You didn’t actually ask a question, but man, is there a lot of condescension in this. Presenting treating the suppression of other people’s rights as “bad” as a “moral” stance, complete with scare quotes, as if it is something sensible people debate along with optimal tax rates and the existence of numbers over chablis.
I’m an adult but by no means old. I try to make up for my lack of experience by listening to other people. One who has been enlightening here is @Antinous, an excellent old mod from these boards who spoke a lot on this, and hopefully I have echoed some of his insight in these posts.
Because whatever inclinations I had in this direction, he made clear: people like me get to treat this as a moral question. We can debate the philosophy as long as we want; we can grow passionate in our defense of equality or show sympathy to its opponents at our leisure. We can work hard for one side or the other, and then we can stop when we’re tired. In short, we have the luxury of treating it as a sport.
But to LGBT people, this is all in earnest. They debate it knowing that the decisions revolve around them, whether others let them partake in what people like me enjoy by default. They don’t have the privilege of retiring when they get tired of having rocks thrown at them. They are stuck in the fight as long as it is brought to them, and it affects their lives in earnest.
We should at least try to remember that and not imagine this is all some academic argument or disagreement. Trying to harm people is bad, without any quotes; treating that the some people have here, as a matter of opinion or disagreement we need to be balanced on, is much less being open-minded than it is being callous toward the vulnerable people.
Eich is a human being with all the nuances that entails, all the good and bad aspects – and he had decided to use his influence to do real harm to other human beings. And in a way it’s been a sport for him too, because his rights have never been at stake. All he’s suffered is a metaphorical sports injury: he lost a job with an organization whose mission is contrary to what he was doing, because those who do care about other people said they didn’t want to support someone who would try to harm them.
All the comments here of people who have been displeased with this outcome have been trying to gloss over that. It’s all about how dangerous it is to try and enforce matters of opinion, and comparisons to different situations, and how we don’t want to be moral absolutists. Without any acknowledgement of this isn’t a question of his opinions; he was trying to hurt other people.
Tl dr, I think this is all summed up in the quote I started with, which I’m going to repeat because it’s one of my favorites:
Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, yet the frogs do not die in sport but in earnest. – Plutarch
When you look at things like this please try to consider who has what at stake, who is playing and who is surviving. Because without that, talk of opinions and nuances and keeping an open-mind is just so much disdain for the ones getting pelted.
And with that wall of text, I think that is probably all I can say on the subject. Anyone who still thinks this is about punishing someone for having an unpopular opinion needs to grow a heart before I can talk to them anyway.
(puff puff puff)
