"All-Female Smith College in Massachusetts to Accept Transgender Students"

Lazy Friday, pullin’ a bchad with a long post.

On the Brandan Eich thing, I’m less interested in what the company should do than what a customer should do. In some sense this is personal. Should I, personally, stop using something or liking something if the CEO disagrees with something I like? Alternatively, what advice should I give someone who is thinking of boycotting a product because of something a company or employee has said or done. It seems to be more common nowadays than I recall 10-20 years ago (though it might be recency bias).

I can think of a few different variations of this line of thinking. A firm (or a prominent employee of a firm):

  1. does something; or
  2. donates money to something; or
  3. votes for something; or
  4. thinks something

that the customer doesn’t like. And the question is should the customer continuing retaining that businesses services (assuming they have alternatives at comparable cost).

I put those in order of what I assume most people would have an issue with. If a firm does something you don’t like, I think most people wouldn’t have an issue finding an alternative. Not that controversial. Things get a little more confused if you someone donates money to something you don’t like, e.g. the Brandon Eich case. I would say that this is similar to the next case of when someone votes for something you don’t like. Finally, I would consider the least controversial to be just where you or the company just thinks something that the customer won’t like.

In defense of the last point, I believe that people in a free society should be allowed to freely hold whatever beliefs they want without harassment or bullying or intimidation. I consider that fairly conventional, but broadly speaking it might be more controversial when you consider things like racism or bigotry. So why do I hold to this rather strong form of freedom of thought. Mainly I think societies need a good process to continually search for new ideas to improve themselves. The best way we have come up with so far has been to let everyone have their own beliefs, say what they want, and then vote to determine overall who has the best ideas. Thus, freedom of thought without harassment can be considered bundled together with freedom of speech and freedom of voting without harassment to a process for the search for ideas on how to govern society. I believe this search is best accomplished freely and that harassment, intimidation, and bullying disrupt this search in a negative manner. Moreover, a harassment-free search for good ideas is a fundamental pillar of good government. Maintaining that is more important than almost any individual issue.

(I would be willing to maintain a few exceptions to the above. First, I would be willing to concede that if the thoughts and opinions are such that they would overturn a free society, then those might be restricted. For instance, in Germany a polical party can’t advocate for the constitution to be thrown out. That’s pretty reasonable, given their history. Second, it can be difficult when one person in the debate does not acknowledge the rights of the other to participate in the search for good ideas, e.g. a white Klan member debating the merits of Jim Crow with a black person. The search for good ideas implies some respect for the fundamental rights of the people you are debating.)

Thus, I think customers threatening to not purchase some companies’ products just because the firm or the employer thinks something they disagree with is this harassment/bully/intimidaiton behavior I don’t support. So just because the firm thinks something, you shouldn’t stop buying the product. If Brandon Eich just said he opposed gay marriage, but wasn’t going to vote to ban it or donate money to support banning it, on these grounds alone, you shouldn’t threaten to stop using Firefox.

It becomes slightly more complicated when you throw in voting. For instance, suppose Brandon Eich said he opposed gay marriage and he was going to vote against it, but not that he was going to donate any money to to oppose it. I would argue that even in this case you can’t threaten to stop using Firefox. The purpose of freedom of thought is to allow society to find the best ideas and implement them in policy. Regardless of whether he is right or wrong on the issue, voting is part of the process of freedom of thought. For society to receive the benefit of freedom of thought, people must be allowed to express their opinions through voting. One response to this reasoning could be that voting is not just thought. If a vote results in a political change, then it may have real world consequences. This is no different than #1 above. It’s a good argument, but it is not completely convincing to me because the underlying processes needed to support a free society (like allowing people to have their own opinions and vote however they want without harassment or intimidation) are almost always more important than policy outcomes.

Coming back to the actual Brandon Eich predicatament, what should a customer do if a firm (or employee) donates money to a cause they disagree with. This is similar to the voting case because the donation presumably could encourage more than one other person to vote whichever way the customer disagrees with. The difference is in scale. However, to the extent that the donations are meant to encourage debate, they are really part of freedom of speech. Just as you shouldn’t intimidate someone for their thoughts or voting, intimidating someone for their contribution to a debate undermines a free society. Thus, you shouldn’t harass people who donate to causes you disagree with.

WALL OF TEXT

What about the other 29 states? You would support them rolling back protection for gays?

Nope. Right to work states simply mean that employers don’t need a cause for termination. However, if a terminated employee of a “protected class” (i.e. someone with more rights than the rest of us prebians) makes a case that the real reason for termination was “coming out” (e.g. his boss said, I’m firing you for “coming out”), then that employee can file a federal complaint with the EEOC and also sue.

Rights for some!

It’s not the same as firing someone for supporting a cause though; that would be firing someone for an action, that might be against company values or something. Firing someone for coming out as gay is discrimination against a type of person (the assumption is that being gay is not a choice).

There are a number of studies suggesting that political preferenecs are, at least in part, innate. Supporting a cause is an action. “Coming out” is also an action. Arguably the latter more directly affects a company, however, since the former is aimed at an external organization.

Well, it’s because being gay is like being tall, or being black, or something else. At least it’s like that in the mind of people. Maybe political inclination does depend on your circumstances. But acting on it, especially in a way that hurts another class of person, is most definitely a choice. Coming out is an action, it’s tied to self identity, and many people don’t view that as a political action.

I don’t think what Mozilla did was fair, and it was certainly intolerant. However, the fact is that their clients and employees are more likely to support the gays, so who will punish them for this unfair treatment?

Again, I’m not sure that was unfair.

Again, I ask the question I asked above. I live in a part of the country where homosexuality is not tolerated. And if I hire an openly gay person, I will lose business.

So what is the “fair” thing to do? Fire the gay person simply because he’s gay? Or fire two other people because I lost 25% of my revenues? In other words, I’d have to fire A and B because C is gay. (Mozilla was probably asking itself a similar question, albeit 180* of where I stand.)

Coming out is also a choice. And up until around the late 1990’s, gays referred to being gay as an “alternative lifestyle choice”. The Gaystapo shifted strategies and went a civil rights route in the late 1990’s. They started claiming (in the absence of scientifici evidence) that homosexuality is actually innate and therefore gays deserved to be protected.

And Proposition 8 didn’t hurt anybody. The law didn’t even take any action except to reassert preexisting law that few objected to until it recently became popular.

The key difference is that the gay employee that you fire is protected via Federal Law through the EEOC. Brenden was not protected because he’s not a member of the protected class.

We have disparate legal protections in this country. The groups that claim disenfranchisement have more rights than the rest of us.

Simple, neither of you should fire him.

It’s getting late on a Friday so I only skimmed this, but I don’t think it supports your claim.

http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/wysk/enforcement_protections_lgbt_workers.cfm

The EEOC takes up their case, but their winning percentage sucks and in 2014 the average monetary award was $18,197. And I still can’t find that federal law that says they’re protected. I see that the EEOC is trying to get the LGBT community under Title VII, but it’s ambigous if they actually are covered. Given their poor showing in court, it doesn’t appear they are.

Further Googling returns this site that specifically states - “There is no federal law that consistently protects LGBT individuals from employment discrimination; there are no state laws in 29 states that explicitly prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, and in 32 states that do so based on gender identity.” (My bad on having it backwards. It’s actually more states that don’t have protections in place.)

http://www.hrc.org/resources/entry/employment-non-discrimination-act

But, if you can point me toward a federal law that backs up your claim, I’m all ears.

@jmh - One fundamental difference I have with your thoughts are how we vote. I believe voting with dollars is more effective than actually voting in elections (PSA - still vote in elections people). As a customer, it’s my choice to use any service I like. If I don’t like a company for any reason (for example, I hate the culture at EA games so I don’t buy their products) I can vote by taking my money to their competitors.