There was no forcing. People voluntarily expressed their desire.
* Some people no longer wanted to work at Firefox if he was their lead
* Some people no longer wanted to use Firefox if he was their lead
Now, the organization can easily take any position here. They could say "Yeah, I guess you can't work here, employees who can't work with Brendan Eich. And yes, I guess you have to stop using Firefox, users who can't use product led by Brendan Eich" or they could say "Brendan, looks like you leave or we lose these people" or anywhere in the middle.
This is just people freely expressing their views and advertising how they will act. It is pure liberty and I love it for that.
Because they are supposed to lead those very employees. If you are going to square off over something like this in the workplace then it will - obviously - impact your ability to do your job.
How could he support gay marriage without negatively impacting his ability to lead his devoutly conservative employees?
I’m in favor of equality in marriage and broadly the rights of individuals to live true to themselves and free from discrimination, but if a divisive topic is 50/50, it’s hard to see how supporting one side or the other wouldn’t alienate some portion of your employee base.
Obviously, never taking a stance on any issue is the most middle of the road, career-lengthening tactic to take, but that’s not exactly the world I want to live in either. I don’t have to (and do not) agree 100% with my CEO’s political views; that doesn’t impact his ability to lead nor my ability to execute.
>How could he support gay marriage without negatively impacting his ability to lead his devoutly conservative employees?
There’s no point in making this argument. Mozilla is company headquartered in San Francisco - and AFAIK, has the most “out” LGBTQ employees I can remember of most tech companies.
Just like I wouldn’t be surprised if Mitt Romney got raked over hot coals for not supporting a RBG replacement, I’m also not surprised Eich got kicked out for not supporting gay marriage. It was incredibly deaf on his part.
I think this is a fallacy: either way you're making someone unhappy. It's fundamentally a flawed argument: giving rights to someone it's not taking them away from someone else.
You're not making the "50%" of the people that are conservative unhappy. You are impacting a minority of those, the ones who can't live with the fact that somewhere there is a married same sex couple.
On the other hand you're telling the other 50% that they do not deserve a right. All of them.
So - that "some portion" it's not the same in size.
<rant>And if you ask me, which I admit: you didn't, the portion that believes that they should be able to deny other people a right they benefit from, can pack up an go. The inability of emphasizing with others would make them horrible software designers and developers.</rant>
> On the other hand you're telling the other 50% that they do not deserve a right. All of them.
This sounds compelling, but what happens when you apply it to other issues? What will you say to the "taxation is theft" camp when they demand the right to the fruits of their labor and don't want them to be used to wage unnecessary wars?
Or are you fine with capitalists firing anyone who advocates for taxes to continue to exist?
Are you seriously equating slavery (human right) with voting on definition of marriage (social construct)? Do you think being against brothers marrying their sisters also dead wrong?
> Human rights don't depend on how many people support them.
This is _absolutely_ true! However, the con 50% in this argument argued that "marriage as the union of M persons who X each other" (the pro side doesn't agree on what `M` and `X` should be) isn't a human right, but that "marriage as the union of two persons who are of the kind of persons that can procreate with each other" is. Only one side can be right as to what the basic human right is.
Marriage is a state sponsored contractual arrangement between two natural persons. It has nothing to do with procreation, gender or sexuality in terms of its state sponsored advantages.
Reference to the historical record shows that marriage in feudal times was a merger of families and was not practiced by those without economic power to protect.
My personal belief is that if any number of people wish to form a communal partnership for mutual benefit, they should be free to do so.
The government has chosen one particular arrangement, that of two individuals, and has pre-defined contractual rules regarding the mutual benefits, the protection of assets and of the results of pregnancy (ie children, inheritance etc) of either party to the contract.
It also imposes responsibilities on parties to that contract, in particular their responsibilities for those children.
Other laws, in particular, basic law, says that natural persons are, to quote one popular document, "are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights". That same basic law embodies the encapsulation of additional axioms, one of which is that "all people are equal under the law".
All of the rest of the "marriage debate" is irrelevant to the underlying legal situation.
And there we come down to the root of the issue - you define marriage as "a state-sponsored contractual arrangement between (at the moment) two natural persons". I define marriage as "a union of a man and a woman that establishes a family and which precedes, in time and in causality, the state". As I said, only one of us can be correct.
If law is the application of rightly-ordered reason to the task of achieving the common good (as I hold) then the _nature_ of marriage determines and limits what kinds of benefits, advantages, limits, and restrictions the state may place upon people. If I'm right, then what marriage and family _is_ matters a lot (and where we should focus our discussion). If we only care about marriage as an act of power carried out by those with the most capability for force, then obviously this is all academic and whatever happens is whatever happens and why get hot under the collar about it?
In the workplace, employees have (broadly speaking) a _legal_ right to be free from discrimination on the basis of protected grounds. If your boss (or their boss, or their boss, etc.) makes it clear they don't support that: that's not a political statement, it's workplace discrimination / harassment.
That a stance against marriage equality happens to overlap with political fault lines is _entirely beside the point_.
>If your boss (or their boss, or their boss, etc.) makes it clear they don't support that: that's not a political statement, it's workplace discrimination / harassment.
I am going to speak plainly. I don't think people in the Valley really believe this argument. Political opinion is a protected class in California yet people feel free to create a hostile work environment for Trump supporters. It feels like there a set of right answers and you can say the right answers or shut up.
> I don’t have to (and do not) agree 100% with my CEO’s political views; that doesn’t impact his ability to lead nor my ability to execute.
If it was only views, I might agree with you. However, it wasn't just views. It was action. And it's easy to see how action can impact a CEOs ability to lead a team of people. Furthermore, we know for a fact in this case, it did literally affect his ability to lead and execute. This isn't a debate. It happened.
Simply put, he could not do his job effectively. So he stepped down. Others will say he was fired, but you can only think that if you think Eich lied.
Well, and yet here we are in a thread that is essentially about how Mozilla collectively failed to do their job under Eich's replacement. It may be obvious that a CEO with a political stance that is anathema to some subset of employees will impact productivity negatively, but it is far less obvious that this negative impact would have been worse than the negative impact of the CEO they wound up with (and who it stands to reason was chosen on the criterion of not being close to Eich politically, rather than anything else).
This only makes sense if you start with the assumption that anyone with any conservative views is fundamentally broken as a human being and they need to be 'fixed' before they can be treated equal to the other 'normal' people.
But do you and all your colleagues agree on everything with all your bosses? If so, how do you know?
What if the boss eats meat or prefer cats over dogs, while you (or other employees) do not?
Please don't reply with "are you comparing [X social cause] with eating meat?", because for some (not me), eating meat might be more important than [X social cause].
Says who? 50% of voters?
The employees of any large organisation are bound to have differing views, particularly on divisive political issues.
Why should somebody be forced out of a role because their views differ with those of some of their employees?