Should libertarians care about Brendan Eich's resignation?
Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich has resigned his job after just 10 days in the role. This came after it was rediscovered that he gave $1,000 to Proposition 8, a direct democratic move to ban gay marriage in California, that narrowly passed. Upon discovering this, twitter and other areas of the internet mobilised, with 72,000 supporting a petition to the board to sack him. One libertarian perspective might be that, since no negative rights were infringed, this was an entirely defensible use of social pressure to enforce social norms—Eich contributed to a proposal that many libertarians believe would restrict the rights of gays. For this perspective, the Eich situation is proof that state intervention is not needed to achieve socio-political equality for groups considered oppressed. It's very very interesting that many progressives are actually using the rhetoric of thin libertarianism, which they would usually abhor, to defend their position on the issue.
Contrariwise, an alternative "thick" libertarian perspective might hold that people have the right not to be hounded out of their job for opinions they hold and do not enforce on others—by all accounts Mozilla is a highly equal-opportunities place for LGBT people. For this perspective, Eich's resignation is a worrying indication that First Amendment—freedom of expression—rights are disappearing. But confusingly, some would call the hounding position the true "thick" libertarian view, since it says that legal rights alone do not guarantee gays' freedom.
A third perspective might say that although this resignation, considered alone, might not be regrettable, because it advances gays' freedoms, as a rule people should not lose their job for holding certain political perspectives and even actively supporting them. This would hold especially strongly if we agreed that the small donations Eich made were unlikely to actually change anything.
I think all of these perspectives have merit as libertarian responses to what's happened. But whatever the normative issues here, I think the whole situation is much more interesting as an illustration of a positive (i.e. descriptive, not morally loaded) historical trend and tendency that is becoming, in my opinion, more and more obvious. Gay marriage was on almost no one's radar in 1990. In 2000 it was still only an utterly minority idea even among gays.
In 2008 (the same year as Prop 8, and the end of the google ngrams data range in the previous link), US President Barack Obama was elected and specifically opposed gay marriage. Between 2008 and 2014 gay marriage has gone from something a liberal Democrat felt he could not guarantee election without opposing, to something that a chief executive (admittedly a Silicon Valley chief executive, of a particularly "socially aware" firm) has to favour, or at least not outwardly oppose, to keep their job. This is astonishingly rapid.
And various issues suggest that maybe this ousting had little to do with a cost-benefit analysis. Let's assume the best argument in favour of ousting him is that (a) he tipped the balance in favour of anti-gay marriage in the past, and this delayed gay people gaining their deserved marriage rights, and (b) his position at the top of Mozilla will stop it being truly equal to gay employees and consumers. That is, let's assume that the left-leaning people who got Eich overthrown do in fact wish Eich to have meaningful freedom of conscience and speech, but they also think it's fair to censor him if he acts based on those in ways which increase oppression or reduce social welfare.
(This isn't entirely accurate: some do think that people genuinely shouldn't be able to be both employed and hold personal anti-gay marriage perspectives. But I see personal opinions (many of which are genetically heritable) as a much weaker justification for the hounding and the principle of charity dictates I tackle the strongest possible opposing argument here.)
The fact that showing neither (a) nor (b) has even been attempted in any of the myriad of news and commentary I've seen on the issue is telling (I'm open to being refuted here). Indeed, none of the commentary I've seen has even mentioned these issues. And what's more I bet Eich-resignation-advocates wouldn't change their minds if we discovered that Mozilla's currently pro-LGBT policies were impervious to CEO influence, and that his $1,000 did pitifully little to change the outcome of Prop 8, never mind the overall progress of gays' marriage rights.
This suggests to me that this is about policing heresies. This is a doctrinal dispute. I wonder if Eich would still be in his job had he publicly stated regret at his old anti-gay marriage perspective and repudiated it forcefully. I bet he would. And this brings me to the final point: libertarians should care, but not because the instance itself is necessarily a bad thing—an ugly, base, low, cowardly, mean thing certainly, but it might pass a cost-benefit analysis if we really did one—but because of this trend. Progress appears to be an unstoppable juggernaught, and it might be speeding up.