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Selective intolerance
So for days I've been mulling a rant in response to this open letter chastising those who called for the resignation of Brendan Eich and warning of the dire consequences of this kind of "intolerance". (I don't know about you, but I'm getting pretty sick of being called "intolerant" for not particularly caring that an anti-gay millionaire lost his job for badly handling his first PR crisis as CEO.) Now, thanks to Donald Sterling, I don't have to.
I do wonder if I'm guilty of a false equivalence here, but to the degree the cases aren't comparable, I think they actually favour Sterling. After all, his remarks were private and involved only private affairs (i.e. who his girlfriend should associate with). Eich's donation was public and had the political aim of depriving others of their civil rights (unconstitutionally, as it turns out). David Badash spells it all out pretty clearly I think. Perhaps I'm missing something, though, so I'm hoping one of the signatories comes forward to take and defend a stand on Sterling so I can pick through their justification.
I do wonder if I'm guilty of a false equivalence here, but to the degree the cases aren't comparable, I think they actually favour Sterling. After all, his remarks were private and involved only private affairs (i.e. who his girlfriend should associate with). Eich's donation was public and had the political aim of depriving others of their civil rights (unconstitutionally, as it turns out). David Badash spells it all out pretty clearly I think. Perhaps I'm missing something, though, so I'm hoping one of the signatories comes forward to take and defend a stand on Sterling so I can pick through their justification.
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(Communism used to have that status, not without justification. But it faded long before the USSR fell, and how many people who think Eich got what he deserved think the same of the Hollywood Ten?)
Given American history, public racial bigotry certainly fits comfortably. If Sterling had intentionally gone on the air to say those things, we can grant that the team or the ticket buyers would reasonably demand that he go away, and reasonably follow that up with a strike or boycott respectively if he didn't.1
On the other hand, not every race-based policy disagrement is created equal. Conflicting opinions on affirmative action, for example, doesn't strike me as justification to call for socioeconomic oblivion in either direction. Ditto reparations for slavery.
Same thing here. Yes, there are expressions of anti-gay bigotry that properly fall beyond that pale. But no, I don't think that holding what's still a mainstream opinion about how marriage should be defined (and/or a strong opinion that such matters should be determined legislatively rather than by the courts) are among them.
I also believe that political action should get an extra degree of social tolerance precisely because it's the arena in which disputes ought to be resolved. (Basically, there should be social incentives for fighting fairly and openly, rather than by extralegal or corrupt means.)
Organized or not, petitions for his removal and Firefox boycotts are the only reason I ever heard of Eich. And I don't believe they should have happened.
(Note: the participants absolutely had every right to engage in both. I believe it was a bad, illiberal choice, not that they shouldn't have been able to make it.)
1Racism in a private conversation is an interesting question. The piece doesn't say how TMZ got the audio, or where it came from. If it was captured from something that's would have reasonably been thought private-- a phone call, a conversation someplace not obviously observed-- I'm a lot more leery about taking action over it. Reexamining his previous public behavior, sure, and oftentimes that leads to "oh, everybody knew" coming from all corners. But my baseline is that public life is all about the ability of people to get along despite holding opinions they'd hate each other's guts over. That's one of the reasons I hate the steady erosion of privacy. But that at least pertains less to Eich.
(The issue isn't absent: one of the facts of our brave new world is the erosion of the class of information that's public-but-obscure. Minor long-ago arrests and youthful embarrassments are causing all sorts of problems that they didn't formerly. The reasons for keeping ballots secret would arguably apply to campaign contributions as well, if there weren't questions of corruption that demand some public scrutiny of the latter.)
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Isn't the fact that "extralegal or corrupt means" are prosecutable incentive enough? And, if it's not, isn't that a prescription for more robust prosecution?
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If making an unpopular opinion known (or a known opinion becoming retroactively unpopular) risks ruining your livelihood, that's a huge disincentive to make any but popular opinions known. That kind of chills the incentive to participate in any but the most anodyne politics, doesn't it? (There are brave people who'll run those sorts of risks, and become famous heroes or hissings and bywords depending how it works out. But they're the exception.)
If you still want to influence matters, at least doing it secretly (and hence, generally, corruptly) offers the chance you won't be ruined by an unpopular choice.
("More robust prosecution" has filled American prisons to an unprecedented degree. Since crime rates are down, maybe there's some causation there, though I'm skeptical. But offenses haven't gone down to the same degree that inmate numbers have gone up. There are limits to what throwing the book at 'em can do.)
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It would be very interesting to hear from someone who claims to support same-sex marriage in principle but to have voted for Proposition 8 strictly on procedural grounds. Sounds pretty convoluted to me, but you're more familiar with such manifestations of libertarian doublethink than I am.
I think it's important to keep in mind how exceptional Proposition 8 was among same-sex marriage bans even for its time. It was the only one that sought to invalidate existing marriages. (They were ultimately grandfathered in, but that was not a provision of the law and thousands of couples spent nearly a year in legal limbo before that was sorted out in the courts.) This gave it an air of spitefulness that other measures lacked--an air which was only enhanced by the vile negative campaigning of the pro side, whose ads equated homosexuals with child molesters. It was like Anita Bryant had never left the political stage. The straight people defending Eich (no offence) seem largely to have forgotten about this, but we haven't. (The tv spots are preserved on youtube, btw, in case you need your own memory refreshed.)
This is what Eich supported with his donation. He didn't just hold the opinion that same-sex marriage was undesirable, he aided a campaign that used scare tactics and outright lies to strip his fellow citizens of their legal protections and deny their extension to others. This is what he was asked to disavow, and he wouldn't.
To be honest, I was on the fence about the whole affair until I read Eich's CNET interview. I found the disconnect there gobsmacking. He says saw in his friends' eyes the pain he'd caused them but refused to say whether, given the chance, he'd inflict that same pain again, which makes his apology for "causing" it sound pretty damn insincere. It reminded me of nothing so much as a disciplinarian saying, "I'm sorry I had to hit you." (The implication being "But I had every right to, since you deserved it, and I'll do it again if I feel like it.") This is on top of the basic disconnect of saying that he's been as "inclusive" of his LGBT staff as anyone while at the same time voting away their right to equal treatment--as if what happens in the misty realm of politics has no concrete impact on people's actual lives.
At that point, I thought, "Who would want to work for this kind of psycho? What company would want him to be their public face?" He was technically right that he didn't owe anyone an explanation for his political activity outside of work, but it hardly shows good faith when you're trying to reassure someone you've injured in the past and who is justifiably worried you'll do it again. This is exactly what Mark Surman was getting at when he wrote, "Brendan didn’t need to change his mind on Proposition 8 to get out of the crisis of the past week. He simply needed to project and communicate empathy. His failure to do so proved to be his fatal flaw as CEO."
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I didn't see his concern as insincere, but conflicted: he's friends and colleagues with people with whom he disagrees over a matter of public policy and who likewise feel strongly. That's pretty much electoral politics in a nutshell, isn't it? (Unless one is very careful about whom one associates with, anyway.) If you want the high-speed rail line, you can feel genuinely bad about the people who are going to lose their homes to it, while still thinking it passes overall cost-benefit. You can think it's right to send troops to Europe in WWII, while still finding it hard to look your isolationist neighbor in the eye when she gets the telegram about her son. Thinking a policy is right isn't incompatible with being aware of or regretting the pain it inflicts.
(If anything, the opposite-- "because this policy is good, I'll either deny any harm, or else assert that all affected deserve it good and hard"-- strikes me as more insincere. Though the net demonstrates to me daily that it's extraordinarily common across the spectrum.)
But just to be clear: am I correct that you believe he should only have been able to remain CEO if he declared his 2008 position wrong, and publicly came out in support of same-sex marriage?
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Part of the point I was making is that you can and should be able to separate opposition to same-sex marriage from support for Prop 8. Moreover, throughout your responses, you've been making the point that what should be not allowed by society and what should be forbidden by law can and should be diverge. People like Eich were free to discourage people from contracting same-sex marriages before and they are free to continuing discouraging them now, regardless of what the law says.
I can't see any cost-benefit analysis of same-sex marriage which favours its opponents. The cost to those whose relationships are denied recognition is huge and extremely concrete; the societal benefits to disallowing them are completely nebulous. It's not at all comparable to a rail line or an intervention overseas.
Either same-sex marriages should be recognized by the law or they shouldn't.
At the time Prop 8 was passed, it should've been clear to anyone paying attention that that ship had sailed, that--as Gavin Newsom notoriously pointed out--same-sex marriage was coming to California and that all that all a legislative measure could do was, at most, delay it a few years--in the meantime inflicting useless suffering on hundreds of thousands of people. As I say above, the degree of spitefulness on display was sickening.
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Fair enough-- I formulated that badly. Does he need to support same-sex marriages being legally recognized, independent of any personal reservations on the subject he may have?
I can't see any cost-benefit analysis of same-sex marriage which favours its opponents. The cost to those whose relationships are denied recognition is huge and extremely concrete; the societal benefits to disallowing them are completely nebulous. It's not at all comparable to a rail line or an intervention overseas.
Unless you really want me to, I don't think it's worth making a case I don't personally believe in against same-sex marriage. I do believe that opponents are sincere in expecting dire consequences, at least some of which I think are merely wrong. (As opposed to dishonest, crazy, or malicious.)
Some of those are based on values I don't share, but that I think people can legitimately have. (E.g., religious views that inform their concept of public morality.) Some are based on concerns I sympathize with, but disagree with in specifics, like the basic Burkean conservative principle that you don't lightly make unprecedented changes to bedrock social institutions, precisely because you can't reliably envision all the consequences.
To pick one example: Marriage as an institution is in decline by various metrics, with various bad consequences that disproportionately affect the poor. (That's potentially a whole side-conversation of its own. But even if you disagree, will you stipulate that it's a widely-held belief that a person of good will might believe?)
I don't personally think that same-sex marriage is likely to have a significant effect on that.1 But if I believed that same-sex marriage would accelerate the trend, I'd count that as a strike against it. It's pretty clear that a lot of opponents do believe that-- in which case the choice would be about which minority should suffer.
1I used to think that the effect would be strongly positive, on the theory that an influx of people who'd had to fight for the right to marry would consider it especially important. I'm less convinced of that now, but still think the effect is positive-to-neutral.
(Hit the character limit again. :-) To be continued.)
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I don't think that was so clear as all that. Trends can reverse given time, as anyone who remembers the Cold War knows well enough. (For decades, countries only went from non-Communist to Communist. The process might be stopped early with outside intervention, but to a first approximation no country ever made the reverse transition. Until suddenly, with a handful of exceptions, they all did.) Marijuana legalization looked inevitable for a short while a generation before it started to happen (assuming it really sticks this time)-- places like Ann Arbor made it a $5 ticket, Conservative voices like William F. Buckley favored decriminalization. Then the 80s saw a reversal, and a doubling down on the drug war. The NRA spent decades steadily losing ground on gun rights before starting, very recently, to dramatically win.
And if a trend is bad, perceived inevitability is a poor reason to cooperate with it.
Turn it around: suppose a world in which same-sex marriage rights existed, but were where Civil Rights were in the post-Reconstruction era: enacted and theoretically guaranteed by the law, but in practice under steady assault with no help forthcoming from the federal courts. Something like Prop 8 goes on the ballot. If it loses now, it'll probably win in three years-- the trend in public opinion is very clear.
Do you wait for the inevitable? Or do you fight it, and hope that the tide changes before the next go-round?
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I'm still not quite sure what you're getting at, as I can think of at least four different ways to address this question:
1. What public stance satisfies my notion of a perfectly moral society?
2. What public stance do I think should satisfy the most members of our society?
3. What public stance would have satisfied Eich's employer, the Mozilla Corporation?
4. What public stance would satisfy me personally (to the point that I would not consider taking political action against Mozilla, such as boycotting their products)?
For obvious reasons, I'm only truly comfortable answering (1) and (4), but I'm not sure whether those are the answers you're interested in or not. I think Surman and others have answered (3) adequately, and if they haven't, there's nothing I can add because I'm not privy to any additional information beyond their public statements.
But I guess (2) is what we're debating at this point. As I said, the minimum I would want from anyone I chose to work for was an assurance that they would not seek to violate my civil rights or strip me of equal protection under the law. That strikes me as a reasonable minimum standard for a CEO or business owner and seems to be the one everyone (except The Donald, of course) is comfortable holding Sterling to.
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"Thoughtcrime" isn't quite the right word, since of course he's not being criminally punished. Maybe "thought tort", since he's being financially penalized, expelled from an organization, and (maybe-- as I understand it they're still seeing if this is possible under the rules) deprived of his ownership of certain property?