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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

> the community has pressured him to step down because he expressed an opinion not held by the majority.

That's not true. The fact that the majority believe the idea was necessary for the pressure to be applied, but it is not why the pressure was applied. The pressure was applied because his views trample on others' rights, and equal rights is philosophically closely tied with the entire mission of an organization like Mozilla. There are many other things which the majority believe, but which most people would acknowledge an individual's right to disagree with. This issue is different because Eich's personal opinion negatively materially affects another class of people without any justification.

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> his views trample on others' rights

No; I don't agree with Eich's views, but merely having those views does not implicate anyone else's rights in any way at all. Rights are violated by actions, not merely by expressing distasteful opinions.

You mean actions like donating $1,000 to a campaign to deny people's rights.

I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you somehow have been living under a rock and did not know that he donated $1000 to support California Prop 8.

Donating money over time against marriage equality is pretty distasteful.

It's shocking and irritating to me that the three of the replies pointing out the strictly false nature of your post are all downvoted while your post sits inexplicably positive.

You can turn any political belief into "someone's rights". There are people who believe abortion is a woman's right, and others that believe legal abortion is an unprecedented holocaust. I believe we should be able to work together and respect each other while we work that out.

This is enforcing an ideological litmus test on the industry, policing people's internal beliefs. It is terrifying.

Personally, I feel the opposite. I think it's terrifying that so many in the tech industry apparently feel that ethics are irrelevant.

Sure, the world is not black and white, you can always twist things around and mince words to support any viewpoint. But you picked a bad example, because the argument with abortion is that the unborn baby has rights too.

The only way you can say gay marriage violates someone's rights is to say that people have the right to not be offended, or the right to hate people who are different from them. For all the contortions that people will make on this issue, it's fundamentally about fear and hate and nothing more. Abortion is a much more nuanced issue.

Yes the framing is intentionally naïve, as if the minority-ness of the opinion is why he was rejected. If he was a vegan I doubt anyone would give a shit despite that belief being way more unpopular than opposition to gay marriage. The key is not that his belief was unpopular, it's that he held a belief widely regarded as bigoted and unjust. He then went on to enact those beliefs by proxy, through financial contributions.

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