Selective intolerance

[muckefuck]

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.

Comments

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

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.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

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?