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Weasel Zippers
4/3/2014
The IRS leaked the National Organization for Marriage’s tax returns to the Human Rights Campaign, who helped oust Brendan Eich.
Via First Things:
…The one thing all sides can agree on is that Eich, on paper, is very well suited to the job. His most notable technical achievement is the invention of the Javascript programming language, and while some of us might sniff at the poor design decisions which made that language notoriously unpleasant to work with, it is incontestable that it forms the underpinnings of much of the modern web. Indeed, a great deal of the complexity in a modern web browser is devoted to interpreting JavaScript as quickly and correctly as possible, and a staggering amount of work has gone into finding ever more baroque methods of optimizing its execution. Eich himself is quite familiar with all of this labor, having served in senior technical roles at Mozilla since he co-founded it. In fact, he has worked there almost continuously for the past sixteen years—an aeon in Silicon Valley—and is widely-known and liked within the company, the non-profit foundation that controls it, and the broader community of programmers around it.
Why, then, the ruckus? Amazingly enough, it is entirely due to the fact that Eich made a $1,000 donation to the campaign urging a ‘yes’ vote on California’s Proposition 8. When this fact first came to light in 2012, after the Internal Revenue Service leaked a copy of the National Organization for Marriage’s 2008 tax return to a gay-advocacy group, Eich, who was then CTO of Mozilla, published a post on his personal blog stating that his donation was not motivated by any sort of animosity towards gays or lesbians, and challenging those who did not believe this to cite any “incident where I displayed hatred, or ever treated someone less than respectfully because of group affinity or individual identity.”… [emphasis Weasel Zippers]
Read the entire article at Weasel Zippers.
Related: May 2013: Traditional Marriage Group to Sue IRS Over Leaks
The National Organization for Marriage, a conservative organization whose confidential records were leaked by the IRS to its left-wing critics, announced on Tuesday it will sue the tax agency for damages. NOM’s 2008 tax return was, according to a press release the group sent out on Tuesday, taken by the IRS and subsequently leaked to its primary political opponent the Human Rights Campaign…
Andrew Sullivan: Brendan Eich’s Ouster as Mozilla CEO ‘Disgusts Me’
…This state of affairs prompted Andrew Sullivan, a gay author and columnist, to essentially accuse gay activists of quashing Eich’s First Amendment rights: “The whole episode disgusts me – as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society,” he wrote. “If we are about intimidating the free speech of others, we are no better than the anti-gay bullies who came before us.”…
Read the whole thing.
Update: Fahrenheit 8
…Andrew Sullivan is worried that “LGBT Movement Becoming Like Religious Right“. I am straining to remember the CEOs that lost their jobs due to their pro-choice or anti-gay-marriage positions.
And I am not talking about politicians, most of whom with national aspirations feel obliged to hew to their party’s line.
Brendan Eich and the New American Totalitarian State
…”If competent individuals can be fired at work for their personal stances on issues that they do not bring into the workplace, then we are no longer in a free and open society…”
An American Nightmare. (video) Glenn Beck reacts.
…On radio this morning, Glenn delivered an impassioned monologue in which he explained why Eich’s resignation represents “an American nightmare.” The only thing Eich is guilty of is exercising his First Amendment right to free speech, and in allowing Eich to resign amidst this faux-outrage, Mozilla has proven itself to be the antithesis of the “diverse” and “inclusive” company it claims to be.
“We say: We hold this truth to be self-evident, that I am an individual, and I can say and believe what I want and so can they. We’ll disagree, but no one, especially the government, can stop that because freedom of speech is one of our deeply held beliefs. And freedom of speech only needs to be protected because it’s hard,” Glenn explained. “People are going to say things that you disagree with… We do it every day, and we don’t lose our jobs over it. But when somebody openly disagrees with same-sex marriage, they often lose everything. The most recent example of this case is the Mozilla Firefox web browser’s CEO Brendan Eich… He donated $1,000 to a political cause – something he believed in – six years ago, and he lost his job over it.”…
