Tag Archives: Tolerance

News

Mozilla claims to be inclusive but forces pro-marriage CEO Brendan Eich to step down

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This article from Townhall by Guy Benson is a must-read.

Excerpt:

Eich is out on his ear for the unpardonable sin of subscribing to a moral and political belief so mean-spirited and close-minded that it was shared by President Obama back when the fateful contribution was made. (Obama was never actually against gay marriage, but it was his public stance for awhile). Indeed, a majority of California voters endorsed Proposition 8 that year, including substantial majorities of Hispanics and African-Americans. When Eich’s private beliefs recently came to light, online petitioners demanded that he either renounce them or be fired. Think about that. “Renounce your beliefs and agree with us, or else” is not a sentence that should be uttered lightly, if ever, in a free society. Scalp collected, and message received. They didn’t even seriously allege — let alone try to prove — that Eich’s tenure as CEO would be marked by discrimination in any way. It was his mere presence that was intolerable. An appeal to reason from one of Eich’s gay colleagues evidently fell on deaf ears:

Mozilla’s Education Lead Christie Koehler, who is gay, also defended the company in a blog post, despite stressing that she was “disappointed” to learn that Eich had made donations in support of Prop 8. “Certainly it would be problematic if Brendan’s behavior within Mozilla was explicitly discriminatory … I haven’t personally seen this (although to be clear, I was not part of Brendan’s reporting structure until today),” she wrote. “To the contrary, over the years I have watched Brendan be an ally in many areas and bring clarity and leadership when needed.”

Ah, but who needs “clarity and leadership” in a CEO when there are ideological conformity tests to satisfy? Upon Eich’s departure, Mozilla issued a statement expressing their support of “free speech and equality,” with no apparent trace of irony. Gay rights organization GLAAD was even less self-aware in its official response:

Mozilla’s strong statement in favor of equality today reflects where corporate America is: inclusive, safe, and welcoming to all.

Inclusive and welcoming to all…unless you’re a hateful “bigot” who disagrees with us on the definition of marriage — in which case, get the hell out.

[UPDATE: Link to PJ Tatler story removed, and title of this post changed]

Let’s take a look at one case of fascism in detail.

Frank Turek, too

You might remember that this happened to well-known Christian apologist Frank Turek when he spoke at Cisco.

Excerpt:

In 2008, Dr. Turek was hired by Cisco to design and conduct a leadership and teambuilding program for about fifty managers with your Remote Operations Services team. The program took about a year to conduct, during which he also conducted similar sessions for another business unit within Cisco. That training earned such high marks that in 2010 he was asked to design a similar program for about 200 managers within Global Technical Services. Ten separate eight-hour sessions were scheduled.

The morning after completing the seventh session earlier this year, a manager in that session —who was one of the better students in that class—phoned in a complaint. It had nothing to do with content of the course or how it was conducted. In fact, the manager commented that the course was “excellent” as did most who participated. His complaint regarded Dr. Turek’s political and religious views that were never mentioned during class, but that the manager learned by “googling” Dr. Turek after class.

The manager identified himself as gay and was upset that Dr. Turek had written this book providing evidence that maintaining our current marriage laws would be best for the country. Although the manager didn’t read the book, he said that the author’s view was inconsistent with “Cisco values” and could not be tolerated. (Dr. Turek is aware of this because he was in the room when his call came in.) The manager then contacted an experienced HR professional at Cisco who had Dr. Turek fired that day without ever speaking to him. The HR professional also commended the manager for “outing” Dr. Turek.

This firing had nothing to do with course content—the program earned very high marks from participants. It had nothing to do with budget constraints—the original contract was paid in full recently. A man was fired simply because of his personal political and religious beliefs—beliefs that are undoubtedly shared by thousands of your very large and diverse workforce.

When I meet people at lectures, debates and conferences, the first question they ask me is why I have an alias. This case explains why. It’s much harder to get a job or a promotion when people on the secular left can just search the Internet for all your views and rule you out – or have you fired. It doesn’t matter if you are using peer-reviewed data to make your case, as I do. They don’t care about facts, they just want you to stop disagreeing with them and start celebrating their views.

You absolutely have to have an alias if you are a man who expects to provide for a family. And don’t take chances – save everything you make for that day when they find out who you really are, so you can go down fighting.

News

Leader of gay student group: disagreeing with us makes us kill ourselves

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The latest from Life Site News about Stanford’s University’s attempt to suppress a pro-natural-marriage group’s campus event.

Excerpt:

At a recent GSC meeting, SAS co-president Judy Romea reminded student leaders that not only is the SAS not “anti-gay,” it stood “in solidarity” with homosexual groups against the controversial Westboro Baptist Church when it held a protest on campus.

But that wasn’t enough for campus gay activist groups, who turned out en masse for the same GSC meeting to demand that funding for the event be pulled.

“Their viewpoint kills people,” Jeffrey Cohen, vice president of GradQ, a homosexual advocacy group for graduate students, told the GSC.  “There’s a lot of research published in top psychology journals that have looked at university environments, both positive and negative. An event such as this would be a negative event, [and] in schools that have negative events there is a statistically significant increase in suicide.”  He said the last time a pro-marriage speaker visited the campus, someone told him “they wanted to kill themselves.”

Cohen said he was especially “bothered by the idea that their conference is trying to create better ways to deliver [the pro-marriage] message. … The idea that they are learning how to deliver their message scares [me].”  Cohen suggested SAS cancel its conference and instead hold a joint event with GradQ in which gay activists would have a chance to promote their message too.

Ben Holston, chair of the undergraduate senate, also threw his weight behind the gay groups. “This is an event that hurts the Stanford community,” Holston said. “To express a belief that, for some reason this event is not discriminatory, is completely off-base. This event as it stands, given the speakers, and given that they have said the event is supposed to ‘promote one-man one-woman [marriage],’ which promotes stripping away rights of people in this room, is unacceptable on Stanford’s campus.”  He urged the GSC to withdraw its funding for the conference.

Now I’m chaste, and a virgin, so I was just imagining what it would be like for me at Yale during Sex Week, when my student fees (hypothetically) would be used to bring in sex addicts to instruct college students that my view is sick and twisted and that binge drinking and premarital promiscuity is morally praiseworthy. Does anyone here seriously think that I would threaten to commit suicide unless people who disagreed with my chastity and virginity stopped disagreeing with me? No. A sex addict’s disapproval of my chastity and virginity doesn’t make me want to commit suicide, because I am not insane. I’m also not engaged in immoral behavior by being chaste and remaining a virgin. Criticism of me for being moral doesn’t bother me – that’s your problem if you disagree with morality.

If you tell me that what I’m doing is wrong, I’ve got piles of papers in peer-reviewed journals showing me that for my plans – life-long married love and influential Christian children raised by a stay-at-home mom – chastity is the best plan. But it doesn’t bother me if you disagree with me, and I’m not going to attack your place of work with guns, vandalize your church, or force you to lose your job – because I’m not a gay activist. I don’t care that you disagree with me, because I believe that there is a right to free speech and no right to force you to celebrate and fund my sexual orientation.

That gay activist sounded insane, but I don’t think that most gay people agree with him.

Look:

Ben, a graduate student in neuroscience, told the GSC that even though he is homosexual, he believes the SAS should be able to access the same student funding as any other group.

“What bothers [me] the most is that in the name of tolerance, we are silencing and taking away support from a view that we don’t agree with,” Ben said. “These views are out there, we should listen to them. I totally disagree with these people, but we need to hear what they have to say.  We need to hear SAS.”

Now there is a gay person I can tolerate – because he tolerates me.

News

Pro-marriage event at Stanford University deemed “hate speech”, denied funding

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From The College Fix.

Excerpt:

An upcoming conference organized by Stanford University’s Anscombe Society called “Communicating Values: Marriage, Family & the Media” has been dubbed “hate speech” by the college’s graduate-level student government, which refused to allow any of its student fee-funded budget to support the event.

The Anscombe Society is a conservative student group centered around traditional marriage and family values; it also encourages chastity, and tackles subjects such as sexual integrity and pornography.

According to the minutes of the student government meeting on March 5, a large group of angry students attended to protest the conference and its request for funding.

[…]Ultimately, the Graduate Student Council refused a $600 funding request: “With a vote of 10 for, 2 against, and 2 abstaining, the funding to Anscombe Society has been retracted by the GSC,” the minutes stated. What’s more, the Stanford Daily reports that the undergraduate student government also denied the Stanford Anscombe Society a $5,000 funding request last week.

According to the Anscombe Society’s website, the event aims to “help university students and young adults to promote the values of marriage, family, and sexual integrity to the broader popular culture. Featuring speakers at the forefront of this effort, the conference will allow students to network with other individuals who are willing to engage in intellectual and civil discourse about the issues of marriage, family, and sexual integrity.”

These days it seems as if college students have moved away from the traditional view of marriage in more ways than just the male-female formulation. They think that male-female marriage is too restrictive because marriage should be about being happy and being in love, not about complementary sexes. Marriage should last as long as love-feelings and happy-feelings last, it’s not about commitment and self-sacrifice and the responsibilities of parenting.  Now, the marriage means happily ever after – it means that if you have a wedding, then you are guaranteed happiness, without having any self-sacrificial responsibilities to spouses or children. It means that you can continue to be selfish, and that somehow, you and the other person will be able to keep the relationship going by just living like you’re each still single. Your spouse is there to make you happy. Your children are there to make you happy. There is nothing that marriage teaches you, because there is no design for it other than to produce happy feelings.

My view is that people who are rejecting the old definition of marriage, and the old responsibilities of husbands and wives in marriage, will never be able to produce a lasting, loving marriage. Either the challenges and responsibilities of marriage and parenting excite you, or you won’t have a real marriage that lasts. If you are going into the the thing with the attitude that there are no rules and responsibilities, and that it’s all about you and your feelings, you will fail. You can have a wedding, but it’s not going to magically produce a permanent, exclusive, life-giving union. Marriage is a specification, and you can’t magically implement the specification with a big wedding, any more than you save enough for retirement by winning the lottery. There is a right way to do it and a wrong way. Smashing all the rules is the wrong way.