Intolerance Of Intolerance
I wrote this when the Mozilla founder had to step down for making anti-gay marriage political contributions. To some it was unfair because it constitued free speech.
It was free speech. But it was not unfair. What is unfair is not being able to marry, for both spiritual and practical reasons, the one you love.
What you say through your words or political donations has implications for what jobs you can hold. In light of the times and the now tortured irony of that statement, below is an update to the awkwardly-posed and insufficiently articulate words below.
Let’s say that in 1910 you were opposed to a woman’s right to vote. Let’s say you had contributed financially to opposing that right, likely because you were a man, due to your fear of empowering a gender which gave birth to you—and, for those of you who have ever been loved by a woman—is a gender which is probably part of your salvation and ability to operate in the world.
Let’s say it’s still 1910 and you run a store in Chicago that sold both men and women clothing.
Don’t worry: you don’t have to sell black people clothing yet because you don’t have to let them into your store, or sit with them at the front of the bus. Remember, it’s 1910, there’s still time.
Now, because your position on woman’s suffrage becomes known, even though you weren’t that vocal about it (you made a small donation, years ago), women stop buying clothes from you en masse, and some of your female employees quit. Their reason? They don’t want to buy clothes from someone or work for someone that doesn’t view them to be equal humans (the nerve!).
You are forced to step down by the owner, a rare male women’s suffragist, from running the clothing store because it hurts business by 10%, even though your male customers, who were 90% of your business, don’t much care. Many people lament that your “political” belief wrongly got you fired, because women’s suffrage is a “political” issue and shouldn’t be a part of “business” conversations.
Men tell you in private how bad they feel for you, and even some women (!) come to your defense, saying politics and business shouldn’t mix.
Should politics and business mix?
My view: yes, they absolutely should, when it comes to issues of human justice that affect the people you employ and the people that you transact with. I frankly think this is a beautiful moment, when the human zeitgeist makes it economically impossible or increasingly untenable to hold a “political” position which diminishes freedom on the planet.
It is a sign of progress when someone has to step away from a commercial activity when their unjust “political” view becomes economically untenable. It’s a sign that the world is going to make prejudice uncomfortable for shareholders, which is when real change happens.
Economics usually wins, and when it lines up with freedom, humans should smile.
Bigots, even those slightly bigoted, should increasingly be preempted from holding leadership positions. How else do you think we went from slaves to niggers to Barack Obama?
As for the current direction of the American Presidency, here is something to believe in.
John Rawls only asks of us one thing: imagine a society where you could be born as any of its members, and then design that society from that vantage point.
If you might have been born gay, what would you want?
Would you want to be granted the dignity of marrying someone you love?
What about for your gay children?
Gay marriage is a justice issue, not a political issue. It just looks like it is a political issue because forward progress towards freedom must be achieved by political means.
As of 2015, we made a big step forward. Like women’s suffrage and civil rights before it, it is an injustice we which had to be corrected through politics, which is different than a “political” issue where all viewpoints deserve equal consideration.
It is not a farm subsidy.
In John Rawls we trust.
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.
Ideally citizens are to think of themselves as if they were legislators and ask themselves what statutes, supported by what reasons satisfying the criterion of reciprocity, they would think is most reasonable to enact – John Rawls
