Preaching to the Converted: Scripting a Shaming

According to Wikipedia, JavaScript is a dynamic computer programming language. It is most commonly used as part of web browsers, whose implementations allow client-side scripts to interact with the user, control the browser, communicate asynchronously, and alter the document content that is displayed. Its okay if you don’t understand any of that. I’ve worked in IT more entire career, and I can barely keep up.

Suffice to say that if you use, or have used, a PC, tablet, or smartphone in the past ten years, you have interacted with JavaScript. It was developed in 1995 by Brendan Eich. It’s easy to call people visionary, but Eich is one of a small subset of American technologists who genuinely and meaningfully changed the technology landscape for business and society.

And he’s currently looking for a job. As many of you know, Brendan was the CEO of Mozilla, an open-source company (and creator of the Firefox browsing platform) that is more of a co-op than a corporation. His appointment to CEO was the result of a career’s long campaign to revolutionize the industry. However, shortly after his appointment, his support for, and contribution to the campaign around, Proposition 8 in California came to light. After much outcry from many sectors, including lots of gays and lesbians, the Mozilla board came to the conclusion that Eich’s continuing presence was a black eye, and that the company, long supportive of gays and lesbian inclusion and equal rights, could no longer continue with him at the helm.

This move was roundly cheered by most gays and lesbians I know. I was not one of them. In this day, where gays and lesbians are continuing to make remarkable strides in acceptance and legal coverage, it’s easy to forget where we were just a couple of years ago. Public opinion has swung so quickly and so radically that it has far surpassed even the most optimistic among us. Considering that just in 2012 we were all lamenting the passage of one anti-gay-marriage state resolution after the other, to have the pendulum swing this far in the other direction is truly an historic moment in our history.

The problem with swinging pendulums is that sometimes they can hit you on the head. Here is someone who wrote a $1,000 check to support Prop 8 a dozen years ago. And now he has been drummed out of office by a board that grew fearful of the public backlash initiative by gay and lesbian activists. Some have even compared him to Donald Sterling, and gay pundits, most notably Michaelangelo Signorile, have said that a double standard is at play—where Sterling’s bigotry is universally decried, while others have, including some gays and lesbians, become apologists for Eich.

I guess you can put me in the latter category. To my mind, Eich got caught between the shifting tectonic plates of societal change. If we were to make a list of CEOs (and local, state and federal elected officials) worthy of our condemnation, Brendan Eich wouldn’t make the top 50. The top 100. There are some truly dangerous bigots out there, but Eich isn’t one of them.

And no one can convince me there is a legitimate comparison to make between Sterling, who federal and local courts have decided has directly and historically discriminated against racial minorities, and someone who in their own time, exercising their right of free speech, made a donation to a political cause. There is a chilling effect that is risked when our polemic becomes so binary and strident that we don’t give people the opportunity to change their mind. We accept it when the president says his viewpoints about gay marriage have ‘evolved.’ But we don’t take this as an opportunity to educate and groom a success story; we throw the baby – and the CEO – out with the bathwater.

And he’s an easy target. Despite the ubiquity of the technology he pioneered, most Americans don’t have a clear idea on how the work of Brendan Eich affects their daily life. Since as previously mentioned, I work in IT, his work is a little closer to home obviously. But for me it uncovers a hypocrisy.

If every person who called for Eich’s head would advocate a similar boycott of any product or services company that has a CEO whose personal believes they don’t agree with, they would have a very unsatisfying and frustrating trip to the grocery store. Or choosing a hotel or an airline. Or picking out computer software or hand-held devices.

There was never any evidence that Mozilla would become less gay-friendly with Eich as the head. He made no comments about any changes in policy. Further, he has said he regrets the stance he took. At a time when tides are flowing in our favor, isn’t incumbent on us to not get power hungry and abuse the new status we have all worked so hard, and waited so long for?

When the bullied becomes the bullies, we have to start taking a look at ourselves. When we employ the same strong-arm tactics that we’ve been victim of all these years, we run the risk of being no better than those that held us down all this time.