Thoughts in a Haystack

Al Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and marginally less deranged Religious Right theocrat, is sad.

Brendan Eich, creator of Java Script and one of the founders of the Mozilla web browser was recently named as CEO of Mozilla. This ignited a firestorm after it was revealed that in 2008 he contributed $1,000 to the effort to pass Proposition 8 in California to ban same-sex marriage after the California Supreme Court found such marriage was protected by the California Constitution. Under the unique law of California, where its Constitution can be amended by a mere majority vote in an initiative, a simple 52% majority decided to change the Constitution to remove the right to marry from gays.

Mohler, first quoting Alistair Barr, perhaps inadvertently, gets to the point:

The controversy around Mr. Eich's appointment demonstrates how gay marriage has grown to be seen as a bedrock civil-rights issue by many. In Silicon Valley, many see it as a nonnegotiable issue. Failure to support it is akin to tacitly backing the old race-discrimination laws of the 1950s and 1960s.

That is a profoundly important sentence. Alistair Barr gets right to the heart of the issue. As it turns out, it is exactly the case that those who have opposed at any point the celebration and normalization of homosexuality or the legalization of same-sex marriage now find themselves being painted as bigots, as prejudice [sic] homophobes, who have no place in polite society and certainly not in public policy, nor, emphatically in this case, in the corporate world, especially in Silicon Valley.

Well, yes, Al ... gay rights are a bedrock civil-rights issue and those people who were and are against those rights are prejudiced bigots and homophobes with no more place in polite society or public policy than Bull Connor.

Does that mean Eich should have been forced to resign for a $1,000 donation to bigotry years ago. Maybe not. As has been correctly pointed out, neither Hillary Clinton nor President Obama supported gay marriage back then. But neither did they take positive action to deny gays their rights and, as Mohler notes, they have both changed their positions and "publicly apologized for having held the previous position; something Brendan Eich said that he would not do."

Mohler quotes Debra J. Saunders to the effect:

Sadly, winning has made some advocates ... less tolerant, not more so. It's not enough that they won; they have to make opponents grovel in penance.

Silly me! I thought penance would be something Mohler would be in favor of!

Instead, he thinks Saunders' allegedly ironic coda, "All hail tolerance and diversity" is correct ... as long as it includes bigots!

Oh, wait a minute! Al was in the forefront of condemning the Christian charity, World Vision, for saying that they would employ Christians who are in legal same sex marriages.

World Vision's rationale was that not a few Christian denominations supporting it had accepted or, at least, not opposed, gay marriage ... you know, tolerance and diversity.

That was not enough for Mohler and his ilk. Within a couple of days, by threatening to withhold donations they were otherwise willing to make to deprived children around the world, they made World Vision grovel in penance. Let children starve if we don't get our way!

And all the evil silicon valley types did was say that a very rich person shouldn't have more power!

Oh, the horror!