The truth is a maintainer can eject someone without a CoC. The purpose of CoC, as stated by its author in her very bigoted and hostile twitter feed is to eradicate meritocracy.
CoC lets some random person with a political axe to grind derail a project with accusations about things done outside the project (Eg a disagreement on twitter) backed up with a gang of people accusing the project maintainers of being bigots if they don’t eject their intended victim.[1]
This is bullying.
I won’t invest time in projects where the contributors are not respected and maintainers will listen to a politically motivated mob over reason.
Since the proponents of CoCs seemingly are always people who violate them constantly (under the CoC its own author should be kicked from every project that adopts it based on her twitter comments) it’s clear the intention is not to protect anyone.
The intention is to force their politics into open source projects.
[0] This means I get to see abuse from straight bigots as well as SJWs who hate me for being male and apparently think preferring men is discrimination against women! (Or so they have told me on twitter.). I only mention I’m gay here so you understand I’m not some neonazi. I’ve been jumped outside a bar and called a faggot in Oklahoma, but I don’t feel these “codes of conduct” do anything to protect me, quite the opposite. So they don’t address the key case that I’m guessing HN users will assume they do. Gay men are considered highly privileged these days, and thus subhuman.
[1] There are many examples, check the reddit threads in /r/Linux of the abuse of CoC.