I respect Mozilla as a company, but have no desire to work there (despite there being a lot of technology fit) because the CTO, Brendan Eich, made a donation of $1,000 to support Prop 8—a 2008 California ballot measure which banned gay marriage. Sure, I understood that his views were not those of his employer. But that doesn't make it easier for me to want to work for/with the guy.

See, I don’t think it’s about the public message that companies send to their consumers. It’s about the message they give to potential hires: you’ll be working with these people on a daily basis. Depending on the dispensability of the employee in question, a company may choose to fire someone rather than potentially rule out a large number of future employees. It’s an economic decision.

At any company larger than about 3 employees, you'll be working with at least some people who have opinions/ideas/beliefs you find disagreeable or even disgusting -- and, conversely, some of your coworkers will think the same of you.

IMO the most important message to give to potential hires is "we won't put your job in jeopardy over such disagreements". Firing people over political disagreements rules out a huge number of potential employees.

Sure. I would work with these people and execute what I need to do. But knowing what they believe in and the extent of which they would act to remove/restrict rights that I should have ultimately will prevent me from wanting to get to know them, to interact with them beyond a strictly professional capacity.

From experience, that doesn't go well - over time, it gets exhausting. Your company culture gets built up with walls between people because there's no trust.

So yes, having a difference of opinion/belief/diversity is important. But at the same time, there are certain core values that need to be stood for.

But what about co-workers or subordinates? Would you be disturbed because the guy who cleans the floor holds controversial views? Also bear in mind that employees will leave and be replaced with new ones who may be very different people.

Once you get past a certain size of company you're never going to get people who don't disagree on some divisive issue, whether it be gay marriage, gun rights or abortion. The test of your company culture is how well it can deal with that unless you want to start asking people political questions at interview (is these even allowed?).

> you're never going to get people who don't disagree on some divisive issue

I'm not sure you appreciate how deeply these issues affect the people they're about. It's not just talking points for everybody.

The pity is, no one can agree on what 'it' is. What everyone also has is a different idea about what 'obviously has to stop NOW'.

"You're free to believe whatever you want, as long as in effect it's indistinguishable from believing the same thing as me" is going to get you nowhere, fast.

If someone spends their entire life having to justify their existence to the de-facto ruling class, patience for this "all viewpoints are equally valid" stance can run out fast.

So many words for 'we won't accept it'! I'm not saying that all beliefs are equally valid. I don't even have a problem with calling people bigots, as long as you're careful to mind the gap between 'speaking' and 'acting'. I am saying that you are not the only one who really, truly, actually believes that they're running out of patience and that 'doing something' is justified.

It doesn't matter how strongly you believe that you're in the right. If you decide that, just this once, it isn't really imposing your beliefs on others then you will have to live the rest of your life in a world where everyone else decides that way too.

(Not to say that you won't have to live that way even if you don't do it. Other people's beliefs will impact you, more or less by definition. On the other hand, it doesn't make for a very convincing justification.)

Nobody's "imposing" anything on anyone. It is the absence of imposition to which you seem bound and determined to protest. Why?

You are, alas, making entirely unfounded assumptions about my personal beliefs. The third sentence of my previous post is the only thing I've said in this thread about that. Elsewise I'm just talking general psychology.

I haven't asserted that you're infringing on anyone in more than a general sense, by the way. Though 'nuh-uh' wouldn't be a particularly convincing response if I had. And I'm not even talking about 'everyone who doesn't hate gays'. Nor am I excluding people who do hate gay people from my criticism. Given that I already believe that you're right and they're wrong (about gay rights, anyway), your posts don't seem to be going anywhere.

Edit: For future reference, "X is right" and "I believe that X is right" convey exactly equivalent information unless you're talking about psychology, which I am and you don't appear to me to be. Saying it really loudly doesn't change the epistemology. Am I misunderstanding you?

(Claims that the government being permissive on something is an infringement upon those who do not wish to perform that act do not follow logically. Not saying that's what you'd say next, but it's a common enough next step in this conversation so I figured I'd touch on it just-in-case.)

Back to both sides trying to crush each other under the weight of law, I suppose. No surprises there.

However one of the great triumphs of capitalism appears to be getting very different people to work together towards a common goal.

I blame the meme-space that we live in for ideas that I find abhorrent, not the individuals that believe them.

    Roughly 25% of my generation has been killed by abortion

http://www.emcom.ca/health/abortion.shtml

People change. That's the point. And that's the idea.

And you have thus wasted an opportunity to educate them in the error of their ways.

On other days, I feel like the people we're talking about here never really learn. They only die out. Or become so small in their numbers that they finally feel shame about their idiotic views, so they keep their views to themselves. Because they still won't learn, they will still die with them. Never to experience the love and happiness that is to be received when you change views of yours that hurt people who would never hurt you.

Likewise, most companies I've worked for don't engage in overtly political events so they don't self select out any candidates based solely on religious or political reasons.

Edit: Not to say DRM isn't an important (and potentially divisive?) issue, just not nearly to the same scale.

If my boss were donating money to groups trying to strip civil rights from people with Irish ancestry, which I happen to have, could you really fault me for not wanting to work with them?

The phrase "disagree politically" sounds very civilized and sterile. But in practical terms you are asking me to ignore the fact that my boss views me as an inferior being, and holds this feeling so strongly that it's worth spending $1000 to punish me and others like me by legally stripping away my rights.

I will give you that there’s a giant difference between a public persona and the person. But I find when working closely with someone - particularly in 80hour crunch time weeks - you don’t end up dealing with their public persona, but with a version of them much closer to their "personal life". So day to day your experience with your co-workers is very personal, and frequently in an unprofessional mode.

I think that when making choices about who I will work with, I'll lean heavily on what I know about them personally, and treat their public persona with a great deal of distrust.

Here is the thing, you can't go to the Supreme Court with some random request to rule on a principle they need to do that in the context of an argument. But the Supreme court's decision can be narrow or broad. And the argument limits how broadly it can be applied.

If you look at another decision, Roe vs Wade, the controversial abortion decision. That was based on a right to privacy between you and your doctor. Because it was based on the right to privacy, and not some definition of when life begins or doesn't begin, or when a person is or isn't a person, it has been very durable at being applied against a number of other laws that would seek to overturn it. even laws that would ban the 'day after' pill.

So to be a good decision, and one that will put this issue to rest for a while, the contested law needs to be written in a way that allows for a broad, structural, decision. One where the Supreme court can say on principle the constitution gives equal protection under the law and any attempt to deny those protections or rights based on sexual orientation is invalid.

Prop 8 was reasonably well written as a foil against which this argument could be made. (and was made and has so far succeeded as far as the Circuit court is concerned).

My point is that because you saw Brendan's name on a list of names that gave money in support of the proposition, you don't know anything about the context of that donation. And by immediately dismissing the company based on this imperfect understanding you close off opportunities that may be much better than you know. And even if Brendan is morally opposed to same sex marriage, by choosing not to work at the company (which doesn't take the same position) your actions put you at risk of committing the same sins that a hiring manager might make of choosing not to hire someone because of a difference of opinion.

Raganwald's piece was a well written plea to see past the individuals of an organization when those people are not speaking for the organization. Understand that in any group of people there will be some with whom you disagree. But if the mission of the group is true, perhaps your contribution can help it to succeed, and in so doing you may also be able to change the opinions a few of your co-workers to something less disagreeable.

This is a really weird, silly rationalization. Don't you think he would have said something to this effect when this blew up on Twitter? You think he's just sitting there on his hands going "Jeez, I wish there was something I could do to convince people that I'm not actually a horrible bigot, but instead have complex and inscrutable plans for a massive Supreme Court precedent in five years. Oh well!"

> by choosing not to work at the company (which doesn't take the same position) your actions put you at risk of committing the same sins that a hiring manager might make of choosing not to hire someone because of a difference of opinion.

You can't seriously be asserting that it's a "sin" for me to consider not working for someone who doesn't respect my or my peers' rights, let alone one on equal footing to employment discrimination. That's complete and utter bullshit. It's my right to vote with my feet, just as much as it would be a bigot's right to not work for me.

The guy is a bigot. He worked to ensure that a class of people had fewer rights than other classes of people. If that doesn't make you a bigot, I don't know what does.

I'm disappointed that you wasted our time with that completely ridiculous argument. That said, thanks for letting me know that if I ever take a morally abhorrent position on something, you'll be there to say I'm a great guy, and that even if I'm not, people should still work for me.

(though even in that world, I think it's baffling that you managed to attack people who don't want to work for a bigot as being somehow bigoted...)

There's every chance that donating $8,000 to a cause was not about Gay Anything, and he was supporting a cause of someone he wanted to butter up / chat with / get into the table with.

Trust me: the "tipping culture" goes way beyond DC & lobbyists.

Corruption: for when donating to a cause to get favor gets a LGBT response. Shitty PR, and probably deserves it for currying favor with <subject X> but really not that uncommon.

Boo! Politics is dirty; reeeeal dirty.

I agree that any group of people will have some that disagree, but he is the CTO. That changes things.

Your comparison between not choosing to work at a company and refusing to hire somebody is invalid. It is perfectly okay for Brendan Eich to choose not to work for a company with a gay CEO. Not hiring somebody is a completely different matter. The next thing is that Brandan Eich is not some random guy at Mozilla. As the CTO he has a lot of power, and influence over company culture. If you are gay (and also if you aren't) then it's entirely reasonable to take this into consideration, since this might cause you a lot of grief. For example, perhaps it would be wise to ask gay people who are working at Mozilla for their experience. Also, your good work at Mozilla would be increasing the influence and/or wealth of the CTO, which would be partially going to these these causes. It all depends on how much this will influence you within the company. Will there be lots of gay jokes? Will it be taken into consideration later in whether to fire you or not? These things are hard to find out, and there are plenty of companies that are a safe bet in this respect.

To be perfectly clear, I also think it would be wrong to fire anybody for being for prop 8, just like it's wrong to fire somebody for being against prop 8 (as long as the political beliefs stay outside the workplace).

First, I don't know if Brendan is pro-Gay, anti-Gay or agnostic. My assertion is that with one data point (a contribution to the prop 208 campaign) is, by itself insufficient deduce his actual feelings.

My exposition on the strategy of passing it in order to change the country was not in a vacuum. Several people, myself included, who very much support a bias-blind right to marriage, agreed that adjudicating the issue would be both faster and more effective than legislating it. Prop 208 needed to pass in order for that to happen. And yes, there were people who argued in favor of more legislative work. But the history of this issue inside of California looked to be a predictor of a national debate on the issue. "fixing" it in one state is necessary but insufficient to ensure the rights of the married. Had Brendan been a member of that group I could have represented his actual position, but since he was not, I can only share that folks on the list of donors included people opposed to the concept of a marriage ban but with a strategy of getting it adjudicated and settled. The argument was made and rebutted that supporting it might make it the law of the land when we opposed it, the counter argument is that it is either constitutional or it isn't. If it is constitutional then our modest group did not have the financial resources to counter a very vocal and well funded religious constituency so opposing it might kill it for now but it would keep coming back again and again. If it is not constitutional then by getting it on the books now, we start the clock on the adjudication process sooner rather than later, and can sponsor the prosecution effort to make that case. At the end of the day one has to know the shape of the problem and where to fix it, until prop 208 started winding its way up to the Supreme Court there was no definitive statement on if the problem could be fought that way or not.

The second point was that making a job choice based on the politics of the people you may or may not work with means you may miss out on some great opportunities. One of the reasons given for anti-discrimination hiring practices is that discrimination isn't about the quality of the work someone can do, and by discriminating you miss out on quality workers you would hire in a non-discriminatory way. Granted it's not the primary reason, or even a major reason, but it's a reason to avoid your personal biases when hiring that can benefit you personally. That also applies to people looking at a company, they can choose not to work for a company because their future manager has a point of view or a race or a gender the potential employee finds distasteful, but if they let those tendencies rule their choices they miss out on things which could be really really good.

An example of that was when I was walking around 'career' day at USC with a fellow engineering student talking to various company recruiters. My companion was adamant about not working for any company where women were put in management roles over engineers. Their reasoning was that women didn't understand engineering and so would be unable to manage well. (this in spite of having women classmates who were excellent engineers!) He could have been trolling, I didn't really know him well enough to say. But I thought at the time that was really sad.

So my points were simply that one data point is a weak place to start drawing conclusions, and writing off a company because of one employee risks robbing you of some excellent experience.

I suspect too many words got in the way of the point.

I don't mean to reply to this too pithily, but some pith kind of fits here:

When you hear hoofbeats, assume horses, not zebras.

Point 2: You directly stated that not wanting to work for bigots is the same as employment discrimination. That's a moronic argument. If you think your most exciting possible opportunity is to go work for a homophobic bigot, then go ahead, nobody is stopping you, but don't piss on people who have more than one opportunity.

too many words got in the way of the point

No. You just have an incredibly naive position... and you're being incredibly rude to those who disagree with utterly insane positions.

It's disgusting that you compare not wanting to work for a woman to not wanting to work for a bigoted asshole.

I can't even begin to fathom what made you think that was a reasonable argument to make. But I assume whatever broken made you think that was okay is also what keeps you from realizing that it was a stupid point...

no need for further replies, at this point we understand that you're an idiotic blowhard who supports bigotry, and insults those who don't.

Your first (big) paragraph I do not follow. You did not give any justification for why it's better to get the issue into the Supreme Court ASAP while suffering the disadvantages I mentioned, rather than opposing the ban. The Supreme Court does not just take into consideration the constitutionality in some fixed legal sense. They have the freedom to interpret laws, and they do so according to the current sentiment. Just read the court transcripts and you'll see this. For example they constantly debate whether same-sex marriage will be beneficial to society or not. Since you did not reply to any of the arguments I made, I'll repeat one of them: if there would be a next ban (perhaps in a different state) that is successful, then that will go to the Supreme Court. This is no worse than prop 8 going to the Supreme Court, in fact it's better for the reasons I outlined previously. Do you think that people who are against marriage equality are doing themselves a disservice by donating to anti-marriage equality groups? I really do not understand this, but I'd love to be convinced otherwise by logical arguments.

I certainly agree with the next paragraph where you say that it would be stupid to let a difference in political belief heavily influence your job choice. However, insofar as these differences have practical effects on your treatment, chances of being fired, and mental well-being (it's bad for your mental well-being to be in the closet at work or anywhere else), it is smart to take such things into account.

It's a perfectly rational, and intelligent decision to avoid working at a job where you report to a bigot whose opinions are directly opposed to your own.

He was willing to spend hard-earned money to deprive people of legal rights. What on earth would make you think it's smart to trust him to be fair and even-handed in the workplace?

In a perfect world he'd only be a horrible bigot at home, but in the real world that's unlikely.

There are plenty of jobs elsewhere. Jobs that don't involve reporting to a bigot.

If you are a professional, you should be ready to work with anyone, not just the people who agree with you.

Your view is not objectively correct. To insist otherwise is fascism.

And yes, they do exist. They are actually a pest in certain forums. 4chan has a board which functions essentially as a ghetto for them and other miscellaneous right wingers, so that they won't be screwing up, say, the science or the sports boards with white supremacist spiel.

Sure, some opinions and politics are clearly subjective, however many others are clearly discrimination and bigotry. Anyone is free to spout their bigotry all they want, but I won't think any less of anyone who does not want to work for bigots or with them or even associate with them in any way. And I definitely won't blame any employeer who feels people like this reflect badly on their company and their culture.

There are few any large set of people actually agree on

gun control, prayer in schools/government, searches by the government/TSA/whatever

There is a lot of subjective disagreement over exactly what liberties exist, and their limits.

As the parent said, if you really think you have an objectively correct view of what civil liberties are, and other folks are just wrong, ....

To put it more drastically, just because someone dares to stand up to their oppressors, they are not immediately oppressing anyone themselves.

it's safe to say I'm not sure what you mean.

certainly if someone says 'we spend 20% of federal outlays on welfare' and I say 'no, it's about half that', one or both, are objectively wrong.

anyway, what do you mean?

Would you call that prospective employee a fascist?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAZOZ5hNN9g

Feel differently about it now?

I can't think of a better way to illustrate my point about walking a mile in someone else's shoes!

Are all of the people who changed their minds over the last 10-15 years suddenly better people who are now worthy of your association?

How many people woke up one day and said, "wow I was wrong. Gay marriage should be allowed, and I am truly repentant for holding such an evil belief", versus the people who are just parroting what they think they should say.

Did these people change their minds or is that people who are pro gay marriage have stepped up the attacks on those who are anti-gay marriage (calling them bigots etc...), so that anti-gay marriage-ites are afraid to publicly express their beliefs?

Let's pretend I agree with Prop 8 (I don't, with the exception of what ChuckMcM mentioned below). Clearly you feel strongly about it, enough to avoid a company on the sole basis there is a leader there who disagrees with you, someone you may or may not work directly for or with on a daily basis. If I were a hard-line conservative and I knew that about you, I would be terrified to work for you. I have no idea what you might if you come across a blog post, a random tweet, or something else after we've been working together. Surely if you're willing to write off an entire company due to a single $1,000 donation (the line of reasoning goes..), you might be willing to fire me over a mundane tweet about a controversial issue you feel strongly about. This is to say nothing of the huge nebulous area about if I apply for a job working directly for you and we both know we are at polar political extremes.

Ideally, there would be a clear demarcation between public/professional lives and personal lives. I don't care what my coworkers believe in, vote for, or donate to. I hope the same respect is afforded to me.

What if you never knew of Brendan's views during your entire tenure at Mozilla? This is a situation I believe you have already experienced because it is so likely.

Attitudes like yours are why things like donations to political causes should be private.

But yeah, one of their employees happens to hold personal beliefs you disagree with. That means he should be fired regardless of job performance? How does that make any sense? It's one thing to say that he directly took actions to make a workplace unsafe, or has openly said harmful, awful things in public. But neither of those things are true of Brendan Eich. An employer has no more right to fire someone for being anti-gay marriage than it does to fire them for being pro-gay marriage. And that's a good thing, because there are plenty of staunchly conservative employers out there that would love to force all their employees to support their own pet political agendas.

Holding personal beliefs and acting on personal beliefs are two different things entirely. In my arrogant opinion, being anti marriage equality should be held in the same level of disrepute as someone being against racial equality or similar.

You're free to hate whatever you want, but when you give money to organizations that cause people to kill themselves, you've directly supported that action. Some things I can see a company wanting no part of.

I don't personally believe Prop 8 was a good thing, but maybe he had compelling reasons to donate. You won't know unless you ask him. I don't particularly care what his reasons were, because it's HIS MONEY.

I mean, if you think somehow boycotting Mozilla and trashing them in public will help advance some social cause you believe in, then go for it. I bet if you looked through the donations made by every Google employee you'd find hundreds, if not thousands of them donated to the campaign for Prop 8. Same goes for Apple, and Microsoft, and pretty much any big company - even in the valley.

Being able to ignore political disagreements - even big ones - in favor of making progress in some other field is the mark of being an adult, and it's what our civilization is built on. If we refused to have contact with people who didn't exactly conform to our worldviews, and refused to cooperate with them, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING would get done in this country. You need only look at the utter impotence of the US Senate and House to see an example of this in action.

Do you think the world would have benefited if Alan Turing had refused to work with the research establishment because some of his colleagues were homophobes? Do you think the world would have benefited if Turing had been unable to get work because the establishment considered his personal views unacceptable? That's the kind of behavior you're advocating here: Blatant, unflinching intolerance in both directions.

Woah woah slow the fuck down. That is not what I said. I said that supporting the actions of organization X which does Y with your direct financial contribution means that you have supported Y in some way, however small.

That applies regardless of who you are. It doesn't matter that Mozilla might be a great place to work - it puts him in the same company as the guy that runs Chik-Fil-A. Giving money to a company that does bad things means you have supported those bad things. Doesn't particularly matter whether you like this fact or not, because it's true.

I'd argue even more that it applies when you're the CEO of a large company. $hate_organization can now legitimately say that this Mozilla guy supports them. Great press right!?

>I mean, if you think somehow boycotting Mozilla and trashing them in public will help advance some social cause you believe in, then go for it.

Which I also didn't say or advocate.

>That's the kind of behavior you're advocating here: Blatant, unflinching intolerance in both directions.

Which.. I also didn't say or advocate.

Please read what I actually said and not what you want me to have said. I didn't advocate boycotting Mozilla, and I drew no conclusions other than "This is uncool, and being related to the company in such a position now drags their name into it, and it makes perfect logical sense that a company may choose to distance themselves from a person in such a case"

Roughly half of your post is a damn lie.

And another thing, if you don't think that being told by evangelicals and conservatives and other hate groups that you are wrong and terrible and evil all the time doesn't contribute to suicide, you're out of your damn mind. I can't tell you exactly what message at what time might cause someone to snap, but I can very well say that every one contributes somehow.

Yes, it is. Look up Prop 8 supporter commercials. Brendan Eich paid for those.

Get a clue. Politics in the US are absolutely not black and white. Sometimes you ally with groups you disagree with to advance a cause you agree with; sometimes you support an organization because the good it does outweighs the bad it does. The EFF isn't perfect, the ACLU isn't perfect, Planned Parenthood isn't perfect, etc etc etc.

P.S. It's Brendan's money to do with as he pleases, not yours. Mozilla is a non-profit - his salary doesn't contain a cent of your money.

If I work for a company that takes a cavalier approach to firing, I'm putting my career at risk. But as long as there aren't other character issues, I don't think a conservative CTO is damning. They might not even know; it's not really their job not to hire Republicans.

(I can't believe I am, sort of, defending Republicans here.)

Promoting hatred and discrimination towards any group that is part of your (potential) employees and their friends and families would be good reason to fire someone as far as I'm concerned.

Please - if you literally consider the worlds Catholic and Muslim population (to cite two large religious populations nearly uniformly opposed to your position) as possessing beliefs so repellent that you wouldn't work at a company that employed one... then I pity your intolerance for the weird and wacky mosaic that is humanity.

I've got plenty of weird and ridiculous beliefs of my own. And sometimes I want to respond to the people I disagree with by identifying them as evil or stupid. Frequently I discover that from their context - the values they were raised with, their own life experiences - their positions are more reasonable than I want to give them credit for. The socialists who grew up immersed in boomer politics, the anarchist who saw his friends beaten up by the cops... The anti-abortion activist who can't believe anyone would kill a baby... and yes the gay friends who can't believe someone doesn't want them to be able to marry the person they love. All people.

By all means do your political thing and fight for what you believe in. But hating and smearing anybody who doesn't agree with you doesn't make me sympathetic to your cause.

Lots of beliefs ruin lives. I can show you conservatives who fervently believe that having high taxes on high income earners would destroy the country, because Henry Ford types would then find it more attractive to take a 40 hour a week management job at an established corporation than to spend 100 hours a week to create a new industry, and the lack of anyone selling affordable transportation would then condemn anyone not born within walking distance of gainful employment opportunities to a life of abject poverty (and so on for each generation's major innovations). There are serious scientists who argue that not imposing a significant carbon tax right now will soon result in irreparable damage to the planet and widespread death, destruction and famine. Then there are people who argue the opposite of these things -- that not imposing serious taxes on the rich will lead to insufferable inequality, that the increase in energy costs that would come from any serious effort to address climate change will be extremely regressive and cause real immediate harm to those living in poverty, etc.

Take any issue and you'll find two sides to it. You can believe that your side is right, but the other side believes that their side is right. One of you has to be wrong, but that doesn't mean either of you is evil. Everybody is wrong sometimes.

You're sure that it isn't you who is wrong in this specific case because it affects you individually. If you were wrong about this then the result would be to your detriment. But that doesn't prove that you're right -- or that you're wrong. It only proves that you have a stake in the outcome, which (because you're human) makes you want to paint those who disagree with the position you take as the enemy. But they're not evil. They just disagree with you on an issue that personally affects you.

You can't just say "umm but no one is evil and everyone disagrees and everyone ruins someone else's life some way or another so what the heck? Let's just do whatever?" That leads nowhere.

>Then, when all arguments are done, it is up to the judge to say who is right and who is wrong.

The judge is just a lawyer in a robe. The judge can be just as wrong as anyone else. (See e.g. Dred Scott.) And the judge doesn't get the final say anyway, we do. We The People get to appoint different judges or pass new laws or amend the constitution. So we have to decide somehow which of you is right or wrong. Isn't it better to treat one another as people acting in good faith and have a debate and try to convince each other than to wage a holy war where each side dismisses the other as a immoral and proceeds to partisan political maneuvering rather than mutual understanding?

I think you really got something backwards here if you think that oppressed minorities are the ones doing the bullying here.

There's a lot to unpack here, and I disagree with more than this one part of your comment, but I want to be absolutely clear on this. Catholics are not "nearly uniformly opposed" to SSM. As of 2012, a slim majority (around 52%) of American Catholics support SSM (Pew Research poll). The pope does not speak for all, or even most Catholics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_and_Roman_Catholi...

You probably wouldn't object to calling a racist person a bigot. It is my opinion that just because there are more (open, visible) homophobes than (open, visible) racists doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to call it what it is. Would it have been inappropriate in 1978, the year that the Mormon church finally rescinded their policy of not allowing black people to be ordained, to call Mormon racists out as bigots? I feel that it would not.

[0] Just to be clear: I'm saying if you have that absolutist view you are much more likely to be fundamentally religious, and an order of magnitude more likely to be opposed to gay marriage.

I found Prop 8 utterly repulsive, but I also dislike the precedent it sets to fire someone over protected political activity (campaign donations).

Not at all (AT ALL) defending Prop 8 here, but where do you draw the line in cutting these people out of your life? Take the issue of abortion, which is easier to see that there are no easy answers. You either believe that abortion is MURDER or stopping abortion curtails PERSONAL LIBERTY for all women. Either way, people are defending a highly moral position and you can argue against their conclusions but you should at least try to respect their personal opinion, especially if they afford you that same respect.

I look at the new Lincoln movie and that makes a lot of these points for me. Everyone is entitled to shun bigots and work only with people they agree with, but there is an opportunity to improve things for everyone by sitting down at the same table with people we disagree with rather than vilifying their existence.

The abortion debate is basically a balancing act between two undesirable outcomes. No one likes abortions, but no one (by simple definition) wants unwanted children, either. Choosing either outcome is very much a moral gray area; how do you know you've made the correct decision? I don't think anyone has the right to make that decision for someone else, but I completely understand where the other side is coming from.

On the other hand, there is no such balancing act in same sex marriage. It is an entirely positive, beneficial expression of love between two individuals. There is no choosing a lesser evil, it's simply a good thing. Why would any reasonable person choose to prevent a good thing for absolutely no reason at all? I can't understand the other side at all, because they aren't using any sort of logic to arrive at their conclusion.

Frankly, very few issues these days are as stark right-and-wrong as same sex marriage is. I think it's entirely reasonable to shun and openly shame homophobes in 2013. Perhaps you have the patience to sit down and try to talk with these lunatics, but I don't have that kind of patience. Just like racists, homophobes deserve nothing but derision, and just like slavers, they deserve to ultimately be nothing more than a chapter in a civil rights history text. I won't have them in my life, and I am missing nothing by their exclusion.

"Frankly, very few issues these days are as stark right-and-wrong as same sex marriage is"... for coldpie.

It is entirely possible that future generations will look back on the debate and just laugh at it as we laugh at people who used to burn witches. You will certainly find people today who would think it was disgusting and offensive to even think of supporting gay marriage and these people have some considerable % of the money and votes so you can't really dismiss them.

So the purpose should not be to enforce views, but to enforce certain actions. So you can be as racist as you want , but you can't refuse somebody a job on the basis of race.

If you believe in a religion that is against gay sex, gay marriage can appear to co-opt your religious construct of marriage, and change the definition of what marriage is and what is supposed to represent in a religious context. Obviously the legal definition is different than whatever random religion's definition, but that can be a too subtle distinction for many voters.

"Derision" might be more satisfying than educating these people, but remember we are talking about more than HALF of California right now. As Dave Chappelle says, the worst thing you can do is call someone crazy - it's dismissive. It's important to remember that MOST people who are racist or homophobic not because of "ignorance" but because it's what they were taught by those around them growing up. Believing in the inherent goodness of people is what has allowed us to go from a deeply racist society (as recently as the 70s-80s) to having a black president. Many older people WHO WERE RAISED RACIST were able to be educated and turn the tide on racism over the course of a few decades. I find that incredibly encouraging and allows for you to separate deeply negative beliefs from the people that currently hold them.

Then even if you accept that to deny abortion is to curtail women's liberty, and this is bad, so that preventing abortion is not an unmitigated good...

And even if you accept that allowing gay marriage is an unmitigated good...

Then it still seems to me like abortion is a much more pressing issue than gay marriage. It's a trade-off, but that doesn't mean the answer isn't obvious, and it doesn't mean that a good thing which isn't a trade-off will necessarily be more valuable.

(There are three "if you believe..." statements in this post. I want to make it clear that I'm not endorsing or disendorsing any of those beliefs.)

The same sex marriage debate is nowhere near as urgent or serious as the abortion debate.

The same can be said for same-sex marriage and related issues (polygamy, civil unions for widows/widowers who don't want to remarry, the imposition of religious definitions on secular society OR secular definitions on religion, and so on.) Can you give me a good reason why the benefits attached to marriage should be attached to family A but not family B? Does your reasoning hold up when introducing family C into the mix? What if one family doesn't want to use the term "marriage" but another does?

Take my family: I live with my wife, my son, my sister, and her son. I'm responsible for both children during the normal work day. It seems reasonable that this family arrangement should allow us certain benefits which are presently tied to marriage, like access to my nephew's school records and being able to schedule medical appointments for him.

As the rest of your comment demonstrates, if you choose certain terminology, you can make complex issues appear to have obvious and simple solutions. The question of how to legally define family relationships deserves far more care than it's usually given.

The fact is that real people that would have existed now don't (50 million Americans since Roe v. Wade). That may not be murder, but it is certainly something akin. Filling the language with euphemisms doesn't change the reality.

Keep in mind, I'm not even taking a position here. I'm just letting you know what the fuss is about.

> I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it

-- Attributed to Voltaire.

IMO, that perspective is one of the keystones of our culture, and not to be thrown away lightly.

This isn't surprising, but context is often lost with that quote. Think about it for a second, how can you advocate that you would defend one's freedom to limit one's freedom?

Leaving wrong ideas on display is a necessary part of democracy, because it encourages the refutations to be regularly publicized as well. It requires people to understand why an idea is wrong, rather than merely being told that it is and admonished never to speak of it again.

If you don't allow people who are wrong to be wrong in public, they will continue to be wrong in private where no one is there to correct them.

You're confusing the quotation with the referent. (Or at least making a similar class of mistake.)

I won't defend your freedom to limit my freedom, but I will defend your freedom to say that my freedom should be limited. (Even if doing that makes it more likely that my freedom will in fact be limited.)

I'm sure I'll draw a line somewhere, but so far I can't think of anyone whose speech I find sufficiently scary that I want them silenced.

Otherwise we wind up embedding our morals onto their life.

This key issue isn't whether or not things are changing (they are) or whether it's good or bad (that's debatable).

The key issue is who gets to decide.

If I want to tell the world a million things about myself, that's my business. But if someone else wants to tell the world things about me (especially if they know it's personal or private), then that's definitely not cool.

It's not that much different for institutions, companies, or any group in general. None of us should be surprised at the reaction of another whose digital cherry we popped on-line.

This reminds me of the old tale about the man with a gossiping problem who went to a sage for advice. The sage told him to slice open a feather-filled pillow, shake it outside his house, then come back tomorrow. The next day the man asked the sage what to do about his gossip problem. The sage said, "Go gather those feathers."

I'm reminded of the Friends episode where Ross sleeps with the copy girl.

(ie. you can be less transparent by spending your time doing rather than talking.)

The Microsoft guy was their Creative Director for Xbox Studios, and he made a comment about his employer's product to a very large audience under the said persona.

For people like me, the OP, it's fine. We don't have high ranking positions in multinationals. Our opinions are unlikely to matter (but of course there are exceptions) when tweeted, blogged or emailed.

There's a time, place and persona for everything, Adam Orth decidedly chose the worst of the three to use.

>“[That was] just the normal daily back and forth I have with Manveer,” Orth wrote on Twitter later. “Apologies for offending non-cities. I was trolling him personally.”

http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/05/microsoft-studios-creative...

When EVERYTHING we say is attached to a megaphone, people either start to say a lot less or we need to accept a lot more. Personally I want to accept more and not be self-muzzled. I think we have to go in that direction, if no other reason than to accommodate that poor generation that grew up online and have a whole embarrassing history attached to their future lives before anyone understood that their history will no longer fade away from sight.

If one off-the-cuff personal comment can get you fired from a job, does that mean it should prevent you from getting hired too? Ever again? It is an easy decision to fire someone in the 5 seconds of Internet heat that these sorts of things can generate, but we need to consider what that is costing us all.

Thanks to social media, these conversations stop happening between two people and include me on the other side of the globe, too. I like that. I want to hear people's real opinions, get a sense of their real personality, from the internet.

Firing someone over their tweets sends a powerful message to everyone to filter what you tweet.

He compared the business decision to engineering limitations (vacuums need AC out of plugs, mobile phones need cell towers in range), and was snide about people objecting to the business decision to have a console that only works when it is connected to the internet.

He wasn't having open an honest dialog, and he wasn't conducting that dialog politely.

I think most folks on HN know of some marginalized political philosophies such as anarchism or libertarianism. These political philosophies aren't popular, but there are polite and intellectually rigorous ways of discussing them, and there are immature and inconsiderate ways of discussing them.

You can discuss marginalized or unpopular things without being an asshole. But Orth was discussing them while being an asshole, and was doing it as a representative of Microsoft.

Sometimes this happens because people force it to happen.

> No.

As much as I agree with the rest of your thesis, you can't argue that a very strong message hasn't been sent to the people making decisions at Microsoft - on this issue, there is an extremely vocal group who disagree with this position. It's dishonest to suggest that this will not have an effect that the people who disagreed with this man will appreciate on the final product design. It will.

This is my criteria for understanding if I actually worth something to my company/organization/team.

How much can I screw up and still be a part of this organization? That is value.

If you are one stupid meaningless tweet away from being fired, you should be looking for another job.

I wouldn't judge a person based solely on their published content, especially those authors that write fiction. But there are works I'll never buy or recommend because I will not knowingly support the actions/attitudes of the author. (SciFi examples: Card, Hubbard, Rosenberg...)

My choice.

Speaking of which ... is there any tool to swipe clean an Gmail inbox? Due to to the recent changes I finally got ready to switch over to my old pop3s. I plan on slowly fading out my Gmal account, so I would start by deleting all the past mails, etc. Any recommended way to do this?

I vaguely remember that when people complained about Facebook, they were forced to ensure that data had been deleted.

http://longnow.org/seminars/02011/jul/25/why-cities-keep-gro...

One difference as to why cities keep going and corporations die:

"Cities tolerate crazy people," West observed, "Companies don't."

Microsoft was willing to cut a Microsoft employee, too.

If you really want to fire someone, swallow your pride and write a decent severance package, but do it same-day. If things are really at that point, then waiting does no good.

Author likely wasn't there, back in the day.

The guys at the game company didn't deserve to be fired. They were engineers having a (somewhat obnoxious) private conversation. Adria Richards did. I can't defend her, because her job was PR and she condescended to a mean-spirited, name-and-shame attack on people she didn't know. (She didn't deserve the onslaught of horrible things said about her, clearly, but she fucked up and deserved to lose her job. I've lost jobs over less.)

I hate the private-sector politician life more than anyone, as one can tell by my railing against it, but if your job is to be the public face of a company, then you choose not to have the same rights to public/private separation as most people, just as elected officials can't let their guards down. So that's why I can't stand with Adria.

That does not apply to people like Aaron Orth. CEOs are public faces; almost everyone else is a public individual. Orth being fired over that tweet is just ridiculous. This is why I hate 99+ percent of corporations. If you turn your back on someone just because he becomes unpopular, then you are of no use to anyone. Corporations with no moral fiber deserve to be dissolved, and their resources reallocated to the public interest. I am all for private enterprise, but only if it stands for something. If you fire someone because an off comment gets negative attention, then you don't have any moral constitution anymore and there's no reason to allow you ("you" being a company; I'm not advocating killing people) to continue to exist.

The moral constitution and all that should be outraged at closed gardens and monopolist providers and assymetry in the market between a couple providers and a lot of consumers blah blah. Its not a "do no evil" company, and firing him is pretty small potatoes compared to their other issues. You're dealing with a criminal organization. Don't bother busting Al Capone for jaywalking, or in this case firing a crony.