Monday 14 April 2014

Responding to the Ousting of Mozilla’s CEO

By Jim Daly.
This is the kind of news story that will make you shake your head at where we are as a culture.
The co-founder of Firefox maker Mozilla, Brendan Eich, is a “thoughtful, nerdy, humble guy” (according to a homosexual San Francisco-based journalist) – the type of man you would want to run a technology company. He created the JavaScript programming language and uses his smarts and influence to advance the principles of individual freedom and an open Internet.
However, to his peril, Eich also supports traditional marriage. In 2008, he donated $1,000 to California’s Proposition 8, which defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman.
His relatively small donation was enough to mobilize staffers in his own company to publicly condemn Eich being named as the CEO of Mozilla Corporation. They took to social media to voice their displeasure. Others joined them, such as online dating site OkCupid.
The pressure led Brendan Eich to resign yesterday.
Eich’s departure led actor and gay-rights activist George Takei to post on his immensely popular Facebook page that Mozilla staffers “can now work in a hate-free zone.”
That’s quite the powerful accusation – that merely holding the view that marriage should be defined as a union between a man and a woman can create an environment of “hate.”
Indeed, that word – hate – gets thrown around a lot when it comes to those of us who hold to a view of natural marriage.
Nevermind that Eich never discussed his support of one-man, one-woman marriage while in his professional role. On the contrary, Eich has said he’s always “kept my personal beliefs out of it [Mozilla].”
Mr. Eich even sponsors a project that helps minorities, including those who are LGBTQ, get training and support.
Maybe that’s why Mozilla Executive Chairwoman Mitchell Baker is quoted as saying she “never saw any kind of behavior or attitude from him that was not in line with Mozilla’s values of inclusiveness.”
And yet, Eich is accused of hatred and gets ousted from the company he helped start simply because he supports natural marriage.
It’s enough to make a reasonable person’s head spin.
Even influential author and blogger Andrew Sullivan, who is openly gay, is recoiling at how Eich has been treated. In a blog post, Sullivan writes, “The whole episode disgusts me – as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society.”
Sullivan also quotes a reader who disagrees with Eich over gay marriage, but who gets the bigger issues at hand: “There’s no freedom of speech if you can’t be employed while holding your opinion.”
Yet this is where we are.
Sullivan and others coming to Eich's defense are right. It's wrong and ridiculous. It's reverse discrimination. It's social bullying, pure and simple. I'm reminded of the title of that off-beat comedy from another era:
"It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World."
Indeed it is.
Let me ask this:
Is it not reasonable for those who support same-sex marriage to extend to us the same level of tolerance they expect from us?
I certainly think it is.
https://community.focusonthefamily.com

Drink - The Enright Files

We live in a culture that's awash in drink - enjoying, romanticizing and marketing the pleasures of alcohol. But countless millions of people have lost their families, their health and their dignity to alcohol. Michael Enright talks to two authors who have written about the bottle and the damage done: Ann Dowsett Johnston, author ofDrink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol, and Olivia Laing, author of The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink.
Detail from the book http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2014/04/07/the-enright-files---drink/