Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas is speaking for the Left and tweaking the Right today by arguing "Brandon Eich was a victim of market forces, conservatives should applaud." He can't see that the gay lobby might look a bit like his book title "American Taliban."
He announces the very temporary CEO of Mozilla, is "a tech legend, the inventor of Javascript—a programming language that powers much of what's cool on the web," but "The problem with Eich is that, well, he's a bigot. And worse than that, he hasn't 'evolved' since 2008, like so much of America. He held steadfast to his beliefs, out-of-step with the world his product serves." Surrender, or you're the KKK, he wrote:
Of course this is intolerance. Would Sullivan rush to this guy's defense if it turned out he was a Grand Wizard in the KKK? Of course not. We are allowed to be intolerant of people who operate outside the bounds of civil decency. This wasn't governmental action infringing on any Constitutional rights. This was Mozilla developers saying they refused to do work with a bigot, private websites blocking access to the Firefox browser because they refused to do business with a bigot, and employees of the firm speaking up because they refused to work for a bigot.
In short, it was the free market expressing itself. Eich was perfectly within his rights to stay at Mozilla, but he would then face a hostile market and eventually faced the reality that he couldn't do his job in that environment. The free market spoke, and a free market enterprise was forced to react....
Conservative views on marriage equality are now fringe, and especially so with the younger people who matter most to marketers. So the free market they worship has turned against them. They can cry about "McCarthyism" all they want, but this is just market forces at work.
Moulitsas concluded by mocking someone should start "Bookmarks for Bigots" and headquarter it in Mississippi, where the idiots live.
