Bill Maher: “There Is A Gay Mafia — If You Cross Them, You Do Get Whacked”
Photo Credit: AP
In the online-only “Overtime” portion of his HBO show Real Time, host Bill Maher weighed in on the Mozilla controversy, and did not react in a way that you would think. Maher seemed to disagree with gay rights activists for targeting Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich because of a 2008 donation to support a ballot initiative that would ban same-sex marriage in California.
“Well, and he gave it when President Obama was still against gay marriage. So, I don’t think it’s very fair,” guest panelist fmr. Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA) said.
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Photo Credit: Sammy James Dodds / Flickr
By Elise Hu.
The Mozilla controversy that played out over the past two weeks bursts with ironies. And this one is perhaps the most prominent: The free speech that Mozilla co-founder Brendan Eich spent his life’s work defending and enabling — and an open-Web revolution Eich helped lead — drove his unseating. It raises questions about how a company leader’s personal convictions should be judged.
After a public, pitched debate over whether Eich was fit to lead given his 2008 donation to California’s Proposition 8, which defined marriage as only between a man and a woman, Eich decided for himself that he wasn’t. He resigned Thursday despite many Mozillians who came to his defense, in response to other Mozillians who called for his ouster.
The Web as it is today might not exist without the brilliant technologist Eich. He invented JavaScript, was an early architect of the Web and co-founded Mozilla, the company and foundation behind the popular Internet browser Firefox. His passion for the Web and its users has always been clear. In a late 2013 interview, he described his charge as “working on the Web and working on making sure the user is king or queen of their experience.”
At Mozilla, putting users first, openness and inclusiveness are core to the organization’s beliefs — and operations. Mozilla’s technology is created in public — in stark contrast to its competitors like Microsoft and Google — and as it became clear when Eich was named CEO, its internal debates are quite public, too.
“This is an organization that is extremely transparent, where a number of employees had said, I don’t feel comfortable being led by this person,” says Anil Dash, a technology startup founder and a longtime Mozilla community member. “It’s been polarizing because this seemed in contradiction to a lot of the values of openness that the organization helped create has espoused.”
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