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from the i-guess-they'll-unfriend-mozilla dept.
The controversy around Mozilla's new CEO Brendan Eich continues. Eich made a personal $1000 donation to California's Yes on Proposition 8 campaign in 2008. Now, dating site OkCupid has started redirecting Firefox users to a page explaining Eich's views against marriage equality, and asking users to switch to IE, Chrome, or Opera.
If individuals like Mr. Eich had their way, then roughly 8% of the relationships we've worked so hard to bring about would be illegal. Equality for gay relationships is personally important to many of us here at OkCupid. But it's professionally important to the entire company. OkCupid is for creating love. Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure.
Visitors are then provided links to alternative browsers, or they can continue to the site by clicking a hyperlink at the bottom of the page.
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Tuesday April 01 2014, @08:30AM
If the issue of LGBT equal rights didn't impact the Mozilla foundation, then maybe I'd agree that his personal views "shouldn't have any bearing on his ability to do a good job."
However, I doubt this is the case I'm willing to believe that Mozilla has LGBT employees. I'd be willing to bet that some of them want to (or will eventually want to) get married. I'd expect they'd want to receive equal benefits to their counterparts. I'd expect they'd want to be free from harrassment in the workplace. I expect they'd not want to feel like they'd be unwelcome to talk about their relationships in the workplace, unlike their colleagues. I'd expect LGBT engineers considering employment would want to feel welcome.
The CEO has a lot of power in a company, and both explicit decision making powers (benefits) and implicit decision making powers (what's tolerated/not in the workplace). The CEO's personal views on topics like this are hardly irrelevant. It would similarly be relevant if someone in a CEO position publicly opposed an "equal pay for women" law, was against the Family and Medical Leave act, etc. Those views matter.
Do I know the details of Brendan Eich's personal views on LGBT equality? Nope. Do I know that he'll act on them in a professional capacity? Nope. Would it be relevant if he did? You betcha.
His personal views might be much more nuanced than we can tell from one donation. He might separate his personal beliefs from his professional actions. He might not. But (IMO) he has some reasonable 'splaining to do to the people who work for him. People who have some reasonable fears about how they'll be treated in his company.