muckefuck | Selective intolerance

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politics

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.

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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.

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.)

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

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?

Does he need to support same-sex marriages being legally recognized, independent of any personal reservations on the subject he may have?

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.

Sterling wasn't even trying to strip anyone of their rights, was he? (At least in the recorded conversation-- I understand that the not unexpected "oh, he was always a giant racist-- for example..." anecdotes have started to emerge, so he may have tried to elsewhere for all I know.) He expressed opinions that we don't tolerate (at least from public figures-- people's mileage and willingness to fight with older relatives may vary) regardless of whether they're acted on.

"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?

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