I’d like for people who support gay marriage to answer this question: Is it right to deny employment to someone who opposes gay marriage?
It’s not a trick question. It’s serious. Is it right to deny employment to someone because they oppose gay marriage, or ever opposed it at any point in the past?
The horribly named dating website OKCupid thinks that it is. They posted a message to Firefox users, in which they ripped Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich because he donated to California’s Prop 8 campaign in 2006 — eight years ago. Mozilla makes Firefox. I just verified that OKCupid is still broadcasting this message if you access the site via Firefox.
Hello there, Mozilla Firefox user. Pardon this interruption of your OkCupid experience.
Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples. We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid.
Politics is normally not the business of a website, and we all know there’s a lot more wrong with the world than misguided CEOs. So you might wonder why we’re asserting ourselves today. This is why: we’ve devoted the last ten years to bringing people—all people—together. If individuals like Mr. Eich had their way, then roughly 8% of the relationships we’ve worked so hard to bring about would be illegal. Equality for gay relationships is personally important to many of us here at OkCupid. But it’s professionally important to the entire company. OkCupid is for creating love. Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure.
If you want to keep using Firefox, the link at the bottom will take you through to the site.
A backgrounder highlight’s Eich’s $1000 donation in support of Prop 8 — which won in 2008. The same day Prop 8 passed, Florida and Arizona voters also approved bans on gay marriage. Does OKCupid have anything to say about that?
OKCupid’s message does not bring people together. It does not “create love.” It’s an attempt to cast some people out of polite society if they do not conform to what OKCupid wants. It’s a hateful, intolerant message.
It has also sparked stupidity within Mozilla itself. Several employees have posted tweets calling on Eich to step down. They are fools and should be fired summarily.
But getting back to the question at the top: Are we at the point now when it is ok, indeed mandatory, to deny employment to people because of their opposition to gay marriage?
If that’s where we are, then we are in far more trouble than any of us thought. Christians already face mild persecution over this issue. If the likes of OKCupid carry the day, then the persecution will get a whole lot less mild.
Plus, the gay marriage movement may not have ever been about marriage at its core at all. As some of us have pointed out from time to time.
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