Free speech vs. Equality – Brown Pundits

America stands for both but as the article notes very difficult compromises need to be made.
Of course you can seek protection under the (broad) umbrella of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Still courts have now been consistently delivering the message that anti-gay viewpoints will lose out (however anti-women measures such as banning of aborti-facients will probably be still OK).

That said some one must feel the pain of being a true-blue social conservative in Silicon valley. The moment you dare to come out of YOUR closet (aka exercise your free-speech rights) the Hounds of the Bay-ville will be after you. They will tear out your heart out and eat it (with some fava beans and a nice glass of chianti). What a pity. But then again it must have been glorious for Brendan Eich to die for his belief that gays should not get married. All movements need (and feed on) martyrs, so this should be a red-letter day for the anti gay-rights cause.

Mozilla,
the company behind the popular Firefox web browser, on Friday announced
that their controversial CEO Brendan Eich is resigning.

Eich
has been under fire for his views on gay marriage and gay rights. He
reportedly donated $1,000 to an anti-gay organization that lobbied for
ban on same-sex marriages in California in 2008.

When Eich
became Mozilla CEO on March 24, a controversy started over his views on
same-sex marriage. Many Mozilla employees took to Twitter to register
their displeasure at Eich’s views. A few days ago, Ok Cupid, a dating
website, said that it would be asking its users to change their web
browser if they were using Firefox because of Eich’s position on
same-sex marriage.

The resignation comes a day after Eich said that he would not resign for his personal beliefs.

In a blog post, executive chairwoman at Mozilla Mitchell Baker, wrote,
“Brendan Eich has chosen to step down from his role as CEO. He’s made
this decision for Mozilla and our community … Mozilla believes both in
equality and freedom of speech. Equality is necessary for meaningful
speech. And you need free speech to fight for equality. Figuring out how
to stand for both at the same time can be hard.”
..
regards

Published by

Brown Pundits Archive

Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary. Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin. View all posts by Brown Pundits Archive