Brendan Eich recently resigned as CEO of Mozilla after OkCupid
drew attention to a donation he made in favor of California’s
Proposition 8, the anti-gay marriage ballot initiative.
Now the magazine Mother Jones has uncovered that
the CEO of OkCupid, Sam Yagan, has himself previously donated money
to a cause unfriendly to gay rights.
According to Mother Jones, in 2004 Yagan donated $500
to Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah), who served in Congress until 2007
and consistently voted against gay-friendly legislation and in
favor of bills that weren’t. Cannon supported a constitutional
amendment to define marriage and legislation to prohibit homsexuals
from adopting.
Mother Jones would maybe like to give the Utah
Republican, and Yagan, some benefit of the doubt:
It’s possible that Cannon’s opinions have shifted, or
maybe his votes were more politics than ideology; a tactic by the
Mormon Rep. to satisfy his Utah constituency. It’s also quite
possible that Yagan’s politics have changed since 2004: He donated
to Barack Obama’s campaign in 2007 and 2008. Perhaps even Firefox’s
Eich has rethought LGBT equality since his 2008 donation. But
OkCupid didn’t include any such nuance in its take-down of Firefox.
Combine that with the fact that the company helped force out one
tech CEO for something its own CEO also did, and its action last
week starts to look more like a PR stunt than an impassioned act of
protest.
Who needs nuance when you can play the
game of outrage?
from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1ipwidN
via IFTTT