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posted by on Thursday April 09 2015, @09:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the shhh-don't-tell-anybody dept.

National Journal's Rebecca Nelson reports about the Republicans lurking in the shadows of the Bay Area:

Deep in Silicon Valley, where the free market reigns and the exchange of ideas is celebrated, a subset of tech workers are hiding their true selves.

They're the tech company employees, startup founders, and CEOs who vote for and donate to Republican candidates, bucking the Bay Area's liberal supremacy. Fearing the repercussions of associating with a much-maligned minority, they keep their political views fiercely hidden.

The consequences for being outed for conservative views can be dire. In a highly public controversy last year, newly-hired Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich stepped down after critics attacked his 2008 donation to support Proposition 8, the anti-same-sex marriage law in California. Eich, who declined to comment for this story, faced an internal uprising from within the Mozilla community, as well as boycotts from other tech companies, and quit after just two weeks on the job.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday April 10 2015, @12:13PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Friday April 10 2015, @12:13PM (#168710) Journal

    Politics and religion are fundamentally different because the average person tends to be much more invested in those topics, to the point of defining oneself by them

    You can't expect to have a rational discussion about religion, because it relies on faith, which often precludes rational argument (though you can have such arguments about ethics and morality and other aspects of philosophy that border on religion). If your political views are based on faith and not subject to rational debate, then that might be a good clue for you that they're wrong. Or, at the very least, not well thought out and worthy of some further self-examination.

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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday April 10 2015, @12:25PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Friday April 10 2015, @12:25PM (#168715) Journal
    It's a tricky issue. A single baker, for example, refusing to sell cakes to gay (or black, or whatever) people is not a problem. All bakers refusing to sell cakes to the same group would be. As long as there are a sufficient number of bakers willing to sell to a minority group (and the majority of the population isn't going to boycott businesses that sell to them), the only people hurt by the ones that refuse to deal with them are those businesses themselves. During the civil rights movement in the '60s, laws that prevented businesses businesses refusing to sell to black people were essential, because there were large areas where the lack of such a requirement left no options for black people.

    Now, it's a lot less clear. It doesn't seem that there are enough bakers who would refuse the business of gay people that it would make a difference to the gay community, so I'd want to see some evidence that there's a real problem before introducing laws to fix it. I'd also like to see businesses that want to discriminate in this way put signs up in their windows and on their web sites, so I'd know not to accidentally give them my custom, thereby allowing them the freedom to be bigots and me the freedom to refuse to give money to bigots.

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