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from the i-guess-they'll-unfriend-mozilla dept.
The controversy around Mozilla's new CEO Brendan Eich continues. Eich made a personal $1000 donation to California's Yes on Proposition 8 campaign in 2008. Now, dating site OkCupid has started redirecting Firefox users to a page explaining Eich's views against marriage equality, and asking users to switch to IE, Chrome, or Opera.
If individuals like Mr. Eich had their way, then roughly 8% of the relationships we've worked so hard to bring about would be illegal. Equality for gay relationships is personally important to many of us here at OkCupid. But it's professionally important to the entire company. OkCupid is for creating love. Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure.
Visitors are then provided links to alternative browsers, or they can continue to the site by clicking a hyperlink at the bottom of the page.
(Score: 1) by Tangaroa on Tuesday April 01 2014, @04:35PM
This can lead to an endless debate on what human rights are. Under the Lockean view of rights, you have the right to do anything that is not against the law and that causes no direct financial harm to anyone else. In this perspective, gay marriage may not have existed but it was a human right until it was made illegal by the state government, at which point is was not a human right anymore. Rousseau was more explicit in saying that one gives up one set of human rights to become a member of civilization in exchange for the protection of a subset of human rights. Paine disagreed with Rousseau on this point and attempted to erase the distinction Rousseau made between natural and civil rights. The French Declaration of Rights went against Locke's idea of parliamentary supremacy and limited the authority of government to matters where one person causes harm to another, and then the French killed everyone who publicly disagreed with any policy of the Directory. Different viewpoints on the subject get more divergent and confusing from there.
(Score: 2) by metamonkey on Tuesday April 01 2014, @06:11PM
If I'm not mistaken, it's only recently been a few states that ever made gay marriage illegal. For the rest of human civilization it wasn't "illegal," it just didn't exist as a thing to be legal or illegal.
But you're correct, this idea of a recently invented "right" opens a can of worms. What other rights do we have that we don't know about? Why don't we have a right to food, to shelter, to clothing? Should the government grant us those rights, too?
Okay 3, 2, 1, let's jam.