Tolerating Brendan Eich
It's often said that in a tolerance-obsessed culture, everything is tolerated—except intolerance. Actually, this gets said a lot more often than perhaps it should, because being intolerant is not the same sort of thing as being black or female or gay or Muslim. Tolerating people is more fundamental than tolerating their ideas.
Yet tolerating ideas matters, too. And there are times when even a liberal like me is startled by the degree of intolerance intolerance in our current climate of hair-trigger activism.
When Brendan Eich was named head of Mozilla—creator of Firefox and other software—a week and a half ago, controversy followed. Eich, an opponent of same-sex marriage, gave money to the Prop. 8 campaign in California, as well as to earlier political campaigns by conservative hardliners Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul. Lots of Mozilla staffers, supporters, and software users disagree strenuously with Eich on LGBTQ rights (as do I). Soon, some of them started calling for him to step down.
