Scapegoating Brendan Eich has little to recommend it
By S.M. | NEW YORK
WHEN same-sex marriage activists force an ideological opponent to quit his job, are they violating liberal principles? Andrew Sullivan, a steadfast advocate for gay rights, thinks so. I do too, and John Locke, the great 17th-century theorist of liberalism, would probably agree.
In 2008 Brendan Eich gave $1,000 to support Proposition 8, a ballot initiative to ban same-sex marriage in California. When this detail emerged last month, some web developers boycotted Mozilla to protest its promotion of Mr Eich, one of the company’s co-founders and the developer of JavaScript, to CEO. OKCupid, a dating website, joined the anti-Eich campaign a few days later. "Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples,” read the site's default screen for Firefox users. “We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OKCupid." On April 3rd Mr Eich resigned, having spent little more than a week in the job.
Conservatives have leapt at a chance to expose a double-standard: gay-rights activists demand toleration but dispense little of it themselves. This is, Kevin Williamson writes, “liberal fascism”. A glance at the National Review website yields three representative headlines from the right: “The Pitchfork Prosecutors”, “Blacklisting A-OK!” and, my favourite, “The Liberal Gulag.” Meanwhile leftists accuse conservatives of hypocrisy for suddenly opposing a business's response to market forces.
With less hyperbole but plenty of exasperation, Mr Sullivan, an advocate of marriage equality since the 1990s, was first out of the gates to lament the “hounding of a heretic”: “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. And all of us will come to regret it.” Mr Sullivan struck his most compelling chord in a post on April 6th. The tactics of those who forced out Mr Eich, Mr Sullivan suggests, lie in deep tension with two bedrock principles of liberalism. First is toleration:
The ability to work alongside or for people with whom we have a deep political disagreement is not a minor issue in a liberal society. It is a core foundation of toleration. We either develop the ability to tolerate those with whom we deeply disagree, or liberal society is basically impossible. Civil conversation becomes culture war; arguments and reason cede to emotion and anger.
The other idea is a principle undergirding toleration: a certain modesty about the truth of one’s beliefs and corresponding hesitancy to punish dissidents. To exact vengeance on individuals whose views you disagree with is dogmatism. It undercuts the basis of a civilised society. Mr Sullivan again:
[O]ne ugly manifestation of absolute certainty in near-theological movements is their approach to dissidents. Dissidents in these absolutist groups are outlawed, condescended to, pressured, bullied, lied about, trashed, slandered, and distorted out of any recognition. In this case, a geeky genius who invented Javascript and who had pledged total inclusivity in the workplace instantly became the equivalent of a Grand Master in the Ku Klux Klan. And yes, that analogy was—amazingly—everywhere! The actual, complicated, flawed human being was erased by thousands who never knew him but knew enough to hate him. Because that’s all they need to know. No space was really given for meaningful dialogue; and, most importantly, no mercy was given without total public repentance.
In his Letter Concerning Toleration of 1689, John Locke presented a host of reasons why states should stay their hand rather than oppress religious dissenters. Though government intolerance is not at issue in the Eich affair—Mr Eich’s first-amendment rights have not been violated, and activists have legal license to boycott, cajole and pressure him all they like—many of Locke’s arguments add heft to the claim that it is wrong to force a guy out of a job for having a certain view.
Individuals in a liberal society wear different hats. It is possible to be devout in one's politics and religion and also to work well with people who have rival views. An attempt to impose a single religion on everyone is the cause of “all the bustles and wars that have been in the Christian world,” Locke writes. Social enforcement of a same-sex marriage orthodoxy in 2014 is similarly unfair to dissenters and a recipe for reigniting a culture war. “Every man has commission to admonish, exhort, convince another of error, and, by reasoning, to draw him into truth,” Locke writes. Yet it is “one thing to press with arguments, another with penalties.”
Scapegoating Mr Eich, who not only pledged tolerance in the workplace, but who also holds a view that just a few years ago won the support of a majority of Californians and is still the opinion of many Americans, has nothing to recommend it. It is just a recipe for, in Locke's words, more “noise and clamour in the neighbourhood.”
