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Firefox And New CEO Respond To Anti-Gay Charges By Totally Not Addressing Them

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Mozilla, the makers of Firefox, are ignoring the elephant in the room: their new CEO is still anti-gay. He may decided to treat everyone equally, but he doesn’t believe gay people are equal.

Remember Tylenol? It’s a pain reliever, it does basically what Advil, Aleve, and aspirin do: gets rid of headaches. In 1982, Tylenol had a big headache: seven people died after buying bottles of Tylenol laced with cyanide that someone had tampered with. It was tragic — and terrifying. The murderer was never found, but Tylenol’s immediate acknowledgment of the problem and response to the problem was heralded as the reason its brand survived.

The Mozilla/Firefox controversy this week is no where near the size of the Tylenol murders. Let’s make that really clear. People died in the Tylenol murders. No one’s dying because of Firefox. It’s a brand story that teaches an important lesson and has been used as such for decades.

What’s the lesson?

Respond.

Immediately.

When you or your brand are attacked and in trouble, acknowledge the problem, respond, and fix it. Head on.

On Monday, The New Civil Rights Movement was one of the first to report that the people who make the popular Firefox internet browser, Mozilla, promoted Brendan Eich to become their new CEO. Eich is actually a co-founder of Mozilla and also the guy who created/wrote Javascript.

Eich, unfortunately, is also a guy who donated $1000 to support California’s ban on same-sex marriage, Prop 8.

He has never denied the donation, nor has he ever apologized for it.

This week, Firefox/Mozilla have lost some good will and their reputation and brand have been hurt — I think it’s safe to say — because Mozilla’s Board of Directors chose as the face of their company a man who supports discrimination.

This all exploded when Hampton and Michael Catlin, a married same-sex couple who founded Rarebit — a software company that makes smart phone apps like Dictonary! — wrote on their website they were boycotting Mozilla because of Eich’s support of Prop 8.

Finally, late today, Mozilla and Eich responded — only not really.

Eich pulled a fast one. He did not address his support of Prop 8 or his apparent opposition to same-sex marriage equality. He wrongly framed the issue by writing, “I know there are concerns about my commitment to fostering equality and welcome for LGBT individuals at Mozilla” in a a statement on his blog. He promised an “[a]ctive commitment to equality” in the workplace, promised to not discriminate, etc.

Mozilla released a statement that touted its employee benefits that include domestic partnership benefits (oh my — legally required in some states, highly expected in the tech industry), etc. Mitchell Baker, Mozilla’s Executive Chairwoman, also released a statement, one far better, but that’s because she writes:

I am an avid supporter of equal rights for all. I support equal rights for the LGBT community, I support equal rights for underrepresented groups, and I have some pretty radical views about the role of underrepresented groups in social institutions.

But what Eich and Mozilla have not done is apologize for Eich’s donation, or for promoting him, or made any suggestion that Eich has “evolved” on the issue of same-sex marriage or equality.

Which means he hasn’t.

In fact, there was zero mention of same-sex marriage in any of Eich’s or Mozilla’s statements about the outrage being expressed by Eich’s promotion.

The software developers who are boycotting Mozilla wrote a very personal statement on their website, detailing how Prop 8 personally harmed them. They are a same-sex bi-national couple who were prohibited from marrying and from jointly starting a business because of Prop 8.

That’s a big deal.

Here’s what one of them wrote via Twitter yesterday:

It’s unfortunate that Brendan Eich not only doesn’t support marriage equality, but actually donated money to ban it. That’s a huge statement in and of itself.

Brendan Eich may treat everyone equally, but he doesn’t believe gay people are equal.

And if Mozilla’s employees know that, what does that do to them?

Previously:

Firefox Users Boycott Browser Over New Anti-Gay CEO

Firefox, The Anti-Gay Browser?

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Right-Wingers’ Latest Chick-fil-A Meltdown Proves They Have ‘Officially Jumped the Shark’: Morning Joe Panel

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MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Donny Deutsch mocked conservatives for running the “woke” hysteria into the ground.

Ron DeSantis and other Republicans have screeched about the so-called “woke agenda,” which they warn will undermine American values and put children at risk from all manner of threats, but the “Morning Joe” host said most voters simply don’t care about that manufactured issue.

“Joe Biden, 350 pieces of bipartisan legislation signed, and Ron DeSantis and everybody else is talking ‘woke, woke, woke, woke, woke,'” Scarborough said. “Again, something that I said on this show and I heard a lot about from liberals, even, in 2021. You’re not hearing it, again, in part because there have been some corrections. You have the head of Berkley Law School, Yale Law School, Stanford Law School going, ‘Hold on, hold on, we’re not going to let these woke mobs get in the way of free speech.’ They’re saying it at the most elite law schools in America, so common-sense Americans are going, ‘Okay, there may still be a problem, but they’re working on it,’ and yet these Republicans are all acting like it’s 2019, 2020 and they just keep freaking out. Well, Joe Biden is talking about job training and signing bipartisan bills.”

Conservatives have turned against Chick-fil-A for hiring a vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion — which actually happened over a year ago but largely escaped notice until recently — and Deutsche said that was a nadir for “woke” hysteria.

READ MORE: ‘Cowards’: Soledad O’Brien rips former CNN colleagues for silence as Chris Licht wrecks the network

“The ‘woke’ movement officially jumped the shark,” he said. “Joe, you touched on this earlier with the Chick-fil-A move. Right-wing company, I don’t say that negatively, very family values, closed on Sundays, the head of the — [company chairman] Dan Cathy came out against same-sex marriages. They’re very conservative. Now, all of a sudden — you’re right, very conservative, obviously a great company, and they came under fire they have a DEI initiative, diversity, coming under fire from right-wing groups. That’s the official moment that ‘woke’ officially jumped the shark and put Fonzie on skis in Honolulu.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

Image by Hector Alejandro via Flickr and a CC license

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RIGHT WING EXTREMISM

Fox Host Says Democrats Don’t Believe in Heaven So They Play ‘Hard’ to ‘Perfect’ Earth

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Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy blamed the differences between Republicans and Democrats on religious beliefs about Heaven.

On Sunday’s Fox & Friends program, co-host Pete Hegseth argued religion was liberating because people could realize they aren’t perfect. A video clip of the moment was shared on social media.

“It changes the way you look even at politics,” Campos-Duffy agreed. “And sometimes, you know, we look at how hard on the left they play. They really play for keeps. They play in a way that’s very, you know, a lot of times conservatives look at it and go, why don’t we play as hard as them?”

The Fox News host said Democrats were trying to perfect the Earth because they did not believe in Heaven.

“Well, for them, where we live right now, this place, Earth is it,” she opined. “So everything’s on the line here for them. They think, as you said, they can perfect this Earth. Those of us who have faith don’t believe that. And we believe how we act here determines where we go after. And so we had to behave.”

“And so even in politics, we don’t, you know, we act within those moral limits,” Campos-Duffy insisted. “And you know, the ends justify the means is sort of the rules for radicals. That’s not how Christians act.”

Watch the video below from Fox News or at the link.

 

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Extremist Group Targets Florida High School’s Yearbook Over Inclusion of LGBTQ Students Section

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The publication of a Florida high school yearbook that included an LGBTQ section has drawn rebuke from a conservative group, The Orlando Sentinel reports.

Lyman High School’s 256-page yearbook includes two pages that highlight the school’s LGBTQ students and features gender identity terms such as “genderfluid” and “nonbinary.”

The Seminole County Public Schools in response to the criticism is offering to issue refunds or reprint the yearbook without the LGBTQ section that the conservative Seminole County Moms for Liberty claims is offensive.

“They shouldn’t have any sexual definitions in a yearbook,” the group’s chapter chair Jessica Tillmann told The Sentinel.

“This is a yearbook that goes to every student as young as 14.”

The school’s yearbook is stirring controversy for a second straight year after the district in 2022 considered putting stickers over photos of a student walkout protesting the so-called “don’t say gay” law, the report said.

The Sentinel’s Skyler Swisher reports that “An LGBTQ+ section in this year’s yearbook includes a picture of members of the student’s Gay-Straight Alliance, definitions of key LGBTQ+ terms, a passage on the evolution of pronouns and a profile of a student who advocates for the LGBTQ+ community.”

Danielle Pomeranz, the school yearbook’s faculty advisor, isn’t on board with the district’s decision to remove the LGBTQ content.

“They are definitions,” Pomeranz told The Sentinel.

“They are not teaching anything about sex at all. … Nobody is teaching anybody about sex acts. It is ridiculous.”

Pomeranz has since resigned from her position in the district, citing in part the Sunshine State’s political climate and an unsupportive district, the report said.

“We’ve always had the LGBTQ+ spread in there,” she said.

“Our job as journalists and members of the yearbook staff is to provide coverage of the entire school and that includes all of the communities, including the LGBTQ+ community.”

Read the full article here.

Image via Shutterstock

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