The forced resignation of Mozilla CEO Brandon Eich over his support for an anti-gay marriage referendum continued to provoke bitter debate over the weekend. After an initial burst of revulsion even from liberal pundits like Andrew Sullivan over the purge of a businessman from a company over his political beliefs by pro-gay thought police, many on the left have recovered their bearings and are reminding themselves that freedom of speech for me but not for thee has always been their guiding principle. Though some are a bit shame-faced to do so, some liberals have decided that punishing individuals for their personal politics is OK because those who hold opinions contrary to their own are not only wrong but so hateful that their mere presence undermines the efforts of those associated with them.
That this is rank hypocrisy is so obvious that it barely needs to be said. If, say, a liberal business executive were to be ousted from a similar position at a Fortune 500 company because a lot of the shareholders or executives at the business didn’t like the fact that he or she was a supporter of gay marriage or had donated to prominent liberal candidates for office, you can bet your stock portfolio and your mortgage payment that the mainstream media and every left-wing pundit in creation would be anointing such a person for sainthood rather than twisting themselves into pretzels in order to justify Eich’s defenestration, as so many have already done.
But in doing so, some on the left have, albeit unwittingly, stumbled into some truths about First Amendment rights that undermine their positions on an important case under consideration at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Some, like the Guardian’s Mary Hamilton, rightly point out that the First Amendment doesn’t entitle Eich to a job at Mozilla. That is true, and I don’t believe any serious conservative critic of the Mozilla lynch mob has said any different. Mozilla and any other company have a perfect right to hire or fire anyone they like. Anti-discrimination laws don’t require liberals to hire conservatives or vice versa even though injecting political litmus tests into job searches are not conducive to hiring the best people. But when New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote that Eich had to be ousted from his position because Mozilla isn’t an ordinary company, that should have unsettled some on the left who have been mocking the idea that corporations have First Amendment rights. If Mozilla should be able to fire Eich because of his politics, how can liberals also argue with a straight face that Hobby Lobby should have to pay for abortion drugs?
The upshot of Manjoo’s piece was to say that rather than a soulless instrument of the technology business, Mozilla is a unique sort of company with a raison d’être that rises above mere commerce and must be nurtured by an individual who shares a vision of inclusiveness that excludes defenders of traditional marriage and other non-liberal concepts. By refusing to “recant,” as Farhad put it, he had demonstrated his inability to lead the company. As Michelangelo Signorile, the editor-at-large of the HuffPost’s Gay Voices wrote, “It’s about a company based in Northern California that has many progressive employees, as well as a lot of progressives and young people among the user base of its Firefox browser, realizing its CEO’s worldview is completely out of touch with the company’s — and America’s — values and vision for the future.”
That Mozilla’s employees and board members actually think it is consistent with American values or even “freedom of speech” (in the words of the company’s disingenuous announcement of Eich’s departure) to hound out of their midst someone who, though a supporter of gay rights in other respects, may disagree with them about marriage or support conservative candidates says something awful about such a group. But if that’s how they feel, then it’s their right to do so even as many on the outside of their cozy left-wing bubble enclave jeer at a version of “inclusiveness” that demands ideological conformity.
Ironically, Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern thinks conservatives are the hypocrites to complain about this because of the Hobby Lobby case. He thinks conservatives are only for protecting the First Amendment rights of companies when they allow people like the religious owners of the Hobby Lobby chain to oppose the Health and Human Services mandate that would force them to pay for abortion drugs for their employees but not for Mozilla to burn Eich at the stake. Wrong.
Conservatives have been consistent about the rights of corporations. It is the left that has always mocked the notion of First Amendment rights applying to corporations, principally in campaign finance law cases. Conservatives have correctly argued that individuals do not give up their right to political speech when they incorporate or engage in commerce. By claiming, as they now do, that the special culture of Mozilla requires it to root out all unbelievers in gay marriage or supporters of conservatives, but deny that Hobby Lobby has the right to protect its particular culture or the beliefs of its owners, liberals are the ones that are engaging in hypocrisy.
It would be nice if liberals were sufficiently self-aware of their inconsistency to cause them to “recant” and grant Hobby Lobby—which has an individual business culture just as special as the one at Mozilla—the same respect it demands for the Torquemadas who rule the roost in the high-tech sector. But I’m not expecting that to happen. The real problem here isn’t hypocrisy but a liberal mindset that views conservatives as not merely wrong, but evil. Eich’s fate shows that the decline of civility in our political culture may have become irreversible. But that makes it all the more important for the courts to defend the Constitution against the left’s crusade against the First Amendment with respect to political speech and faith.
