Hacker News Reader

Comment by noxToken | Hacker News Reader

> In other words, are we saying that only certain kinds of people can be CEOs?

In short, yes.

There are plenty of rational people out there who don't care what someone does in their private life as long as it doesn't have a readily apparent effect on business. It's a shame that all people cannot be like this, because there are others who take a hard line stance against certain private matter that someone else may hold. That is, the fact that a CEO is a Dom in a D/s relationship will resonate so negatively with some people that is can adversely impact business.

Do you remember the Cheerios commercial[0] with the interracial family? People have much bigger skeletons in their closets, and from a business standpoint, that's a liability. It's not right. It's not fair. But it's reality.

[0]: http://www.today.com/news/cheerios-ad-mixed-race-family-draw...

View on HN

Sorry. I should have said "should be CEO", not "can".

My question was about how much we cater to others' intolerance. It seems backward to me that we throw up our hands and accept that we'll, say, never have a fat president again because people just don't respect fat people. Or that a major political party should never nominate an out atheist because they are not electable (a self-fulfilling prophecy).

The silver lining to the Trump candidacy, I think, is that there is more tolerance of unconventional leadership than we have suspected. I swore up and down that Trump was unelectable.

> It's a shame that all people cannot be like this, because there are others who take a hard line stance against certain private matter that someone else may hold.

In Eich's case, it wasn't a private matter. He used his money and influence to attempt to enforce his religious views on people who do not subscribe to his religion. When you are involving the government in public enforcement of your personal views, they are not personal any longer.

The donor list was not public. Some people believe private political behavior should stay private, just like voting.

Saying "this is too important for privacy to apply" affects more issues than just politics advocacy.

In this situation, people apparently are applying the template: "When you X, it's no longer personal anymore".

Are you sure it wasn't public? Those kinds of donation rolls often are. In either case, I do think it is reasonable to reject a CEO who is actively attempting to harm their own employees through government enforcement of personal religious beliefs. Especially for an altruistic company like Mozilla.

Given that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were also opposed to gay marriage at that time, would you agree that that they should also have been disqualified?

If not, why not?

I don't think it's an interesting comparison, given one is a choice between two "lesser evils" and elected by three hundred million citizens VS the other being a leader of a private company appointed by a board from a pool of presumably many (or at least several) valid candidates. Totally different scenarios.

But yes, it was a big black mark against them and they, too, received lots of public pressure to change their public policy on the matter. And eventually, they did. Eich refused to even say he wouldn't make such a donation again, much less apologize for the harm he caused.

Sorry, why should a public official should be held to a lower standard than the director of a private company? I'm not seeing that.

Most observers believe that the passage of Proposition 8 in California had far more to do with black churches turning out for Barack Obama than it did with contributions from people like Eich.

Edit: updating with citation.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11...

70% of black voters supported Proposition 8, which means that they were against gay marriage.

You're right that I didn't answer your question directly. To be explicit, yes, I think wishing to impose your personal religious beliefs on your constituents should disqualify you from holding public office. However, when presented with two options that both fail that test, I will vote for the lesser of the two evils presented to me.

I don't think that Mozilla was faced with that dichotomy, and the fact that Eich was relatively quickly and easily replaced backs that up.

> I think wishing to impose your personal religious beliefs on your constituents should disqualify you from holding public office.

Should officials be cajoling or forcing people to "convert" (not every religion has conversion as such)? Nope.

Can we divorce all laws from any metaphysical worldview? No. That's not possible. We presume certain things matter, like human lives, freedom of conscience, truth, the health of the planet, etc. Banning murder assumes that the Flying Spaghetti Monster does not exist and/or does not require human sacrifice to get into heaven. I can't come up with the right adjective, but that's imposing an (a)theological position on constituents. It's obviously the right position, too.

Point being, even the idea of "inalienable rights" is an (a)theological position. Some people think rights are given by God or the nature of humanity. Others think laws are given by the people and groups that can enforce them.

The goal isn't to have agnostic laws. That's literally impossible. The goal is to find a just baseline worldview we can all compromise on and have tolerant laws that follow from that.

I don't agree with your premise, and this isn't the forum to debate that. But even if I did, given that even members of the same religion have disagreements about the morality of gay marriage, I don't think your argument is relevant to this specific situation.

> Are you sure it wasn't public?

Ah, I was mistaken on that detail. Apologies. Apparently I've read some poorly researched sources on the subject.

There was a lawsuit about whether it should be made public and a judge ruled that it should be. So "leaked" is inaccurate, though there was and is disagreement about whether the information should be public.

Has he actually said he did it because of religious views?

I've come across people who believed that the state should not be involved in marriage. They viewed extending marriage to gay couples as just making a bad situation worse, by getting the state involved in even more relationships.

> Has he actually said he did it because of religious views?

Yes, he has.

No, I haven't -- but keep on misrepresenting everything about that case, including the legal situation in California.

Do you have a religious reason for putting words in my mouth on hacker news? That would explain things about as well as your false assertion about me!

To save anyone interested in what I've written some site-specific searching, start here and follow the links I left in this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13411986

Searching for coldpie and my name will return lots of tediously similar comments from him inveighing against me based on ill will and little else. I'll spare you all those search results :-|.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com