Conor Friedersdorf’s complaints about Brendan Eich’s forced resignation from Mozilla are more coherent than Andrew Sullivan’s, but he still misses the point. His argument seems to be that perfectly reasonable people oppose gay marriage both now and in the past, and they shouldn’t be defined as bigots unworthy of employment.
That makes sense, but it has nothing to do with what actually happened. Mozilla hired a CEO who didn’t merely oppose gay marriage but donated $1,000 to keep it illegal. Some people said that they wouldn’t use Firefox if the CEO didn’t renounce his support for Proposition 8. He probably didn’t need to do that to keep his job. He probably just needed to handle the blow-up with more empathy. But, whatever, he wasn’t fired. He resigned.
This is supposed to be some kind of illiberal travesty, but it isn’t. If the CEO of a company wants to make donations to hot button political causes then they should expect that a segment of the population is going to refuse to do business with their company. It’s reasonable for a board of directors to consider the political activism of candidates for CEO if that activism is likely to result in boycotts and negative publicity.
There is nothing illiberal about refusing to do business with people who you think are morally repugnant. The only free speech issue here is the people’s freedom to tell everyone about a CEO’s political contributions.
It’s really a battle to define opposition to gay equality as outside the mainstream and as morally reprehensible. If you are on the wrong side of that battle then you probably aren’t enjoying losing this battle. But it has nothing to do with the First Amendment or free speech.
