Comment by BrendanEich
8 years ago
So you concede your assertions about "legal limbo" were false -- good. That's progress.
Moving on to assert "incredible amounts of harm" as caused by me among a majority of Californians who supported both Prop 8 and the prior work of Mark Leno et al. on Domestic Partner Law, California's form of civil unions -- which as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_partnership_in_Califo... says, and as Leno said at the time, ensures equivalent positive rights under state law for all -- is nonsensical.
We were allies when we supported civil unions. Obama was on side of civil unions in 2008, and likely strategically lying that he believed marriage was one man and one woman. Then the goalposts moved, and incredible yet heretofore invisible harm was being done? Nonsense.
Fixating on "religion" is also nonsense. Theft is against the law. Major religions teach that theft is sinful. Does this mean religious people are enforcing personal views on other people? Of course not. Atheists (I know some; neo-Darwinian evo-biologists) supported Prop 8. People who didn't like the Foucauldian agenda behind the whole thing, or the judicial overreach, or mayors like Newsom overreaching, supported Prop 8. For many and usually coherent reasons, religious or not.
It shows either ignorance or ill will to dismiss both group diversity of thought and individual integrity of thought by labeling views you dislike as "religious", and therefore somehow illegitimate as the basis of action in the public square. Frankly, it is un-American.
You are entitled to your own opinions, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan quipped, but not your own facts. The fact is Californians including me who supported Domestic Partner Law did not do "incredible amounts of harm" up to May 2008. We did not suddenly start doing harm in June 2008 when Prop 8 got on the ballot. We did not do harm when the majority passed it.
Federal law, DOMA -- an unconstitutional power grab against the states by congress and a pandering president -- caused hardships for Domestic Partners in Californians, but Californians could do nothing about that Bill Clinton era law.
As my search link shows, you've been calumniating me on HN for years, while trying unsuccessfully to stay silent on the topic. I'm not optimistic you'll stop now, but that search also shows I've tried engaging in good faith. Here I am again. Instead of silently dropping refuted assertions and moving the goalposts, e.g., to vague "incredible amounts of harm" imponderables, how about making an explicit statement of whom I harmed, how I harmed them, and how I can make amends.
The anti-gay community has a long, long history of belittling and harming gays[1,2]. Prop 8 was a continuation of degrading behavior towards gay people. Advertising claims that gay people want to harm or abuse children directly leads to anti-gay sentiment, which leads to closeting, bullying, and abuse. The campaign you donated to aired these kinds of advertisements[3] and the proposition itself was a direct attempt to maintain gays' second-class citizen status.
I do want to sincerely apologize if I've been misrepresenting your viewpoint. If I have, it was unknowingly. I assumed it was religious, because that's by far the most common objection to it. In all our years of sparring, you still haven't explained why you're opposed to gay marriage, to my knowledge. You always dance around the issue. If you tell me that it isn't based in religion, then I apologize and will immediately stop making that claim. But then what is it? If you're not actually opposed to gay marriage, but rather something like judicial overreach, was the continued harm to gay people worth whatever point it is you wished to prove?
> how I can make amends.
I can't speak to others. For me personally, an apology for supporting the campaign and a statement in support of gay marriage would shut me right up.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_among_LGBT_youth
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-LGBT_bullying
[3] http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/04/04/brendan_eich_s...
(Did you miss the "Update, April 23, 2014" at bottom of [3]?)
I never bullied anyone, so leave that out. Be careful arguing that I'm responsible for others' actions due to systemic problems and biases. That fallacious line of argument cuts in many directions.
Your whole approach, asserting religion only and as if illegitimate, asserting incredible harm ascribed causally to me personally, then moving on after rebuttal without any amendment to your assertions, shows ill will. I'm not going to "dance around" anything with you, and we are nowhere near a common understanding of all our priors.
The best I hope for is try to find common factual ground, which we are doing, slowly.
However, if you can only keep assuming your conclusions and smearing me by association with groups or people I didn't and don't support, I'm out. If you see no way for civil society to function without all the dissenters -- religious or not, we are many -- toeing your line and apologizing for their heresy, then we are definitely done. We can agree that "Error has no rights" and stop now.
I may not agree with you on everything you stand for (or against) but I feel for your position the more I read comments that speak ill of you.
If nothing else, these people come off as sociopathic and it makes me wonder if they are in opposition to you because they feel something immoral has been committed or simply because they just want to let out their hatred into the world.
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I had a response all typed up, but I wiped it, because I'm being unproductive by trying to argue. I should be trying to understand.
My viewpoint is that the only reason to oppose gay marriage is because you believe that gay relationships are inferior to straight relationships. Can you please explain to me a reason to oppose gay marriage other than that? You listed a few earlier:
> People who didn't like the Foucauldian agenda behind the whole thing, or the judicial overreach, or mayors like Newsom overreaching, supported Prop 8.
I don't know what "Foucauldian agenda" means. Sorry.
"Judicial/Newsom overreach" don't make sense to me in the context of a public referendum. These people voted against something they wanted just to prove a point about something else(?); and then what, they were going to vote in favor of it again sometime in the future? Okay, but that's pretty baffling behavior.
I just have a hard time believing anyone in support of gay rights would choose to vote against gay rights and support anti-gay organizations. Maybe you can explain this more for me.
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