Brendan Eich’s ouster as CEO of Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, sparked a firestorm of outrage of those on right who say he was being persecuted for his anti-LGBT views and that the company’s reputation was irreparably tarnished.
On Thursday Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox browser, announced that Eich had decided to step down as CEO only two weeks after he took the post. The decision followed the online dating website OkCupid posting a message to Firefox users going to the site noting that Eich donated $1,000 to the California’s Proposition 8, the constitutional amendment that outlawed same-sex marriages.
“The online dating service OKCupid called for a boycott of Mozilla,” Redstate editor Erick Erickson wrote in a blogpost. “Contributing to an unpopular cause six years ago — during a time the left claimed ‘dissent is patriotic’ — is enough to blacklist Eich. The objections to his hire are not based on his competence, experience, or resume, but on $1000.00.”
Once Eich stepped down, conservatives got angry. They argued that Eich was forced out for his personal beliefs and not his job performance or skills.
In a short blog post, Maggie Gallagher at National Review’s The Corner wrote “Endorse gay marriage, or lose your job. I predicted this world ten years ago, and people scoffed. Nice.”
The Daily Dish’s Andrew Sullivan, who is gay, said gay rights activists had “scalped” Eich out of his job.
“It is also unbelievably stupid for the gay rights movement,” Sullivan wrote. “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.”
One common argument that perked up multiple times was that President Barack Obama used to publicly oppose gay marriage but he was not pushed out of office. Hillary Clinton got a shoutout along those lines too. The Heritage Foundation’s Ryan T. Anderson wrote that the nation’s democratic discourage has been tainted by “bullies.”
“The outrageous treatment of Eich is the result of one private, personal campaign contribution to support marriage as a male-female union, a view affirmed at the time by President Barack Obama, then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, and countless other prominent officials,” Anderson wrote. “After all, Prop 8 passed with the support of 7 million California voters.”
Hi @mozilla will u show your commitment (after you strip JavaScript) by firing those who donated to Obama when he was antigay-marriage?
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) April 4, 2014
“Barack Obama inexplicably remains, as of this writing, president of the United States of America, but Mr. Eich has just been forced out as CEO of Mozilla because of his political views,” the editors at National Review wrote in a piece published Friday.
That editorial continued:
The nation’s full-time gay-rights professionals simply will not rest until a homogeneous and stultifying monoculture is settled upon the land, and if that means deploying a ridiculous lynch mob to pronounce anathema upon a California technology executive for private views acted on in his private life, then so be it.
There was also internal resistance to Eich. Ars Technica reported that Mozilla employees voiced opposition to Eich’s appointment, citing his support for Proposition 8. According to The New York Times, Eich had been encouraged to apologize his donation but he refused. The Times also noted that some of the gay rights activists that criticized Eich were not necessarily calling for his removal.
Activist Evan Wolfson told the Times that Eich’s removal was just “a company deciding who best represents them and their values.”
