Excuse me, I need to go on a little rant right now. I was beginning to write this without knowing exactly how much he gave. Then I read how much and I (mentally) flipped. I could give that much money to a campaign. (That is, if I actually had a real job right now.) I am hearing (and seeing) all of these arguments about how companies like Mozilla should dump their CEOs like that because of how highly they are paid, meaning more money to fuel certain campaigns, organizations, etc. In this case, I do not think the amount (therefore that argument) is relevant.
For the record, Eich did try to reassure people that his views would not result in discriminatory behavior at the workplace, and that he would not tolerate it from others.
I first noticed this ordeal going on when OkCupid did not allow users to access their site if they used Firefox, and left a message saying why. I swear, this was not from personal experience, I just found an article about it from the new "Trending" sidebar on Facebook.
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| "I am just an ordinary journalist for an ordinary online news website. Let me check my OkCupid to see if that hot person ever messaged me back. Oh wait, what's this?" |
Earlier today, I came across an article about Eich stepping down from his position as CEO. I talked with my friends about it, and they were for him doing so.
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| But look at how happy he was. |
Looking at this more, it seems some libertarians are pointing out that this is how the free market should work. The problem I have with all of this is that Eich's views on gay marriage are his views, it should not represent Mozilla's (and it doesn't, as they have made pretty clear).
I guess why I am taking this a bit personally, as I have told others, is because even for school elections (of all things), I have been told to keep my mouth shut on certain topics, not say my opinion, do this certain thing exactly this way, etc. Unlike other people, I will not do that in order to please the public - it is not true to who I am. As you can probably see, I am a bit empathetic. Neither a company nor the public can pick my opinions for me.
If Mozilla itself had been donating its own money to Prop. 8, I would not be happy with them. However, it is this one person who works for them who has an opinion of his own and gave his money to a nonviolent cause. (And I am not talking about the libertarian "nonviolence" - where anything related to the government is construed as literally being violent.)
Another problem I have with this is that I am positive that every single person will not agree with any CEO ever on all of their opinions. I guess it also depends on how you interpret of what exactly was bad about this Eich case - that he does not favor gay marriage (his opinion) or that he donated to the campaign.
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| You will probably not agree with John Mackey, Whole Foods CEO, on every opinion of his. Did you know that he is a libertarian? Maybe that's why prices there are so damn high. |
This reminds me a bit about the situation with Chik-Fil-A. Western Washington University even got rid of theirs after the "scandal." I really did not get it. Believe it or not, quite a lot of Americans still believe in traditional, Christian man-woman marriages.
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| Nothing quite like homophobic waffle fries. |
If it got to the point where people who were anti-gay marriage were so uncommon that the free market ruled in the public's favor, then what would happen to CEOs? With this mindset (being free market and anti-anti-gay), no company would want to hire him as CEO. Either his opinion would have to be forced to change (he could also fake it I guess) or he would have to go lower on the corporate ladder. Does his family deserve this kind of treatment? What if they did not agree with his views. I am pretty sure my dad is anti-gay marriage, but the rest of my immediate family is not. If Eich was my father, would it be fair to me and my siblings for the free market to kick him down because of what he thinks? Is this how the "fair" free market works?
Throughout this process of trying to figure it all out in my head, I wondered if I would be thinking these same things if he had said something like "black people are inferior to whites" and donated to an anti-black think tank. After much consideration, I concluded that yes, I would still support the company (if I even did in the first place) if it had nothing to do with his opinion. However, the difference between my rhetorical illustration and the real Eich case is that his beliefs are not discriminatory towards a certain kind of people in general. Nevertheless, it is discriminatory towards a certain kind of people for a certain practice/ritual/government-sponsored-belief-with-benefits.
Believe it or not, Brendan Eich is a human being, much like the rest of us reading this...unless you're a Reptilian...As you can tell, I am of the opinion that as long as the company is not influenced by a CEO's views, the CEO has a right to have his or her own opinion and spend their paycheck however they please. If anything, I would think less of the CEO, not the company. If a company does not want to risk bad publicity like this, they should make sure to not hire CEOs with certain viewpoints in the first place, or at least make it clear they will not tolerate vocalizations of so-viewpoints (or contributions to campaigns related to that so-viewpoint).
All in all, we should just stop placing the opinions of CEOs (and other "high-profile" somebodies) on an altar.
