Brendan Eich was CEO of Mozilla for less than a week before gay activists destroyed his career over a donation he made five years ago to a pro-traditional marriage campaign. But even as gay activists pilloried him, his views were little different from Barack Obama’s or Bill and Hillary Clinton’s.
Eich, a co-founder of tech company Mozilla–maker of the web browser Firefox–donated to California’s Prop 8 campaign in 2008. Prop 8 was a state constitutional amendment that upheld the sanctity of traditional marriage. It was passed by a majority of California voters.
Eventually the courts negated the vote of the people and made Prop 8 null and void.
Flash forward to 2014 at the end of March, five years after he donated $1,000 to the Prop 8 campaign, Eich was appointed as the new CEO of Mozilla.
Immediately gay activists ramped up a campaign of their own to destroy Eich’s career, and after only a week of pressure he was forced out as the company’s top man. Meanwhile, the company pleaded with its attackers, claiming that it was “tolerant” of everyone’s views. Except, apparently, anyone who has a religious view on gay marriage. Their views are not to be tolerated by the company, it seems.
Now, there is no evidence that Eich has ever made his religious position against gay marriage a personal crusade. In fact, no one even knew of his support of Prop 8 until gay activists took the donor lists of those who supported the campaign to pass the law and used those records as a hit list.
But why was Eich destroyed when his views were not at all different from those that Bill and Hillary Clinton held for decades? Why was Eich attacked when he had a similar view as Barack Obama, who only changed his view in 2012, conveniently just before his re-election to the White House?
It should be remembered that Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) into law in 1996. DOMA is also a law that upheld the sanctity of traditional marriage. Further, as late as 2000, Hillary said that if she were in Congress in 1996 she, too, would have voted in favor of DOMA.
“Marriage has got historic, religious and moral content that goes back to the beginning of time and I think a marriage is as a marriage has always been, between a man and a woman,” Hillary Clinton said in 2000.
Then, in 2006, Senator Clinton avowed that man/woman marriage was “sacred,” saying that marriage is “not just a bond, but a sacred bond between a man and a woman.”
Those weren’t her last words in support of DOMA. In 2008, Hillary said, “I believe that DOMA served a very important purpose.”
It is also important to point out that Vice President Joe Biden also voted in favor of DOMA. So did the Democrat’s U.S. Senate number two, Richard Durbin (D, IL).
As to Obama, it is well known that he stood against gay marriage during the entire time he was running for the White House from 2008 to just before his re-election in 2012.
To name just a few times he came out in opposition to gay marriage, in 2004, Obama insisted, “I am not a supporter of gay marriage.”
In 2008, he said, “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman.”
By 2010 he was still against it, saying, “I have been to this point unwilling to sign on to same-sex marriage primarily because of my understandings of the traditional definitions of marriage,” he said in an interview.
Of course, just before his re-election, Obama suddenly did a 180 and announced that he was in favor of gay marriage. He famously “evolved.”
But gay activists gave Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton decades to “evolve.” Branden Eich wasn’t even given a week.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com
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