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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: 1) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 01 2014, @02:51PM
Apples and oranges. Unless the atheist causes the CEO supports actually seek to deprive rights or privileges from non-atheists, and publicly state that religious people are lesser people somehow, then there's no conflict. By your logic, a devout and outspoken Jewish CEO who donates to pro-Jewish causes (let's assume here these causes are all things here in the USA, for Jews living in the USA, and not involving the state of Israel or its relations with Palestinians) would be suspect because he might discriminate against non-Jewish people. This is rather ridiculous, since to extend this further, any CEO who's affiliated with any religion at all (which is probably most of them, if their religious affiliation mirrors the general population) would be suspected of discrimination against anyone who isn't of that very same religion. Considering just how many Protestant sects there are in the US, in addition to all the other religions and sects of those religions, I don't think I need to explain how ridiculous this idea is.
The fundamental point is whether someone supports a cause which seeks to deny privileges to a group, especially a minority group, for no good reason at all other than "tradition" or "it offends me". If the atheist CEO donated to support a law to remove voting rights from Christians or to place a special tax on them or other religious people, you'd have a point. However, Prop 8 sought specifically to deny a privilege to a minority group, and that's plain and simple bigotry.
As for someone having the right to express opinions, no one has ever challenged this. The First Amendment guarantees this to everyone. The rest of us have the right to criticize people for their opinions, and even to refuse to do business with someone because of their opinion, and even to loudly call for them to be fired for their opinion. When someone is in a prominent, public position such as a tech CEO, their opinion gets far more airtime than some bum on the street, or some cubicle drone. They are the voice of their company. So it's perfectly fine to criticize that company for hiring this bigot, and to call for his firing.
(Score: 2) by wjwlsn on Tuesday April 01 2014, @04:15PM
Alright, so finally you post a reasonable and insightful reply in this thread... so what was the deal with *all* of your other replies?! Honestly, they seemed like rabid "support gay marriage or you're a baby killer" jabs at someone that was politely posting a dissenting viewpoint.
I am a traveler of both time and space. Duh.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 02 2014, @12:07AM
> so what was the deal with *all* of your other replies?
People who understand the issues tend to have little patience for those who both do not understand the issues and insist in arguing out the same tired old cliches. Sometimes those people really are new to the debate, but that's rare. Most of time the people who spout those same old simplistic arguments have heard the rebuttals multiple times before and have simply closed their mind to them and are just rote posting the same old shit.
(Score: 1) by Grishnakh on Wednesday April 02 2014, @12:33PM
Thank you, I couldn't have said it better myself. Whenever someone trots out links to some politically-conservative "pro-families" anti-gay-marriage website with its talking points, I have to assume they're in the camp of people arguing the same tired old cliches.