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Brendan Eich Steps Down As Mozilla CEO
New submitter matafagafo (1343219) writes with this news, straight from the Mozilla blog, which comes in the wake of controversy over Brendan Eich's polticial views (in particular, his support for California's Proposition 8, which would have reversed a decision legalizing same-sex marriage within the state). and how they would reflect on the organization : "Brendan Eich has chosen to step down from his role as CEO. He's made this decision for Mozilla and our community. Mozilla believes both in equality and freedom of speech. Equality is necessary for meaningful speech. And you need free speech to fight for equality. Figuring out how to stand for both at the same time can be hard ..."
What if he had said, "blacks don't deserve the right to vote"?
If someone said that in Alabama in 1957, would it be justified to deny them employment for the rest of their life even if they changed their mind after the Civil Rights Act passed?
Publicly acceptable positions on gay marriage are changing quickly. In 1996, Congress overwhelmingly passed, and President Clinton signed, a bill (DOMA) banning recognition of gay marriage across state lines. 10 years after that, few Democratic politicians, at least outside the most conservative states, would defend that position. But views changed slowly. In 2004, when running for the Senate, Barack Obama said that he thought marriage should be between a man and a woman. He said in 2010 that his views were "evolving", and at that point said he supported civil unions. Shortly afterward he came down on the side of supporting gay marriage without reservations.
The point is that this is an issue on which decent, well-meaning people have disagreed. To the extent that there is a majority consensus, it has only formed recently. Going back and retroactively persecuting people for their views before the consensus formed seems grossly unfair.
It was against the self-contradicting phenomenon called "gay marriage".
gay marriage is only 'self-contradicting' if marriage is defined as not involving same sex unions, marriage is a human invention, it does not arise from the facts of physics, chemistry, biology or any other natural process, neither does it arise from basic philosophical or ethical thought. a society is free to define 'marriage' how it likes. prop 8 was an argument about definitions, just because the proponents (not all though) claimed that god was on their side and that therefore 'marriage' was somehow akin to a physical property of the universe does not make it so.
snake