The National Organization for Marriage is urging gay marriage opponents to remove Firefox from their computers in response to Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich’s controversial resignation on Thursday, The Washington Post reports:
The National Organization for Marriage said in a statement that the exit of CEO Brendan Eich on Thursday -- Eich resigned amidst pressure over his contributions to the 2008 ballot measure outlawing gay marriage in California -- resulted from a "McCarthy-esque witch hunt."
“When Brendon Eich made his modest contribution to support Proposition 8, Barack Obama was on the ballot as a candidate who said he believed marriage was the union of one man and one woman," NOM president Brian Brown said. "Now Eich has been the target of a vicious character attack by gay activists who have forced him out of the company he has helped lead for years."
Eich’s resignation has even been a point of contention among some gay rights supporters, with Andrew Sullivan saying Eich had been "scalped" by gay activists and Bill Maher blaming it on a "gay mafia" of sorts.
Markos Moulitsas offers a levelheaded response in his post at DailyKos:
Of course this is intolerance. Would Sullivan rush to this guy's defense if it turned out he was a Grand Wizard in the KKK? Of course not. We are allowed to be intolerant of people who operate outside the bounds of civil decency. This wasn't governmental action infringing on any Constitutional rights. This was Mozilla developers saying they refused to do work with a bigot, private websites blocking access to the Firefox browser because they refused to do business with a bigot, and employees of the firm speaking up because they refused to work for a bigot.
In short, it was the free market expressing itself. Eich was perfectly within his rights to stay at Mozilla, but he would then face a hostile market and eventually faced the reality that he couldn't do his job in that environment. The free market spoke, and a free market enterprise was forced to react.
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