I’ve written a fair amount about pluralism lately, in the context of debates about what kind of accommodations might be made for religious institutions and communities in a public-policy landscape that’s likely to become increasingly hostile to some of their beliefs. That discussion offers an interesting background to the defenestration of Brendan Eich, briefly the CEO of Mozilla, for his past donation to the ballot initiative that (temporarily) re-established the conjugal/opposite-sex definition of marriage in California. I say “interesting” because while Eich’s ouster has been cited (by some liberals as well as conservatives) as a kind of left-wing escalation in the culture war, there are some ways in which his fate might be reasonably seen as less troubling, to principled pluralists and religious conservatives both, than some of the other cases and controversies currently in the news.
By this I mean that pluralism is not a one-way street: If you want (as I do) a culture where Catholic schools and hospitals and charities are free to be Catholic, where evangelical-owned businesses don’t have to pay for sterilizations and the days-after pill, where churches and synagogues and mosques don’t have to worry about their tax-exempt status if they criticize “sexual modernity,” you also have to acknowledge the rights of non-religious institutions of all sorts to define their own missions in ways that might make an outspoken social conservative the wrong choice for an important position within their hierarchies.
Now Mozilla is not, of course, a liberal advocacy group or a gay rights organization. But having views that are controversial within a community you aspire to lead can be problematic even when the community isn’t officially organized around that particular issue. And where an issue like same-sex marriage intersects with an environment like the tech industry/northern California, it is hardly surprising that there would be some sort of controversy around elevating a religious conservative to a public, face-of-the-company position, and it’s hardly outrageous — again, from the point of view of pluralism — that such a controversy might end with a resignation.
Which is not to say that I disagree with the various pro-same-sex marriage writers, from Andrew Sullivan to Will Saletan to Conor Friedersdorf, who reacted very strongly against the way that Eich was pressured to resign. Indeed, I agree completely — but I think that what they’re reacting against, and what should be troubling to pluralists, are the details of the case rather than the principle involved.
That is: Had Eich been, say, an outsider to Mozilla, a hotshot brought in to shake things up, and had he also been an outspoken critic of gay rights or a massive Koch-style donor to social conservative causes, it would be fair to say that his appointment was simply a tone-deaf mistake, a pointless affront to the political sensibilities of the community in which Mozilla lives and moves and hires.
But of course he was actually an insider, a man well known to that community, who (in addition to the minor feat of inventing Javascript) apparently had never had any kind of personal insensitivity or discrimination alleged against him. And his offense was not to be an outspoken social conservative, a major donor to Focus on the Family, a public paladin for the religious right … it was to have made a modest donation six years ago to a ballot initiative that won a majority at a time when most Democratic politicians still defended the traditional definition of wedlock.
Or rather, it was to have made that donation and then to have refused, six years later, to publicly recant: While he twisted in the wind, Eich made a lot of promises about diversity and sensitivity and the gay and lesbian and transgendered communities, but he declined to say, “I have changed my mind, marriage is not the union of one man and one woman.” And for that refusal, he had to go.
So what we have here is not an example of an explicitly ideological institution making an explicitly ideological choice. (Indeed, Mozilla’s post-resignation statement rambled on an on about how non-ideological their culture is supposed to be — open to all forms of diversity, open to free speech and conversation and debate, etc.) Nor is it example of the usual ways (a mix of self-selection, social pressure, groupthink and subtle discrimination) in which conservative views have traditionally been disfavored in Silicon Valley or Hollywood or academia. Nor, finally, is it a case where a would-be leader went out of his way to publicly promote values noxious to his community and team and suffered the inevitable consequences.
Instead, it’s a more stringent requirement for conformity, with a much more stringent test: “Even though we insist that this is not an ideologically-motivated organization, still we have to ask
— have you ever done anything to support the older definition of marriage, and do you privately still believe that it has merit?” (Eich failed the first half, obviously, and
on the second he seems to have taken the Thomas More, qui tacet consentire approach … but that did not suffice.)
This mix of stringency in requirements and expansiveness in application obviously raises certain issues for any social conservative currently employed in a high-ranking position, or interested in ascending the career ladder, in many elite professions. (Could a figure like Robert George get tenure at Princeton today? I’m not so sure.) But it also raises issues for institutional pluralism more broadly, because the way people behave within their own communities when a debate is seen to be settled often has at least some connection to how they behave when given legal and political power in society writ large. That is, while it’s true that a healthy pluralism inevitably involves community norms and community policing in some form, I suspect that an elite culture that enforces the new norms on marriage this strictly, and polices its own ranks this rigorously, is likely to find reasons (and, indeed, is already adept at finding them) to become increasingly anti-pluralist whenever it has the chance to enforce those same norms on society as a whole.
Or to bring it to a still-blunter point: In the name of pluralism, and the liberty of groups as well as individuals, I would gladly trade the career prospects of some religious conservatives in some situations — not exempting myself from that list — if doing so would protect my own church’s liberty (and the liberties of other, similarly-situated groups) to run its schools and hospitals and charities as it sees fit. But the specifics of the way that Eich was treated, the demands made and the tests imposed, makes me a little more worried that such a deal, and such a pluralism, may not ultimately be on offer.