Henry Ford once said that you could have any colour car you liked so long
as it was black. Among social liberals in America, you can have any
opinion you like so long as it is theirs.
The chief executive of the Mozilla Foundation, which owns the software
company that designed Firefox, was forced to step down after only two
weeks in the job because of one his outrageous opinions. And what was
the outrageous opinion held by the Chief Executive, Brendan Eich, that
was so outrageous that he (by all accounts a brilliant software engineer)
could not be suffered to remain in charge of the company? It was that
marriage was a contractual or sacramental relationship between a man
and a woman, and that therefore homosexuals could not marry. This
opinion is now so outré, so utterly beyond the pale, that nobody in Silicon
Valley should be allowed to espouse it in public and keep his job. Thou
shalt not, after all, suffer a witch to live.
It is claimed by those who demanded his resignation that it was not so
much his opinion that was intolerable, but that he donated $1000 to the
campaign to repeal the law on homosexual marriage in California. This
was nonsense, of course; they wouldn’t have demanded his resignation if
he had donated $1000 to the opposing campaign. Mr Eich has been
treated as if he had pronounced himself in favour of lynching or slavery of
blacks. No decent person can now hold the opinion of marriage that he
held; it is now an opinion that should dare not speak its name.
There was a remarkable piece on the website of Forbes Magazine to the
effect that Mr Eich might rightfully have saved his job if he issued a
recantation and an apology. Forbes is therefore the place at which
billionaire capitalism meets the Maoist Cultural Revolution. The Forbes
article also accused Mr Eich of being not merely morally mistaken but, far
worse, of being ‘on the wrong side of history.’ In other words, homosexual
marriage is not so much a legislative choice as an institution whose
development was teleologically immanent in the whole of human history. It
is what the Second World War was all about, though the soldiers who
fought in it didn’t realise it. Mr Eich therefore belongs in that most
capacious of all containers, the dustbin of history. Fit to govern? No, not to
live.
Freedom is slavery, diversity is uniformity and tolerance is conformity.
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