Source: was at MIT a decade ago, was on the CSAIL mailing list until I decided to actually start filtering mail last week (good timing me). Also he somewhat famously left MIT right before starting GNU to ensure MIT wouldn't own the copyrights, and it would be surprising/confusing if he rejoined.
(The cynic in me believes he's resigning because it's far more newsworthy to say "resigned from MIT" instead of "resigned from the FSF," especially given all the news headlines calling him "Famous MIT Computer Scientist," and it also has far less of an impact on his life or his goals than resigning from the FSF would.)
I will tell my descendants true stories about Richard Stallman, and none of them will believe me.
He did resign from the FSF as well.
If Stallman cared about his reputation or being considered famous his entire life would have been quite different.
(If you're applying standard SRE philosophy, someone resigning after a media firestorm is absolutely the sort of atypical and unwanted event that merits an unconditional postmortem. Whether or not you agree with them leaving, it's clearly not the right outcome: either they should have stayed or they should have left before the firestorm.)
"Jeffrey Epstein is one of the most amazing, interesting, and brilliant people that I know.” – Gerald Sussman, Panasonic Professor of Engineering, MIT
> I want to respond to the misleading media coverage of messages I posted about Marvin Minsky's association with Jeffrey Epstein. The coverage totally mischaracterised my statements.
> Headlines say that I defended Epstein. Nothing could be further from the truth. I've called him a "serial rapist", and said he deserved to be imprisoned. But many people now believe I defended him — and other inaccurate claims — and feel a real hurt because of what they believe I said.
> I'm sorry for that hurt. I wish I could have prevented the misunderstanding.
Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September...
Anyway, he probably should have know better than to weigh in.
One’s well thought out response and subtle points can often turn out to have a few holes. In fact...
“If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged”
Yes. This statement of Stallman's:
> We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.
has been reported in several places as Stallman saying Epstein's girls were "entirely willing", completely ignoring that he was not saying they were willing--he was saying that Epstein would have required them to say they were willing.
If you have sufficient power over someone to force them to have sex with whomever you want them to, you almost certainly also have sufficient power over them to tell them to pretend to be doing it of the own free will. Epstein was massively evil, but he wasn't massively stupid, so almost certainly would have exercised such power.
Stallman was talking about Marvin Minsky's sex with a girl at Epstein's island retreat in 2001, which was a few years before Epstein's sexual atrocities became known. Stallman was arguing that from Minsky's point of view, he probably had no reason to suspect that he was not dealing with a consenting girl.
That's the problem with the internet today. It's too toxic to hold any meaningful public discussion.
I'd bet that RMS was open to discussing the point he expressed. Because that's what you do on an old-fashioned mailing list. But apparently he got no response to his email. Instead Selam jumped the gun and started, essentially, a shaming campaign on medium.
This kind of attitude essentially hushes people who can actually hold a meaningful online discussion, and perhaps revising their starting opinions after one. Instead we only get to hear the voices of people that are righteous about their opinions—be right or wrong.
Internet has transformed from an open forum to a shouting contest; if you can't join a big enough shouting group, no need to waste your energy participating.
Stallman defended Minsky. Judge him for what he said. Don't judge him for a defense of Epstein - he unambiguously condemned Epstein with the rest of us.
It's little different than the absurd pretzel that Lessig bent himself into when trying to defend his friend Joi Ito [0]:
> Q: Doesn’t it make sense to you that people would say someone who is taking money from and cozying up with a guy who is a pedophile and who is targeting young women, maybe he shouldn’t lead an institution that includes women?
> Lessig: I’m not sure it describes the case, and more importantly, what about the institution?
> Q: What do you mean it doesn’t describe the case?
> L: I don’t know about the “cozying up to.”
> Q: Going to his house, being socially in his orbit, taking money from him.
> L: In the context of raising money — just like you would go up there and meet with him in the context of an interview...
> L: When you say that he is cozying up to him, that’s something very different from what I understand actually happened, which is: Joi, in the context of his job for the M.I.T. Media Lab, built a relationship with one of the people he’s raising money from.
I don't begrudge Lessig and Stallman for attempting to apply what they think is logic and rationality in approaching these topics. I absolutely despise them for their hypocrisy in the way they refuse to acknowledge how they themselves are tainted by irrationality when defending their friends.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/business/lessig-epstein-i...
RMS is not exactly famous for his keen social skills.
It was taken directly as the girl being “willing” when what he actually said was that she may have been coerced by Epstein into appearing to be “willing” to Minsky.
It doesn’t help that he has a documented history of fucked up comments in this general area.
It's not an interesting defense, and given his prior statements on the subject of statutory rape, I'm having a hard time taking it seriously.
I've spent basically my entire life discussing things in the abstract. I'm not a politician, I don't make laws, and frankly I wouldn't want that power.
To me it makes absolute sense that someone would attempt to "defend" even the most heinous person. It's weird to me that being considered a "defender of X" could even be a bad thing. That's the process by which we collectively make decisions, it's the basis behind stuff like fair trials for example; the lawyer acting for a defendant is not a bad person. It's what (rational) individuals do when they make decisions - even some of the most obviously correct ones - take the opposing side and see where it leads.
It doesn't seem to be limited to this case - I don't know if it's a recent thing, having mostly come of age post-Internet. It's just like, really weird. Amongst my real-life friendship groups this sort of "hate mob" type stuff just doesn't exist, pretty much any topic is up for grabs.
Except that in fair trials we have the concept of stare decisis, that once something has been decided, it's been decided. We very intentionally do not have the courtroom try to reason something out from first principles every time. We do not defend each person who runs a red light by saying, is it actually bad to run a red light. The cases which do overturn existing legal or social precedent are rare, carefully picked by the lawyers to be as sympathetic as possible (cf. Rosa Parks), and carefully timed to line up with sufficient hope of social consensus having changed around the law.
While it is absolutely your right to say "What if this bad thing is not actually bad," to do so without presenting a novel argument about it, and especially to do so for the sake of being contrarian, is not how we make decisions. You should look at the strongest arguments on both sides. You should privately take the opposing side and then see if you can knock it down.
The arguments Stallman presented were hardly arguments and were not novel at all. They're arguments that have occurred to the people he's arguing against, already. If he wants to seek the truth and not just advocate a side, he could have and should have figured that out. I still believe in his right to free speech (in the sense that I would defend his freedom to speak without government coercion), but I don't think he made a contribution to the discourse that's worth defending at a social level.
You think that Minsky being unaware of the coercion would not be a mitigating factor in accusing him of sexual assault? When was that decided?
This is a strange conclusion for you to draw because this statement applies to the majority of HN posts likely including both yours and mine. No decisions are being made here.
Perhaps some context would be useful with regards to Stallman.
Edit: in my defence, is op defending Stallman, or Epstein? Honestly, I don't know how Epstein and Stallman are related. I don't follow Stallman's every statement he makes. I simply asked for some context and enlightenment in this headline and esotericn's comment.
edit: ok...finally some context from other commenters answering (finally) my question, which I think is this from 11th August 2019:
Jeffrey Epstein appears to have committed suicide in his cell. Or perhaps he was murdered — it is not unusual for prisoners to murder prisoners accused of sexual crimes.
Epstein was accused of trafficking: bringing people long distances on false pretenses and then pressured them into sex or prostitution. He also reportedly raped some of those people. I believe those accusations, and I think he deserved to be imprisoned.
Some of his victims were legally adult. Some were teenage minors. I don't think that makes any moral difference. I don't think rape is less wrong if the victim is over 16.
Ok maybe I'm really thick, how does this cause Stallman to resign? His language seems pretty much on par with newspaper of headlines in his "blog". I really don't have an axe to grind either way. I'm trying to get to the bottom of who said what?
Edit..again: so thanks to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20990293 , this is the crux of the matter:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6405929-091320191420...
I've not read the full thread so don't have an opinion either way. If Minsky and Stallman were good friends then I can understand Stallman coming to his defence, especially when dead people can't give an account of themselves. That said I kinda feel Stallman's dug a bit of a hole for himself, and may need a bigger shovel to get out.
So I think the OP is wondering out loud why it's not OK for Stallman to have a public opinion about the morality of the situation where it is apparently OK in one country, but if you go on holiday to another country it is rape.
The OP did not mention Epstein at all and it's not related to the discussion in any way. The problem is that the media has been waging a kind of character assassination of Stallman and quite frankly appears to have slandered him rather badly.
However, to answer the OP's musings: Stallman should know better than to get pulled into this kind of conversation because he has many political opponents who will stop at nothing to drag his name in the mud. He was completely stupid to respond at all. Maybe it's not fair, but it's reality.
> Epstein was accused of trafficking: bringing people long distances on false pretenses and then pressured them into sex or prostitution. He also reportedly raped some of those people. I believe those accusations, and I think he deserved to be imprisoned.
>Some of his victims were legally adult. Some were teenage minors. I don't think that makes any moral difference. I don't think rape is less wrong if the victim is over 16.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190903050208/https://stallman....
Am I the OP in this context?
I think this is exactly what I'm talking about? I've made a comment explaining how this environment baffles me, and you think my comment must be somehow tribal in nature.
Suppose you wished to discuss "ethical problems" in a tutorial, people can do that, and in some other (limited) environments too. You might - to invoke a particularly awful idea - like to hypothetically explore whether what people wear had relationship to their likelihood of being targeted for sexual assault.
If you are in a position of leadership however, you incur responsibilities. People under your leadership must be confident that if someone were to tell you they have been sexually assaulted, your response would not be to wonder what they were wearing. The reason for this is, as is well established, that speculation over what women (or survivors in general) were wearing at the time they were sexually assaulted is a loaded idea that has widespread use in casting blame on the victim of sexual assault, and has been very effective at this for hundreds of years, leading to a vast amount of preventable suffering, all because of we continue to tolerate the mistaken idea that women might somehow 'invite' their own assault.
A person in a leadership or representational role doesn't get to publicly speculate about "clothing and sexual assault" in the abstract, because they have a duty to be aware of how incredibly damaging that is in the general sense, and how public speculation about that sort of relationship would clearly act to dampen survivors of sexual assault from coming forward, including in the org they are leading, in addition to being distressing for the people who have experienced it in the past, which is a significant fraction of people in general, even supposing the speculator meant well.
Even though Stallman wasn't a professor, and was "just" a Visiting Scientist, he maintained an office on campus, and was afforded a certain level of status by MIT. With that status comes an amount of responsibility. Making "philosophical" arguments that appear to defend abhorrent positions, regardless of the intent behind those arguments, is not in line with that responsibility.
>A person in a leadership or representational role doesn't get to publicly speculate about "clothing and sexual assault" in the abstract [...]
How is this applicable to Stallman? What was Stallman doing at MIT? It doesn't seem like he's in any sort of leadership position.
"What he should have done was in my opinion deliver one policy speech. 'This is where we stand on antisemitism. This is where we stand on the mechanisms for dealing with antisemitism in our party. Case closed.' The other major mistake he made was .. a complete abandonment of the principle of free speech. People have a right to say and think whatever they want. 'I'm a member of the Labour Party. OK. I subscribe to Labour Party's political platform. That's what makes me a member.' But that doesn't mean you have the right to troll my Facebook postings, you have the right to vet everything I say or post on Instagram. I mean that's Romania under Ceausescu, that's North Korea under Kim Il Sung. That's now going to be the mandate of the Labour Party? To be trolling in your thoughts and ideas? To see whether you are an antisemite? Everybody, including you, including your camera people harbors some antisemitic stereotypes... OK. Who cares? I mean It's very hard to extirpate, ... because it's rooted in thousands of years. I mean it's everywhere. It's part of the atmosphere, it's part of the environment, it's part of the history. Do I not harbor any anti-black stereotypes any racist stereotypes? Do I harbor no sexist stereotypes? No! And now we are going to have a Labour Party, which is going to [?] the depths of your conscience, ... looking for some evidence of antisemitism, ...? It's complete lunacy and it's a complete repudiation, abandonment of the most fundamental principles of what's called the Enlightenment beginning with as the Germans put it in that nice German folk song Die Gedanken sind Frei (Thoughts are free). People have the right to think what they believe, and since thought is inseparable from speech, you have the right to think and speak as you please. And if you don't like what a person is saying then you have the right either not to listen or try to persuade the person ... but what you don't have the right to do is penalize people, punish people, expel people for their thoughts... It's a complete political disaster because all it does is it forces people to repress what they're thinking until a demagogue comes along and starts saying what you're thinking, what you were forced to repress. And instead of your erroneous thoughts having been answered, the fact that you were forced to repress them, it validates it for you. ... And then the demagogue comes along and starts to exploit all of those repressed thoughts. So morally it's unacceptable to try to police people's thoughts and politically it's a complete disaster." https://youtu.be/OPYfLY2cAi4?t=616
Stallman wrote that “the most plausible scenario” for Giuffre’s accusations was that she was, in actuality, “entirely willing.”
How is that a rational, defensible statement in any terms?
What he actually said, without Vice editing the quote, is:
We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.
From the email thread reproduced in its entirety by Vice at https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6405929-091320191420....
In my estimation, there's a big difference between Vice's framing of "Stallman said she was 'entirely willing'" and the full quote above. There are, of course, other poor comments in that thread.
EDIT -- I mention Vice specifically, because their article (which I'd read earlier) has similar phrasing to the wording used here (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mbm74x/computer-scientist... -- "Stallman said the “most plausible scenario” is that one of Epstein’s underage victims was “entirely willing.”"), and I'd thought the quote that codesushi used was from that publication. On double checking, it might be unfair to single that publication out for the given quote.
"We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates."
Say what you will about the inappropriateness of RMS's conduct or speech or timing, but you should not try to persuade people by misquoting him.
We know that we are in deep trouble when the new generations start solving math formula or hypothesis democratically, by the numbers of 'likes' and 'thumbs up' that they receive.
Is a popular opinion true automatically just because is emotionally satisfying to us, and hence is popular? Not.
As long as he assumes the risk to be corrected and wrong, Stallman has the right to express an discomforting ugly hypothesis or a discordant opinion. And is just that, an opinion. I have no reason to thing that is a dishonest one, that there is malice, attempt to defamation, or that there is a hidden agenda subjacent about it
Which of these three seems more likely in GENERAL:
A) That this happened on a party island and all adults were willing.
B) That someone has been lead to believe this is a consensual act on some party island with willing people there; but in reality the victim is coerced into presenting false consent.
C) That the 'active offender' is aware of a lack of consent and that they are with a victim.
Since I choose to believe that at least a majority of humanity aren't evil; just more than likely stupid and easily tricked, I happen to believe that the set a circumstance being either A or B is more likely that C. I also believe that if "services" were legalized and HEAVILY REGULATED circumstances B and C would be FAR less likely to happen.
I guess you mean that a position taken for the purposes of intellectual discourse (e.g. devil's advocate) could just as well be the person's "real" position?
Is there actually a difference in practice, if they're not in a position to act upon it anyway? (Or is the issue that by engaging in the discourse they are acting upon it?)
I think I understand your basic point - everyone who's a public figure is subject to the opinions of a huge number of people who might want to attack them (politically, physically, whatever), and that limiting expression of opinion is a way to protect against this. But doesn't that ultimately result in all public figures being "soft", "tame", basically politicians?
> “I have to confess, when me and my friend, sort of, used to run through the fields of wheat – the farmers weren’t too pleased about that.” - Theresa May, UK prime minister, when asked of the naughtiest thing she'd ever done
It's an odd twist of irony. Everyone seems to be able to be rational, intellectual, and level-headed, when the issue they are debating does not personally affect them.
Edit: Judging by the karmic sentiment, we are probably unable to have a rational, intellectual, level-headed discussion of such a topic. Pity.
> rational, intellectual, level-headed discussion of how, say, their right to speech should be restricted
Isn't that a contradiction in and of itself?
Open source is in a really complicated moment for its survival. Is like we would had arrived to a sort ot 'extinguish and replace' phase.
[0] https://blog.halon.org.uk/2019/09/gnome-foundation-relations...
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mbm74x/computer-scientist...
Then again, I've only seen the two quotes appearing in the HN threads.
EDIT:
The specific relevant passage is on page 7. Copied verbatim - line with a '>' is Stallman quoting another e-mail in the thread.
"""
> Giuffre was 17 at the time; this makes it __rape__ in the Virgin Islands.
Does it really? I think it is morally absurd to define "rape" in a way that depends on minor details such as which country it was in or whether the victim was 18 years old or 17.
I think the existence of a dispute about that supports my point that the term "sexual assault" is slippery, so we ought to use more concrete terms when accusing anyone.
"""
From the Medium post that kicked the whole thing off [1]:
…and then he says that an enslaved child could, somehow, be “entirely willing”.
And from Vice [2, 3]:
Famed Computer Scientist Richard Stallman Described Epstein Victims As 'Entirely Willing'
Stallman said the “most plausible scenario” is that one of Epstein’s underage victims was “entirely willing.”
And the Daily Beast:
Renowned MIT Scientist Defends Epstein: Victims Were ‘Entirely Willing’
Here’s what Stallman actually wrote:
We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she [Epstein’s victim] presented herself to him [Marvin Minsky] as entirely willing.
In other words, Stallman isn’t saying she was willing, but rather that she likely acted as if she were willing. Lest there be any doubt, the next sentence reads:
Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.
So Stallman explicitly acknowledges the likelihood that Epstein coerced these girls and coached them to pretend to be willing to have sex with Minsky and others in Epstein’s circle. At no point does Stallman say they were willing—rather, he suggests the exact opposite.
Regardless of what one may think of Stallman, what else he wrote, or any of his other behavior, the wide dissemination and repetition of this lie is absolutely unconscionable. Those promulgating it should be ashamed.
[1]: https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec21...
[2]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9ke3ke/famed-computer-sci...
[3]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mbm74x/computer-scientist...
[4]: https://www.thedailybeast.com/famed-mit-computer-scientist-r...
Unlike 20th century newspapers, they don’t have ombudsmen or public editors who care more about truth than headlines (A traditional newspaper might make mistakes such as these, but they’d at least be embarrassed enough to issue a correction the day later). And since they publish in the USA, about US persons, they also have no fear of libel suits due to the US constitution’s commitment to free speech.
Anyone who is a public figure, or might become a subject of news coverage, needs to be very aware that their words will be taken out of context or lied about if needed to get clicks.
Please note, I am one of the people in tech who thinks Stallman should resign from leadership roles for the comments he made; the media coverage which mischaracterises his comments and especially so in headlines (looking at you, Vice) is unethical, and damages the assessment of what he actually said.
What he actually said, unfortunately, is in my view incompatible with him continuing in his leadership roles.
In other words, he's taking us on this garbage thought experiment that Minsky is somehow an innocent bystander. To even arrive at that talking point is asinine.
The point I’m making is that many, many people are deliberately lying or willfully misreading what Stallman wrote in order to force his resignation. Those using such tactics, in violation of their own cherished principles, ought to be ashamed of themselves. Instead, tonight they are celebrating their victory with glee.
The alleged Minsky assault happened in 2001.
This was not an isolated incident.
If it were, I'd look at his comments and write it off as his usual tendency to jump on a minor point and derail a conversation with some totally pedantic technicallity, and I do think the thing he actually said in this case has been wildly mis-interpreted and overstated in many places (the bits about him defending Epstein are clearly untrue, and even the author of the blog post that went viral and set off the shitstorm has said so, and sent corrections to the publications she'd spoken to directly).
I even agree with his statement that, from a moral standpoint 17 vs. 18 isn't really that important -- we set arbitrary cutoffs for age of consent and it's not like there's a legal determination to be made re: Minsky anyway: he's dead.
So from that mailing list thread alone, it reads like a typical autism-spectrum dude missing the social context, making a pedantic point that people read too much into and take the wrong way, and getting himself in trouble. And this is an angle that would naturally draw my own sympathies toward him.
But Stallman is on-record as saying he thinks there's such a thing as "consentual pedophila", and given that context, I think folks can be forgiven for reading into his current statements.
Ultimately though, the bigger issue isn't even about anything that happened in the past few days. RMS has been behaving inappropriately in more serious ways for decades. There are many stories out there about him harassing and propositioning students, making wildly inappropriate remarks to women, and generally making a bad situation around gender and inclusiveness in tech worse. Everyone I've talked to who has known him in a non-trivial personal capacity has corroberated this. The fact that this email is the thing prompted a blog post that happened to go viral and got people to make a fuss about it is incidental.
Even at the FSF's own conferences, he's one of the more frequent violators of the safe space policies that the organizers have put in place. I think the first year the conference had an explicit safe space/anti-harassment policy, he was the only person who violated it (in this case it took the form of a sexualized joke during his closing keynote).
I kinda have the same somewhat fearful gut reaction to these kinds of episodes as a lot of geeky guys do. There's a post[1] out there (which I think originally I found through hacker news) that does a pretty good job of analyzing where that reaction is coming from, and why the fear isn't totally illegitimate, but the idea that this is just a mob picking on some misunderstood misfit is just not what's happening here. Folks have been lienient to the point of negligience with him up until now.
[1]: https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c
Considering a guy just lost two positions, one of them his life's work, for speaking incorrect opinions and being awkward with women, I would say that fear is quite legitimate!
Thank you for posting that link, because rereading it puts this whole clusterfuck in context.
But given the sheer scale of screwups here, the number of people's affected, while I have some sympathy for stallman, ultimately I think this one really is his fault -- it's one thing to make some social gaffes now and then. It's another to actively contribute to a toxic enviornment for longer than I've been alive, to be in the public eye enough that there's no way you're not getting an earful about it from time to time, and at no point sit down and read through some of the arguments about this and consider if maybe there's something you're doing that is maybe a problem.
Again, I have some sympathy (empathy, even; I'm no stranger to being the awkward aspie guy), but there's a limit to how much you can lean on that as an excuse.
I do think angry-mob-accountability is not a very good way to deal with problems, but part of the trouble is people are going to this because the usual channels have failed them. I the way through this is to put in place systems of accountability that actually work so a civilized way of dealing with problems is even possible.
https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-appendix...
I can't help but think this is the same creative destruction - rather than falling back to a core strength of traditional reputation, even a learning institution turns into the winds of its own destruction. Force out the type of person who specialized in software philosophy over social skills, in support of the type of person who politics. Because we're all in politics now.
(And for all his prescience, RMS still couldn't see Free Software ushering in lynch flash mobs, one of which would eventually go after him.)
How did Free Software do that? I don't see how the Free Software movement in practice or in theory has any share of the blame for this social phenomenon.
Sure, it can't really be said that the outrage rags and facebooks are Free Software per se - rather they are proprietary viral-outrage-generating machines even though they may be built on top of Free Software. But setting them up would have been a bit harder without Free Software, and having more investment on the line would have perhaps discouraged wanton slander.
Really I just think it's a novel juxtaposition - we've had plenty of time to come to terms with Free Software facilitating individualist mal-actions (eg child pornography), but facilitating social mal-actions is a newer thing thing to come to terms with.
Updated: explained below, answering to mail lists. Resigning does not seem like a big deal.
I think that just means that some faculty member is sponsoring you to have building access and a login account, more or less. (And the implications of affiliation of course.)
I think the pendulum will swing back, eventually.
I hope soon.
You have great friendship groups. Do you remember, by any chance how this topic was handled in your discussions (I am genuinely curios)
"...
Brendan Eich is gone. The creator of JavaScript and co-founder of mozilla.org has quit as Mozilla’s CEO,
forced out by the uproar over a donation he made six years ago to a ballot measure against gay marriage.
There’s no record of Eich discriminating against gay employees—“I never saw any kind of behavior or attitude from him that was not in line with Mozilla’s values of inclusiveness,” says the company’s chairwoman,
..." [1]
[1](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/04/brendan-eich-qui... )
No one would have questioned him being forced to resign if he had financed an anti-miscegenation initiative. It’s just that hatred of LGBTQ people is still normalized to the extent that people think you should be “given a pass.”
Sounds great when it's working for you. How about in reverse? Are you fine with CEOs firing employees that don't follow their preferred political affiliation/positions? Just to make it interesting let's say it's pro-deregulation, anti-union, anti-welfare, anti-minority rights, and pro guns.
Democracy is what gave homosexuals rights and it doesn't work unless everyone gets to express their opinion. Even people you think are wrong.
If you're after my personal opinion - I think that the whole debate about gay marriage gets muddled because there's basically this interplay between the state and religion.
So you end up in this weird place where - those who really believe in the religious aspects of marriage have to be against gay marriage because it's literally "against the rules", it doesn't compile.
But then in the real world, we have a state that confers benefits based on marriage - and even in places where civil partnerships are wholly equal in the law, you still have the weird 'status' style thing whereby they're sort of seen as being lesser.
To me it's almost completely a nomenclature thing. If we didn't have marriages or civil partnerships, and instead we asked whether two people (of arbitrary sex) should be allowed to cohabit and/or enter a contract with each other to share assets, I think it'd be way simpler.
I mean there'd still be the stalwart homophobes that just think it's capital-W Wrong or think that religiously they need to at least publically claim it as being wrong, but what I wrote up there I think is a big part of it.
Huh? I think it's widely considered acceptable for a straight person to be against entering into a gay marriage themselves. Supporting government policy that prevents other people from doing so is a very different matter.
Somewhat off-topic, but is donating to groups opposing the human rights of minority groups seriously considered "in line with Mozilla’s values of inclusiveness"?
https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20Jun...
https://www.stallman.org/archives/2012-nov-feb.html#04_Janua...
