Mozilla does not do this. Individual has the freedom to pursue their political belief just as anyone can choose to work for and not work for someone you do not agree with. Just as you can vote for a President who is in favor of X solution X instead of solution Y. An open web means exactly that: everyone can participate. And by that we don't mean everyone has to agree on everything.
Sure, but even the open web has some basic ground rules. What what special about Prop. 8 (as opposed to virtually any other issue) is that it represented a direct attack on the 14th Amendment - which is one of the basic pillars of our democracy.
For any flourishing society, a broad spectrum of opinion is vital. But when you start attacking the underlying system that make that open society possible in the first place, you've crossed a bright and shining line.
After all, not everything is up for debate. Indeed, that's the whole point of having constitutionally protected rights. People are comfortable with the back and forth of democratic rule if - and only if - they know that their fundamental human rights and basic legal equality are beyond the reach of public debate.
On the scale of techies trying to ruin people's lives, I'd put the level of these donations pretty low down the list of concerns myself, even if I don't love them (Peter Thiel's right-wing donations worry me more, for example, because they are much, much larger).
I don't mind money going towards Libertarian asshattery because frankly, I'm happy to see it crash and burn as publicly and spectacularly as possible.
Or not. In which case I'm prepared to change my views. But I'm not prepared to change my view about the 14th Amendment and the wisdom and decency of assuring basic legal equality for everyone. To my mind, that is an entirely settled issue. I'd no more go back on that than I'd tolerate a return to slavery (which, let's not forget, is the horrible error that necessitated the 14th in the first place).
You are happy to implicated in some bullshit libertarian experiment to see if it crashes and burns, harming many people, but are offended about being implicated in some bullshit Christian experiment to see if it crashes and burns, harming many people? To me, the collateral damage of Christian fuckery and libertarian fuckery are roughly comparable.
But in any case, Thiel gives money not only to candidates of the Libertarian Party, but also (in fact, mainly) to the regular, anti-gay GOP. It could be that he hates gays. It could be that he doesn't, but just considers funding anti-gay propaganda to be acceptable collateral damage in a quest to promote the Republican Party's other positions. Either way, he's a much bigger problem in my mind than some small fry giving 4-figure amounts to them, because he's giving 6-figure amounts to the bigots, which they can use to promote bigotry.
Oh, sorry, didn't mean to break your reply. I felt my remarks got a bit emotional but I suppose that's par for the course when it's your own family that's being attacked.
Regarding Thiel: I'm not defending the guy. I simply didn't realize how big a GOP supporter he really was. But now that I know, yeah, he can go die in a fire.
Political differences I can accept. Debates about the basic legal equality of one's fellow citizens are beyond the pale.
I guess to me economic equality of citizens is also part of basic equality. I can quibble on how exact the equality needs to be, but people should be qualitatively equal, and as a very loose lower bound should at least being able to live. The idea that people should monopolize all resources needed to live, to the extent of having 1000x or 10,000x what some of their fellow citizens have, with some of their fellow citizens having no food or shelter, is beyond the pale from my perspective, a weird American aberration. From a Scandinavian perspective, the libertarians and the conservative Christians are equally stone-age American sicknesses, and I perceive both of them as basically enemies. If anything, the libertarians have less excuse for not learning from their defeat, because they were defeated >100 years ago, while the Christians were only defeated ~50 years ago.
I agree that political differences are tolerable, but we must be speaking of political differences that respect the opponents' basic right to live. Neither libertarians nor fundamentalist Christians meet that standard. And to the extent that I have American friends who are denied healthcare because of these libertarian fucks, something that doesn't happen in civilized countries, I blame the startup scene for their tolerance of the antisocial libertarian assholes in their midst.
