But someone showing a disregard for a group of people should affect them being in charge of a lot of other people, shouldn't it? Someone who holds anti-gay sentiment should be questioned if they're in charge of people who are gay. This isn't someone flipping burgers people are trying to shame out of a job, it's someone who really does hold peoples' futures and salaries and jobs and lives in his hand.
I agree with this. It’s concerning if he’s directly supervising gay employees, and I’m not going to be inclined to be charitable if he makes any company-wide policy changes that are particularly bad for gay employees or gay users. Hiring decisions he makes personally ought to be subject to some scrutiny. But I don’t think that him being somewhere up the chain from a gay employee is much of a problem in itself; that’s a pretty impersonal relationship (I don’t know what Mozilla’s internal structure is; I’m making some assumptions) and it’s entirely possible that he’ll do right by everybody. I think he owes gay employees some assurances, and I think he has a strong obligation to satisfy the concerns of gay employees that he deals with directly. I don’t think this absolutely requires that he recant his position on gay marriage or that he apologize for giving money to the Prop 8 campaign, although certainly that would help. If he botches this badly enough, and especially if there are actual complaints about the way he’s doing his job, a response is justified, but I feel like this has escalated very quickly on the basis of mere suspicion that he’s going to be unfair (to the extent that it’s that rather than just a desire to punish him for past behavior and current belief motivating this).
I'm really uncomfortable with a position that amounts to "it's okay to shun neo-Nazis but not okay to shun active homophobes." All that does is highlight how absurd it is that we're past the tipping point on overt racism (just for the sake of argument, we're obviously not out of the racist woods yet either) but somehow still okay with anti-LGBT nonense.
There's no need to handwring about establishing some Unified Theory Of When It's Okay To Shun. Just take things as they come. In this case, it's obviously wrong to try to strip gay people of their human and civil rights, and we should be discouraging these activities. When another issue comes along, look at that issue on its merits and handle it accordingly. There's no slippery slope, here, just a regular staircase with excellent traction.
It is kind of absurd, but we don’t really have a better way to do things. We like to say that rights shouldn’t be subject to a vote, but, well, they’ve got to be subject to something. We think we get not-terrible results making them subject to a vote of a small number of people who are appointed by other people elected by a broader vote and who are at least supposed to abide by certain norms about what kinds of things can matter to their decision, but it’s still a vote (the functioning of the Supreme Court is also a good example of an institution where we value norms of behavior that aren’t always conducive to us getting what we want). Practicality demands that we treat positions with significant constituencies differently than fringe positions. I’m actually somewhat uncomfortable with the bans on Holocaust denial that exist in some European countries, but that isn’t anywhere near as toxic to free speech as a ban on, say, climate change denial would be.
This isn’t a slippery slope thing in exactly the way you’re thinking. To run with the speech ban example, I don’t think that a ban on climate denialist speech would immediately lead to bans on insufficiently aggressive speech in favor of doing something about climate change, though that might be a concern. My real worry is that this is destructive of a really important norm and that climate denialists and people at least somewhat sympathetic to their position wield significant political power and will have an opportunity to respond. There are all kinds of speech they might ban, and the natural argument against that – that a speech ban is against a really important norm – is going to be really hard to make given that they can point to the first ban and argue that they’re just doing the same sort of thing. But this is going to be taken as an unjustified attack by the other side, who will escalate if given the opportunity. This is how norms of political behavior fall apart. This is how the Supreme Court became so politicized and how the Senate filibuster went to shit. At least one side, and almost always both, continually escalate the conflict because they inaccurately see themselves as responding in kind to some new provocation which was itself perceived by the provocateurs as a response in kind. Hatfields and McCoys. It’s very important to try not to let that happen. It’s important not to sink to what you think is their level.
Getting back to Mozilla, I really want to be able to draw a clear line and argue that it’s wrong to punish people because you don’t like their politics. Just sticking to gay marriage, there’s a pretty big evangelical Christian aid organization called World Vision International. They do some good work, though I'm not terribly familiar with them and I'm sure there are things to criticize. They’ve also got policies that require employees to live according to a particular code, which includes chastity outside of marriage. But the charity’s president is encouragingly concerned with helping the poor rather than taking a stand against whatever social ill is popular. Last week, World Vision announced that they’d leave it up to individual churches to sort out whether or not gay marriages are legit and that they wouldn’t have a policy against hiring gay people in relationships as long as they were married. Naturally, this pissed off a bunch of their donors. World Vision reversed that decision just a day later, and it sounds like they’d already lost sponsors for 2000 children (about $1m/year).
This kind of thing happens all the time. In the face of it, I want to be able to argue that it’s wrong to punish an organization for being insufficiently anti-gay in a way that has nothing to do with its core mission not just because being ant-gay is wrong (I’m happy to argue that, but if people could be convinced of that then none of the rest of this would be an issue) but also because you should be able to tolerate differences of political opinion in the pursuit of desirable ends. I want strong norms to stand against this. Even if people think that homosexuality is an abomination and that a supposedly Christian organization not taking a stand against gay marriage is an affront to God, if they’re helping children they’re helping children. They can keep arguing against gay marriage, but that shouldn’t have anything to do with their willingness to work with people who disagree with them in order to do good in the world. I’d find it pretty hard to argue that these people have done anything procedurally wrong in bullying World Vision back into not letting its gay employees have public relationships if it’s okay to similarly punish someone for giving just $1000 to an anti- gay marriage campaign.
I don't see where the Koch brothers have crossed some line that makes them condemnable but not him. They are doing the same thing. To a much larger degree, but not qualitatively different as far as I can tell.
I think the difference in degree is sufficient to render it a difference in kind. In some sense the difference between dropping a 5 gram weight on your head and dropping a 500 kg weight on your head is also just a matter of degree. I don’t think allowing people to give $1000 to political campaigns is horribly destructive of political equality. It’s not ideal given how unequal we are as a society - obviously it disadvantages poor people – but this is the sort of thing that’s well within the normal bounds of political engagement. It’s reasonably feasible for the typical person to contribute a similar amount to a cause they care about, either by giving directly or by volunteering. And it’s valuable for people to have opportunities to participate in politics. Meanwhile, the Koch brothers wield influence far beyond what almost anyone else can hope to, purely by virtue of the fact that they are very rich. Their aim is to essentially control policy on issues they care about, regardless of the other interests at stake.
Practically, it’s important that no one is out there railing against $1000 donations but almost everybody has a problem with big money in politics. People do care about this distinction.
