Mozilla's ousting of Brendan Eich shows that, to Progressives, tolerance for diversity is a one way street

As the San Jose Mercury News reports, Brendan Eich, the creator of the JavaScript programming language, has been forced to resign as CEO of the Mozilla Corporation and also from the board of the nonprofit foundation which wholly owns it because it became publicly known that he had contributed $1000 to support Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative which sought to create a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. Eich's ouster is an outrage and a gross miscarriage of justice.

As summarized in his Wikipedia article, Eich is best known for his work on Netscape and Mozilla. He started work at Netscape Communications Corporation in April 1995, working on JavaScript for the Netscape Navigator web browser. Eich then helped found mozilla.org in early 1998, serving as chief architect. When AOL shut down the Netscape browser unit in July 2003, Eich helped spin out the Mozilla Foundation. In August 2005, after serving as Lead Technologist and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Mozilla Foundation, Eich became CTO of the newly founded Mozilla Corporation. In March 2014, he became the CEO.

For those of you who don't understand the significance of Eich's contribution to the Web, almost every time your browser accesses a page on the Web, it executes JavaScript code to enable it to display the page. So, every time you access a page in your browser, you are unknowingly benefiting from work done by Brendan Eich. Now he has been ousted from the Mozilla Organization that he spent decades building because of private political and moral views that he held.

In a post on the Mozilla Blog, "the official source for Mozilla-related news, opinions, events and more," Mitchell Baker, Executive Chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation wrote:

Mozilla believes both in equality and freedom of speech. Equality is necessary for meaningful speech. And you need free speech to fight for equality. Figuring out how to stand for both at the same time can be hard. Our organizational culture reflects diversity and inclusiveness. We welcome contributions from everyone regardless of age, culture, ethnicity, gender, gender-identity, language, race, sexual orientation, geographical location and religious views. Mozilla supports equality for all. We have employees with a wide diversity of views. Our culture of openness extends to encouraging staff and community to share their beliefs and opinions in public. This is meant to distinguish Mozilla from most organizations and hold us to a higher standard. But this time we failed to listen, to engage, and to be guided by our community. ... What’s next for Mozilla’s leadership is still being discussed. We want to be open about where we are in deciding the future of the organization and will have more information next week. However, our mission will always be to make the Web more open so that humanity is stronger, more inclusive and more just: that’s what it means to protect the open Web.

Apparently, Mozilla's concern for "freedom of speech," "equality for all," and a "more just Web" does not extend to defending the rights of any individual to express whatever views he holds, no matter how unpopular those views may be in San Francisco's Castro District.

Be on notice, then, citizens of Silicon Valley. If you should ever decide to let it be known that you hold a point of view that is deemed politically incorrect by the so-called Progressive Left, you, too, will run the risk of being forced out of your job. Mitchell Baker claims that she is supporting "diversity and inclusiveness." What a fucking hypocrite! Instead, she has sacrificed on the altar of political correctness one of the most significant contributors to the Web, whose very openness she is claiming to defend.

Addendum: At the end of her blog post, Mitchell Baker writes:

We will emerge from this with a renewed understanding and humility — our large, global, and diverse community is what makes Mozilla special, and what will help us fulfill our mission. We are stronger with you involved. Thank you for sticking with us.

Apparently, "sticking with" Brendan Eich, without whom the entire Mozilla organization would not exist, was not high on Mitchell's list.