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.
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".
If not, why not?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, he has.
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 :-|.