meaning, so I'm sad to see it become, "issuing opinions I don't agree with". There's no legislating from the bench here. There was a law that was judged to be unconstitutional, so it got struck down. As it has in other jurisdictions for strikingly similar reasons. And that Random Internet Guy disagrees with a variety of federal judges on how to apply the rational basis test is interesting I guess, but you can see how I'd be unmoved.
The purpose of civil marriage is mainly to promote families. That being the way we insure the continuance of our society down the ages. Some people make their families in a way that is perfectly fine on outcome measures, but other people find squicky. My view, one with which the courts are agreeing, is that "eeew" is not a rational basis for excluding those people from the institution of marriage, because the 14th amendment demands (and our sense of natural justice requires) that people be equal before the law.
Of course, I am also on team gay, because I have gay friends and gay family members. And also because I'm not a bigoted asshole. But happily, it fits in with my "treating people the same" bias, one I have carefully considered, so this one hasn't required a lot of extra thinking. And since this bias is conveniently baked into American jurisprudence already, I'm looking forward to this working itself out over the next decade or so as the "eeew" brigade dies off.
And I'll add that I have no obligation to provide justifications for views that I don't hold, like the kookily put one in your first sentence. If you'd like to keep putting yourself forth as a pillar of rational discussion, I'd suggest you stick to holding people to account only for what they've said, not the things you imagine while getting freaked out about gay sex.
I say "activist" because the rational basis test was applied incorrectly. If you are citing experts (as this opinion does), you are doing it wrong. The rational basis test is simply supposed to determine whether there could be a rational justification for a law - i.e., it's not the job of the court to determine whether the legislature chose the right expert to believe.
As for your "treating people the same" bias, which people get treated the same? Gay people? People who prefer to marry their brother/sister? People who prefer not to buy health insurance? You haven't addressed this at all.
I have no idea why you believe I'm "freaked out" about gay sex. I really don't care what private acts consenting people choose to do. I just don't understand how one draws a line between gay sex and, for example, non-reproductive incest or unlicensed medicine. Nor do I understand how subsidizing preferences for straight marriage are illegitimate, but subsidizing preferences for immobility are legitimate.
You've certainly provided no such justification - it's not as if the 14'th amendment says sex preferences are protected, but risk preferences are not.
Clearly you haven't thought things through well enough to provide any explanation, so I'm signing off. Enjoy the moral posturing.
Well. Denied further fruits of your wisdom, I can at least console myself that you will surely educate the variety of federal judges who don't understand the law as deeply as you.
I swear, every single argument against gay marriage is just a refurbished argument against interracial marriage. These arguments were bullshit then, and they are bullshit now. You should be ashamed of yourself.
It does. "Women in interracial couples will give birth to multiracial kids" or some variant thereof is that parallel.
EDIT: I don't support either position (on gay marriage and interracial marriage). I'm just pointing out that there is a parallel in the reasoning of those who oppose gay couples and interracial couples from the angle of the children they'll raise.
That's not an argument against gay marriage, that's an argument against gay parenting (and to stop that, you need a national ban on turkey basters). Except it's kind of a rubbish argument against gay parenting:
That some state of affairs X in a family is best for children is not an argument that not-X should be forbidden.
Children do better if they have rich parents, who can afford to buy them a wide variety of toys, give them a better education, buy them private tutors and books and plenty of other resources to give them a head-start in life. That doesn't mean that the rest of society shouldn't be allowed to raise children even though those children will be raised in a suboptimal fashion.
If - and it is a big, complex, still-being-debated-by-social-scientists type of if - parenting by opposite-sex biological parents is the gold standard, that doesn't mean that people who still get to silver or bronze shouldn't also be able to parent.
For the record, I am an unequivocal supporter of gay marriage, and I have always voted for it.
The only thing that makes me at all uncomfortable about it is the possibility that it sets a norm where it is considered prejudiced and discriminatory to even ask the question of whether same-sex couples are the best for children.
For example, it is pretty well accepted that having two parents is better for children than just one (all else being equal; abusive two-parent relationships are obviously worse). No one would argue that single parenting should be illegal. But it's not taboo to say that having two parents is probably better for kids than having just one. (Though of course many people have superstar single parents and turn out great.)
Likewise I would never argue that gay parenting should be illegal. I just don't want to see it become an ostracizable offense to ask the question, without agenda, of whether same-sex parent situations are the best for kids.
Yep, political correctness is stifling open debate.
For some strange reason, nobody wants to discuss polygamous marriages, and whether they should be legal or not. It would be the height of hypocrisy to support gay marriage but not allow multiple consenting adults to form a similar union. Yet to even raise the issue invites ridicule.
Another thing, I've often heard gay people use the derogatory term "breeders" to slur heterosexual couples with children. Why is this ok? Why doesn't anyone stand up and say this is wrong?
> For some strange reason, nobody wants to discuss polygamous marriages, and whether they should be legal or not.
To me this is not hypocritical, because I do not see a contingent of people saying "we are living in healthy polygamous de facto marriages and wish to have the state recognize them." I don't think you can reason about this in a logical vacuum, it's about observing what actually happens in reality.
> Another thing, I've often heard gay people use the derogatory term "breeders" to slur heterosexual couples with children.
I've only ever heard this term used in fun. Any term used in a genuinely derogatory way is not ok by me.
> I do not see a contingent of people saying "we are living in healthy polygamous de facto marriages and wish to have the state recognize them."
So the minority should not have any civil rights?
In the US there are currently two different TV shows both featuring a man and his five "wives" and all their kids, and they all seem well adjusted and happy. Yet the law does not allow the man to be married to all of them. One of them has been fighting this stuff in court in Utah.
Why do people support gay marriage but not polygamous marriage? Why aren't there activists on street corners handing out leaflets and asking for donations to help minorities in Utah?
There is obviously some kind of double standard going on here and I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it is simply human nature at work. Gay people who want to get married only care about their own situation and are simply not interested in polygamous marriages.
So it is somewhat hypocritical to expect the majority, who are not gay, to care about gay marriage when the debate is not truly about civil rights, because if it were, the campaign would also be fighting for the rights of polygamous families.
I'd like to see the discussion take place and not be dismissed out-of-hand.
> So the minority should not have any civil rights?
I said nothing of the sort. Maybe the reason you are not seeing the discussion you want is because you put people on the defensive by misinterpreting their words.
What exactly did you mean by "contingent"? I interpreted what you wrote as meaning that since there aren't a vocal group of polygamous families making themselves seen and heard, it was somehow okay to ignore them because they were so insignificant.
Maybe I misunderstood what you were saying, but I think my point still stands: that the marriage equality campaign is not really about equality for everybody because it does not include minority* groups like polygamists.
*Although in many cultures polygamy was the norm for hundreds and thousands of years and only recently been banned.
> since there aren't a vocal group of polygamous families making themselves seen and heard
Good so far.
> it was somehow okay to ignore them because they were so insignificant.
It's not about "ignoring" anybody because of their "insignificance." It's about legislating around what is healthy, on the whole.
I haven't done a lot of research into polygamy, but my sense based on the little I have been exposed to suggests to me that in many cases where it occurs it is, in practice, an unhealthy power dynamic.
A good comparison for this is the age of consent. Sexual relationships with minors are illegal because in many/most cases they involve an unhealthy power dynamic. Now there are exceptions (and the rules are pretty arbitrary in that a 17/18 year old couple is a completely different thing than a 15/30 year old couple). But on the whole this is good and important.
Now I could be completely off on my understanding of polygamy in practice. But I have a lot more information about what LGBT relationships are like in real life and therefore feel far more conviction that they are healthy and should be fully accepted. Show me people in healthy polygamous relationships who want to see them state-recognized and I am open to changing my mind.
The "healthyness" of them is important, not only to protect vulnerable people from unhealthy power dynamics, but because if legalized, the state would need to become involved in all sorts of questions like what happens when a polygamous marriage is dissolved. What if just one person leaves? How does custody/property work in all of these cases? What if there are disagreements about power of attorney among remaining spouses when one spouse is in the hospital? The legal aspects of marriage get complicated quickly when there are more than two participants. Unless society has a good understanding of what these polygamous relationships mean and how they function, it would be pretty hard for the courts to decide what is "fair" in these difficult cases.
These are the reasons I don't think you can reason about this in a logical vacuum. You can't just extrapolate and say "well if you can marry one man, the stat is being unjust if you can't also marry two." Life and laws aren't a logic puzzle. They are based on our understanding of the human condition and our ideals about a fair/just society.
Studies indicate that kids of gay parents do just as well as kids of straight parents. On the other hand kids of poor parents do less well than kids of rich parents. Therefore, make gay marriage legal and make poor marriage illegal. /s
Wikipedia is a good place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_parenting It has links to these studies, as well as criticisms about the limitations of these studies.
Interracial couples will raise children that believe interracial marriages are OK and will be less likely seek a mate and marry strictly within their race.
Many opponents of miscegenation are revolted by the "mutts" produced by interracial couples and believe that they will pollute the "pure" races. This is very much the same fear: "If I allow these couples to have children, they will produce children who reflect the coupling."
> Gays and straights are treated the same - both are free to marry people of the opposite sex. Gays may prefer not to do that, but they do have the legal right.
Yep, blacks and whites are treated the same — both are free to marry in their race. Blacks may prefer not to do that, but they do have the legal right.
Characterizing sexual orientation as a preference (not to mention a casual preference that can be changed when convenient) ignores the large volume of evidence to the contrary. You may not realize this, but it comes off as pretty vile. Or you might just be trolling.
How is sexual orientation anything other than a preference? Note that whether or not a preference is "casual" is not relevant to either my post or the post I responded to.
You can demonize me all you want, but it's not a substitute for carefully thinking through your views. I imagine it's more fun though, and less risky - after all, careful thought can result in discovering you are wrong about something.
I don't understand - how are "it is genetic" and "it is a preference" contradictory? The two statements seem orthogonal to one another.
Suppose appetite for risk is genetic - does that mean we should stop saying "risk preferences" and (as a matter of civil rights) must stop legally favoring certain choices regarding risk?
Maybe this doesn't bother you at all. But the structure of your argument also supports anti-interracial marriage laws.
Blacks and whites are treated the same - both are free to marry people of the same race. Some may prefer not to do that, but they do have the legal right.
It's not my argument. I'm one of those wackos who believes the government should get out of the marriage game (i.e. I want to end straight marriage), stop favoring the immobile over the mobile, and stop favoring people with risk preferences that result in the purchase of health insurance.
I'm simply trying to square the standard left wing position that the government can and should regulate anything on the slightest pretext with the other standard left wing position that the government has no right to regulate gay sex. But somehow, in spite of regulation of gay sex being illegitimate, regulation of incest or polygamy is still perfectly legitimate.
Note that I'm attempting to reason from first principles here, not appeal to consequences.
But men and women are not treated the same; a man does not have the same set of people that they are free to marry as a woman does. Whether or not the motivation is to discriminate based on sexual orientation, the plain operation is to discriminate based on sex.
Yes, your preference to have no fixed address is exactly the same as someone's genetic disposition about the gender they are attracted to. Having no fixed address likely enables negative effects like fraud. Same sex marriage likely enables… what, exactly?
How can you not see this is exactly the same argument as inter-racial marriage?
Suppose my preference for mobility is genetically informed. Does that mean "know your customer" laws are a violation of my civil rights? If sexual preferences turn out to be malleable by circumstances and are not genetic, would that make gay marriage restrictions acceptable? If not, then I don't see the relevance of genetic influences on human preference.
If you believe there is no fundamental principle preventing the state from regulating same sex marriage and the state merely needs a rational basis to do so, here is a very simple one. It incentivizes bisexuals to lean straight, thereby reducing the amount of gay sex and the transmission of STDs.
Note that I don't subscribe to the reasoning I just stated - that's just standard left wing political theory (which I don't agree with) applied to a scenario that left wing types refuse to apply it to.
"Gays and straights are treated the same - both are free to marry people of the opposite sex. Gays may prefer not to do that, but they do have the legal right."
That is a totally sociopathic argument, and you know it, and it makes you an asshole for having the nerve to make it.
> But someone who goes so far as to say no to gay marriage is basically saying they view that group of people as less than another group of people and should have less rights
Or they just think the practice of government marriage-sanctioning should be scrapped altogether, rather than extending the privilege to one more politically-popular group and pretending that you're ending discrimination.
Or they just think the practice of government marriage-sanctioning should be scrapped altogether, rather than extending the privilege to one more politically-popular group and pretending that you're ending discrimination.
How noble of this demographic to sacrifice the marriage rights of others while they pursue their ultimate goal of removing government from such matters altogether!
And, in the meantime we continue to deny an entire set of people rights they should have and bury our head in the sand to the current real world problems this poses.
Even if you hold the position you stated and wanted that change, we can't deny someone rights in the current system for some future better situation. There is an immediate and real world problem that needs to be addressed while you strive to implement your preferred system.
Except that when you put your energy into lobbying instead of going your own way and DIY, you're supporting the machine known as government and legitimizing its role as arbiter-of-all-that-is-good. When your campaign succeeds, it does so at the expense of pigeonholing the entire issue of unnecessary marriage regulation into the simplistic "gay marriage", and people consider the entire issue solved and look for the next thing to feel progressive about. But even worse, your narrow success then serves as an advertisement of the system working and covers up the fact that you're actually three steps back due to increased government intervention everywhere else.
Yeah, the "DIY" approach: ask all the gay couples out there who tried that with big expensive packages of legal documents that ended up being worth sweet fuck all precisely at the moment they needed it.
Part of the reason there is a push for gay marriage is because the alternatives (civil partnerships, "DIY" marriages using contracts) and they've failed to provide the necessary protections for couples in the way marriage rights seem to.
There is a compelling societal need to be able to say "here are people who are in an intimate, long-term trusting relationship for the purposes of decision making, finance, tax and so on".
I wish you luck in your campaign to find a compelling and convincing political and intellectual argument for something that would serve the social goods that marriage does and would effectively replace marriage for gay and straight couples. Until then, I'd quite like to be able to get married to someone of the gender I'm actually attracted to. (And as of Saturday, I will be able to, thanks to the marriage laws in England changing.)
The basis and functioning of the UK government seems quite different than that of the US. For better and for worse, a large part of the American foundation is the ability to abstain from involvement with government and go your own way. Treating USG as if it's an authoritative entity that has an ultimate say over any aspect of one's life erodes this ability, and we get left with the worst of both worlds - a broken system that we can't avoid (eg what happened with healthcare).
And yeah, making this argument widely compelling is going to take a lot more than luck. Immediate short-term realities tend to dominate over long-term abstract ideals.
"Be the change you wish to see in the world", and all that.
From my perspective, gay marriage petitioners seemingly wish to have a world where people have to beg the government for the ability associate in a certain manner.
Your summary of what Eich is "basically saying" seems misleading and intended to incite others. I am highly doubtful that he believes other people don't deserve the same rights he does but instead disagrees as to if certain things are right or privileges.
While I do not agree with Eich's views, framing the argument this way accomplishes nothing but fanning the fires. It makes one side feel oppressed and the other attacked. It puts everyone into a defensive mode rather focusing on the real issues. At worst it is manipulative at best it is close minded.
I think your best bet is to treat him as someone who is ignorant and afraid.
I moved to MA a decade ago. I wasn't sure what to expect with the legalization of gay marriage. (I support gay rights, voted in favor of gay marriage, have gay friends and family, etc., just like everybody else. The only reason I thought about it was because I had young children.) Answer: not much changed. No big deal. I didn't have to explain anything to my young children- turns out the kids worked it out for themselves.
No, he's probably not afraid of gay people, exactly, but is certainly ignorant of how gay people love. Often, though, once it gets humanized, this type of fear goes away.
So I'd say, give him a chance. Think of the win if he is convinced to change his mind.
However, he is now CEO. Imagine just how many people he'd alienate inside Mozilla by basically saying "I don't think you should have the same rights as me".
This is not just another political topic, no matter how people would like to frame it that way. This is about treating people the same. You can still think that homosexuality is wrong and support gay marriage. But someone who goes so far as to say no to gay marriage is basically saying they view that group of people as less than another group of people and should have less rights.
This is unacceptable.