NEW YORK — “Are you now or have you ever been a supporter of traditional marriage?”
This question, as if snarled from the grave of Senator Joe McCarthy (R – Wisconsin), is what the intolerant gay-Left now selectively demands of people who defined marriage — even six years ago — as the union of one man and one woman.
The gay Left seems to be building a 1950s-style blacklist. It now bears the name of Brendan Eich, the freshly resigned CEO of Mozilla and one of the technical pioneers who settled the Internet. Mozilla runs the Firefox web browser, and Eich developed JavaScript, the computer-programming language that channels rivers of 0s and 1s into shopping, music, and opinion websites. (And that’s just the clean stuff.)
As the Los Angeles Times reported, seemingly in early 2009, Eich gave $1,000 to the campaign for California’s Proposition 8, a statewide ballot initiative to ban gay marriage. The referendum passed 52 percent to 48 in November 2008. Eich’s check sat quietly in the background until he became Mozilla’s CEO on March 24.
On March 26, just two days later, Eich’s Prop. 8 donation began to stir discussion. That day, he issued a statement on his personal website titled “Inclusiveness at Mozilla.” He reached out to the gay community and offered his support:
I know there are concerns about my commitment to fostering equality and welcome for LGBT individuals at Mozilla. I hope to lay those concerns to rest…
A number of Mozillians, including LGBT individuals and allies, have stepped forward to offer guidance and assistance in this. I cannot thank you enough, and I ask for your ongoing help to make Mozilla a place of equality and welcome for all. Here are my commitments, and here’s what you can expect:
• Active commitment to equality in everything we do, from employment to events to community-building.
• Working with LGBT communities and allies, to listen and learn what does and doesn’t make Mozilla supportive and welcoming.
• My ongoing commitment to our Community Participation Guidelines, our inclusive health benefits, our anti-discrimination policies, and the spirit that underlies all of these…
I know some will be skeptical about this, and that words alone will not change anything. I can only ask for your support to have the time to “show, not tell”; and in the meantime express my sorrow at having caused pain…
I am committed to ensuring that Mozilla is, and will remain, a place that includes and supports everyone, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, age, race, ethnicity, economic status, or religion.
Eich’s words were not good enough.
The very next day, Mozilla employees began demanding Eich’s resignation. Chris McAvoy (not to be confused with NRO’s own Chris McEvoy), leader of Mozilla’s Open Badges Project, was one of Eich’s most prominent critics. McAvoy seemed blissfully unaware of this bitter irony: He demanded that Eich quit his job because of his beliefs, even as McAvoy praised Mozilla as a place “where I can say that without fear of retribution.”
On March 29, Mozilla’s Mitchell Baxter expressed the company’s official position on marriage: “As the Chairwoman, I want to speak clearly on behalf of both the Mozilla Corporation and the Mozilla Foundation: Mozilla supports equality for all, explicitly including LGBT equality and marriage equality.”
Baxter’s declaration did nothing to quiet the burgeoning anti-Eich mob.
Fueled by the relentless pace and unforgiving drumbeat of social media, gay software developers soon hopped aboard the bandwagon, threatening to stop writing code for Mozilla. Some 70,000 people signed a CREDO Mobile anti-Eich petition which, in turn, inspired Truth Revolt’s counter-petition.
On April Fool’s Day, a dating website called OkCupid asked its customers to spurn Firefox and patronize other Web browsers. As OkCupid’s online message said, “Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure.”
Late that afternoon, cnet.com posted Stephen Shankland’s extensive, exclusive interview with Eich. Among many things, Eich said:
I still think it’s pretty important to judge people by how they treat others, in my case for over 16 years, and allow them to separate some of their deeply held beliefs which do not come into play in their role at an organization like Mozilla — even the CEO role. If we don’t do that, the principles of inclusiveness that we’ve practiced will be hurt. I know there are people who disagree on many things, but I’m fighting shoulder to shoulder whether you’re gay or straight, whether you’re married or single, whether you’re conservative or liberal, young or old, wherever you are in the world.
Eich also made an important point about his need, as CEO of a global company, to consider the views of Mozilla’s overseas customers and business associates:
We have a strong Indonesian community. We’re developing Firefox OS to go into market there. I have people there on the other side of this particular issue. They don’t bring it into Mozilla when they work in the Mozilla community. I met a lot of them at Mozcamp 2012 in Singapore. They don’t have quite the megaphone in that part of the world. But the Mozilla mission and our inclusiveness principles really must matter to include them too.
Not even alluding to old-school Muslim sexual mores could save Eich. Oddly enough, Eich swiftly was sliding beneath the bus thanks, in part, to his own technology. As cnet.com’s Shankland explained, “The Bay Area’s hyper-connected Internet-infused living can rapidly transform a controversy into a crisis.”
Eich would not survive the week.
“Brendan Eich has chosen to step down from his role as CEO,” Baxter announced on Thursday, citing him distantly — as if he were bound and gagged in her car trunk. “He’s made the decision for Mozilla and our community.”
“Mozilla believes both in equality and freedom of speech,” Mozilla’s executive chairwoman continued. “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.”
Hard, indeed.
Andrew Sullivan — an outspoken gay thinker, writer, and early advocate of gay marriage — is appalled.
“The whole episode disgusts me — as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society, “Sullivan wrote. “If this is the gay rights movement today — hounding our opponents with a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else — then count me out. If we are about intimidating the free speech of others, we are no better than the anti-gay bullies who came before us.”
Sullivan described the anti-Eich crusade as “unbelievably stupid for the gay rights movement.” He added: “You want to squander the real gains we have made by argument and engagement by becoming just as intolerant of others’ views as the Christianists? You’ve just found a great way to do this. It’s a bad, self-inflicted blow.”
Now that Eich has been frog marched from his position for supporting traditional marriage in 2008, perhaps Obama should resign for his remarks on April 17, 2008.
“I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman,” Obama said at Pastor Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. “Now, for me as a Christian — for me — for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.”
“Brendan Eich [was] forced to resign for supporting traditional marriage laws,” Instapundit.com’s Glenn Reynolds marveled, “for holding, in 2009, the view of gay marriage that Barack Obama held, instead of the view that Dick Cheney held.”
Bill Clinton imposed the anti-gay Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, under which 7,239 gay members of the armed forces were stripped of their uniforms on his watch vs. 3,595 under the previous policy, as enforced during Daddy Bush’s tenure. Clinton also signed the anti-gay-marriage Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 1996. Will gay activists now boycott Clinton’s events and oppose candidates whom he endorses?
DOMA passed the House 342-67, with 118 Democrats voting yes.
DOMA passed the Senate 85-14. The following were among the 31 Democrat senators who voted for DOMA on September 10 1996:
• Joseph Biden of Delaware
• Patrick Leahy of Vermont
• Barbara Mikulski of Maryland
• Patty Murray of Washington
• Harry Reid of Nevada
For her part, Hillary Clinton was amazingly out of step with today’s gay Left as recently as 2006. That year, she called marriage “not just a bond, but a sacred bond between a man and a woman.” In 2000, as the Daily Caller’s W. James Antle III recalls, Mrs. Clinton said, “Marriage has got historic, religious and moral content that goes back to the beginning of time and I think a marriage is as a marriage has always been, between a man and a woman.”
Will the anti-Eich crowd now picket these politicians’ offices, stop donating to their campaigns, and demand refunds for previous contributions? If, conversely, these Democrats were allowed to “evolve” on this issue, why was Eich not given that opportunity — especially given his inclusive statements and policies?
Those who whipped themselves into meringue over le affaire Eich should learn from Honey Maid Cereal’s TV commercial that answered anti-gay attitudes by taking a page (actually thousands of pages) from the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela. A little less rage and a lot more love would serve these people, and America, well.
As a longtime and consistent supporter of gay marriage and equally tenured and committed opponent of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, however, I fear the coming backlash as straight Americans who have warmed to gay equality now will recoil at the gay Left’s neo-McCarthyism.
____________________________________________________________________________________
-Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.