Mozilla’s selection of Brendan Eich for CEO on March 24 prompted widespread outrage because of a $1,000 donation he made to the anti-gay marriage Prop 8 campaign in 2008. Eich resigned ten days after his promotion.
Conor Friedersdorf and Andrew Sullivan are two of the most prominent pro-gay rights writers to denounce Eich’s “forced resignation.” Friedersdorf worries that the anti-Eich movement will have “a chilling effect on political speech and civic participation.” Sullivan goes even farther and writes, “This is McCarthyism applied by civil actors. This is the definition of intolerance.”
Friedersdorf’s and Sullivan’s concerns are understandable, but their arguments paint an inaccurate picture of the effects of Prop 8, confuse the distinction between private and public views, and mistakenly equate two very different types of political speech and behavior.
Friedersdorf asserts that “no one had any reason to worry that Eich…would do anything that would negatively affect gay Mozilla employees,” while Sullivan contends, “There is not a scintilla of evidence that [Eich] has ever discriminated against a single gay person at Mozilla.” Both writers cite Eich’s vaguely-worded inclusivity commitments as evidence for their claims without recognizing that the entire complaint against Eich is based on his direct contribution to legalized discrimination against gay people in California. Prop 8, which he helped enact, has already “negatively affect[ed]” every “single gay person at Mozilla.” Given Eich’s refusal to denounce the apartheid system of marriage he helped become law, it would be illogical to expect him to behave differently in the future.
Relatedly, other commentators have bought Eich’s completely false argument that his beliefs are personal and private. Beliefs become public when they take the form of activism, votes, and donations that lead to laws that have consequences for other people. There’s nothing at all private about a $1,000 donation to a campaign that helped deny gay people equal application of the law for over four years.
Most alarming to Friedersdorf and Sullivan is their perception of the free speech implications of Mozilla’s behavior. Friedersdorf writes that Eich’s resignation sends the message “that if you want to get ahead at Mozilla, you best say nothing about any controversial political issue.” Sullivan similarly opines that “[w]hat we have here is a social pressure to keep your beliefs deeply private for fear of retribution. We are enforcing another sort of closet on others.” In addition to Sullivan’s erroneous (and offensive) suggestion that there’s an equivalence “between the oppression faced by the queer community and [the] intolerance [Prop 8 supporters] feel as ‘out’ bigots,” both writers also use a problematic analogy. They compare Mozilla’s behavior to “a socially conservative private entity fir[ing] someone because they discovered he had donated against Prop 8.”
For free speech purists, Friedersdorf and Sullivan make a good point. However, there is a major difference between legitimate, intellectually honest speech and activism, votes, and/or donations that oppress people. The right to speak freely applies differently to the different sides of the gay marriage debate for the same reason that it’s inaccurate to call Aamer Rahman a reverse racist: the power dynamic matters a great deal. Free speech is more important as a means to protect the powerless from being silenced and oppressed than it is as an end in and of itself. Arguments like Friedersdorf’s and Sullivan’s have been used in the past to justify a neo-Nazi intimidation march through Skokie, Illinois, a town inhabited by Holocaust survivors. As the Supreme Court has recognized under other circumstances (though not those of 1978 Skokie), completely free speech is the wrong cause to defend when it undermines a more important purpose.
Protecting the powerless is probably harder to legislate and enforce than free speech purity. Regardless, our priorities are severely warped when we consider Brendan Eich’s right to a discriminatory political donation ahead of gay individuals’ right to equal benefit of the law.
Ben Spielberg is the Outreach Director for the San Jose Teachers Association. He also writes for the blog 34Justice.com where this post first appeared.
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