Pat Robertson stepped into the debacle revolving around the recent departure of former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich over a donation to the 2008 Proposition 8 campaign, which successfully (for a time) took away the freedom to marry from gays and lesbians in California.
This was Pat’s (inaccurate) take on the situation:
“Here this man at Mozilla, Eich, had given $1,000 about six or seven years ago — $1,000 — to a proposition,” Robertson explained. “And somebody came around and said, ‘Will you contribute?’ And he said, ‘Here’s a grand, get off my back.’ I mean, that’s probably all that it amounted to.”
“But instead of that, he’s being forced out by gay activists, who said that was hate speech to say that the union between a man and a woman is marriage — that’s hate speech.”
“Well then, the Bible then is full of hate. If that the way it is, then God almighty is a hater. If that’s the way they want to define it. And I, of course, don’t agree.”
To hear Pat tell it, Eich’s donation was a casual kind of thing. Because, you know, donating money to take away folks’ rights is “casual.”
Plus, Pat’s version of events was Eich was “forced” out. In truth, Eich was the CEO – the face of the company – and information was made public about his political views which stood in direct opposition to the mission statement of Mozilla.
Brendan Eich, current CEO of Mozilla – maker of the popular open source browser – has decided to step down as after a tumultuous week in which news of a $1,000 donation to the anti-marriage equality Proposition 8 campaign came to light.
Outrage from developers and even websites quickly made it clear this had become a PR nightmare. In an interview with CNET on the debacle, Eich never addressed his current position on marriage equality.
From Mitchell Baker, Executive Chairwoman on the Mozilla blog:
Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard and, this past week, we didn’t live up to it. We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right: it’s because we haven’t stayed true to ourselves.
We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act. We didn’t move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry. We must do better.
Brendan Eich has chosen to step down from his role as CEO. He’s made this decision for Mozilla and our community.
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.
While painful, the events of the last week show exactly why we need the web. So all of us can engage freely in the tough conversations we need to make the world better.
We need to put our focus back on protecting that Web. And doing so in a way that will make you proud to support Mozilla.
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.
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.
In what could have been an attempt at damage control, new Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich talks to CNET in his first interview since the media firestorm began regarding his 2008 donation to Proposition 8 aimed at taking marriage rights away from gays and lesbians in California.
Unfortunately for Eich, the interview does little to tamp down the furor over the news of his donation. Mozilla has, by nature, always held a principle of inclusiveness by the sheer fact of being an open source web browser and allowing developers to contribute to the project that is Firefox.
But Eich refuses to address the crux of the current debacle: his position on marriage equality. When asked, he dodges.While he does share that he’s sorry for “causing pain,” he dodges again when asked if he would donate to a Prop 8-style campaign again.
Two things. One is — without getting into my personal beliefs, which I separate from my Mozilla work — when people learned of the donation, they felt pain. I saw that in friends’ eyes, [friends] who are LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered]. I saw that in 2012. I am sorry for causing that pain.
The other thing is imagine a world without Firefox. Mozilla is under a threat here. We don’t know how big. If Mozilla cannot continue to operate according to its principles of inclusiveness, where you can work on the mission no matter what your background or other beliefs, I think we’ll probably fail. A world without Firefox and without Firefox OS and without our approach to putting the user at the center of cloud services instead of having users get pulled into walled gardens — I think that would be a pretty dark world. I would encourage people to think about that, even if they have a hard time understanding me or meeting me at the Mozilla mission and working on the common cause.
Eich goes on to brag that he’s “the best person for the job” of being CEO for Mozilla and that he feels he’s doing a great job.
Fallout at this point includes a boycott by website OKCupid, a petition signed by over 70,000 people asking for Eich to reverse his position publicly or step down, and a public withdrawal by developers Rarebit from the Firefox OS.
Yesterday, news broke that newly-appointed Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich had been a donor to California’s anti-gay Prop 8 campaign.
In response, developers Hampton Catlin and his husband Michael announced their decision to boycott the Mozilla community entirely.
Now, Mozilla, maker of the popular Firefox web browser and the Thunderbird email client, has issued a statement in regard to the company’s approach to diversity:
Mozilla has always been deeply committed to honoring diversity in sexual orientation and beliefs within our staff and community, across all the project’s activities.
One concrete example of this is in our health benefit policies. Mozilla provides the same level of benefits and advantages to domestic partners as we do to married couples across the United States, even in states where it is not mandated.
For those who choose life insurance, voluntary spouse coverage extends to domestic partners, including same-sex couples.
With thousands of people spanning many countries and cultures, diversity is core to who we are, and we’re united in our mission to keep the Web open and accessible for everyone.
