The 900-Pound Mozilla In The Room

Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has resigned as CEO of Mozilla as a result of pressure from gay-rights activists. Appointed late in March, Eich lasted only a little longer than a week as Mozilla’s CEO.

What led to his swift demise was the fact that in 2008, Eich had donated $1,000 to support California’s Proposition 8, a bill that simply stated:

Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

Doesn’t anyone remember that in the same year, Barack Obama also opposed gay marriage?

Despite all the propaganda you hear about how mountains of right-wing money supposedly corrupt the electoral process, gay-marriage supporters donated $44,123,811 to stop Proposition 8—an advantage of more than $5 million compared to campaign contributors who supported “traditional marriage.” Despite that, California voters didn’t listen to the money and favored Proposition 8 by a margin of 52% to 48%. This is an essential flaw of democracy, and one that doesn’t get nearly enough attention—if voters are outnumbered by a slim margin of 4%, the losing 48% walk away with nothing.

Still, it took only one US District Judge to overturn what seven million voters wanted. So on top of sloppy democracy, you have a dictatorial judiciary, and only boobs and rubes think that judges are unbiased.

I belong to a small and largely voiceless minority who believe that the state shouldn’t have any role in sanctioning marriage, gay or straight. And I’m amused that gays are pushing so hard for it, because if they’d ever actually been married, they might not be so enthusiastic about the whole project.

As I will continually remind you before you get a chance to remind me in the comments, I am much older than most of you, which I feel gives me a wider perspective on recent events. Being born before you were was not a matter of choice—like skin color and, as many of you insist, sexual orientation—so I’d suggest you pipe down with the “ageism” before I curl myself in a ball and start crying in the shower again.

What I’ve witnessed over the years is a seismic shift in societal intolerance, especially in what it means to be a “liberal.” When I was a kid, the censors and book-burners and witch hunters were exclusively right-wingers. They were the ones who sought to get you fired for thinking or behaving differently, especially if they thought you were a communist or gay or supported interracial sex.

And there seemed to be a stretch of time—roughly between 1970 and 1990—when the right-wing witch hunters were largely shouted down. I’m sure that others’ experiences may be different, but during that golden little sliver of time, I don’t remember many people getting fired and boycotted and run out of town for thinking or behaving differently. It was truly the closest I’ve ever seen the USA come to resembling a generally tolerant society.

But by the early 1990s, as the PC Panzer tanks had rolled into every university and every courtroom, the intolerance started coming more and more from the left. I’ve often heard that criticizing PC is a “90s thing,” as if leftist ideological intolerance has quieted down since then rather than infusing society’s basic structures to the point where anyone who dissents is branded a heretic.

In The Daily Dish, the openly gay Andrew Sullivan has called Eich’s resignation “The Hounding Of A Heretic”:

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.

I couldn’t agree more with that diminutive bearded homo. These days, the government, the educational system, and the media—three huge pillars of power—generally fall in lockstep with the progressive narrative. Unlike the 1970s when I was an impressionable kid who absorbed my politics from Norman Lear TV sitcoms, modern society generally supports blacks and gays and women.

The problem is that increasingly these days, intolerance is aimed like gunfire at those who think differently. It doesn’t matter that those who support the firing and branding and shaming of dissenters are convinced they’re finally fighting for an unassailably moral cause—that’s how all totalitarians think.

The Red Scare of my youth has now been supplanted by a Rainbow Scare. I believe that the term “rights” is a dubious concept—i.e., the government can’t give rights, it can only take them—but the right to think differently should at least be as valuable as the right to engage in butt-sex without some mob of closeted jerkoffs clobbering you with baseball bats. America, you need to loosen your ideological sphincter and start tolerating disagreement, or we’re headed straight—pun intended—into another Dark Age.