Stop treating Brendan Eich as a one-off — gay marriage is inherently illiberal.
It’s four weeks since Javascript inventor Brendan Eich was hounded out of his job at Mozilla by a virtual mob of intolerant tweeters and campaigners. His crime? Failing to genuflect at the altar of gay marriage, which is now the closest thing our otherwise godless, belieflite, morally vacuous societies have to a sacred value. For refusing to bow down before this new sainted institution, and for having the temerity to donate money to a campaign group opposed to it, Eich was found guilty by the mob of sacrilege and was hounded out of public life as a modern-day heretic.
And in those four weeks, some gay-marriage backers, feeling more than a little redfaced, have called for the zealots in their camp to get a grip. The treatment of Eich was an example of what happens when bad-apple activists turn crazily self-righteous, they say. British- American writer Andrew Sullivan says the witch-hunting of Eich speaks to the “fanaticism” of certain campaigners, which apparently runs counter to the gay-marriage movement’s desire to create a more “tolerant and diverse society.” This week, prominent American liberals and libertarians published an open letter headlined “Freedom by Brendon O’Neill to Marry, Freedom to Dissent: Why We Must Have Both,” which says the Eich episode showed the “eagerness [of] some supporters of same-sex marriage to punish rather than to criticise or to persuade those who disagree.” “Enforcing orthodoxy hurts everyone,” the letter says, and gay-marriage campaigners must lobby for the “freedom to marry” in a less hysterical fashion.
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Permitted from Brendon O’Neill editor of Spiked.
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