Blacklisting Mozilla

The idea that a business executive could find his company’s internet browser blacklisted by online businesses, and ultimately be forced to resign from his job, simply because he once made a donation to the campaign against same-sex marriage in California, might be thought to be some luridly paranoid right-wing fantasy. Yet it has happened to the now former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich.

The other day I overheard the following snippet of conversation between two female office employees, A and B. A is from south Dublin, an irreverent computer geek-type in her early twenties. B is in her fifties, and from the northside.

A: Omigod, did you hear that loads of websites are now blocking Firefox, because the CEO, like, came out against gay rights? They said they didn’t want to encourage people to use Firefox because his position was so wrong.

B: (Without looking up from her screen) : Well, it is wrong.

That short exchange says a great deal. First, there is the assumption, picked up and casually parroted by A, that making donation to a campaign for preserving traditional marriage is equivalent to “coming out against gay rights.” A is not, so far as I know, a fierce ideologue, and I doubt if she willfully distorted the facts as she had received them. Whatever the source for her information about l’affaire Eich, it had given her that impression.

Then there is the attitude of B: basically indifferent to what happened, but of the opinion that the man in question sounded like a nasty piece of work and had got what had been coming to him. That, at least, was what her words and tone implied. In some matters, crime for example, B is solidly conservative; I have heard her speak in favour of killing child abusers in various cruel ways, for example. But where same sex marriage, or “gay rights”, as she imagines, is concerned, she is on the side of the mainstream culture.

These people are not Utopian academics or liberal D4 journalists; they are two very ordinary Irish people, working in an office in the private sector. How they talked of this subject shows how completely the pro-SSM lobby has come to dominate the language of the debate. Twenty years ago, I doubt if many homosexual activists would have argued that opposition to same-sex marriage made a person unemployable. Today, normal citizens barely raise an eyebrow at the prospect.