Oh, dear. Oh, no. Oh, our shining stars and lacy garters. A corporate chief and motherfucker gave money to the cause of preventing people from having equal rights, and, when people found out about it, they were pissed, so he had to resign or ruin the corporation. Honestly, fretting about some rich asshole who had to step down over his assholishness is a waste of time and energy. Is he still rich? Yeah? Then who the fuck cares.
What's hilarious and sickening at the same time is the line-up of shitheels and cumbuckets on the right who are so very upset because Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich was "hounded" out of his job for giving money to support Proposition 8, which outlawed gay marriage in California (for a bit).
Like, for instance, Newt Gingrich, who said on ABC's This Week, "This is just the most open, blatant example of the new fascism, which says if you don’t agree with us 100%, we have the right to punish you, unless you’re like Hillary [Clinton] and Barack Obama, and you recant." Asked if there was a line that Gingrich would draw, like opposition to interracial marriage, Brave Newt took a brave stand for free speech: "I think the question is do you want to live in an open and tolerant society, or do you want impose your views at the cost of people’s jobs?"
Indeed, Newt Gingrich. A free and open society where people don't lose their jobs. Hell, what do you want? A place where, as he said, "If you’re a young faculty member, in a lot of places, if you’re a young member of a news department, and you have the wrong views, meaning conservative, you have no career." Absolutely not. Faculty members, or anyone, who has the "wrong" views should not be fired for that, opined mighty Newt.
Unless, of course, those views piss off Newt Gingrich. At a 2005 speech at the American Enterprise Institute (motto: "Capitalism is awesome. Let's bomb shit"), the jolly fornicator commented on a radical professor, "Ward Churchill is a viciously anti-American demagogue. He has every right to free speech, and I support his free speech. We should give him free speech by not paying him." Now, let's grant some nuance. Gingrich thought that, as a professor at a public university, "taxpayers" should not fund his speech: "Taxpayers don't have to pay for lunatic professors to have a salary to miseducate their children." But let's not nuance it too much. In one case, he doesn't want anyone fired, not even college faculty members. In an earlier one, fire that fucker.
Oh, the right is, as ever, shit-slickened with hypocrites. John Fund at the National Review (motto: "Massaging our prostates with Buckley's femurs") whined about the "pitchfork persecutors" who targeted Eich for his views. This would be the same John Fund who had no problem with the forced resignation in 2010 of Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod based on things she said (in a ludicrously-edited video), not actions she took.
Even websites with a primary purpose of hounding people into losing their jobs or going insane, Twitchy and Breitbart, have had the balls to get upset about Eich. Seriously, Breitbart, which huffed from James O'Keefe's rancid asshole repeatedly, should feel foolish for saying that "gay activists...destroyed" Eich's career, but that would presume the lampreys who work there feel shame.
The Rude Pundit is of two minds about the whole thing. There's the Andrew Sullivan-ish "This is wrong as a general principle" side. This blog has never shied from defending people who were under attack for their speech, no matter what side they are on, especially when it comes to jokes. (#CancelColbert? Fuckin' seriously?)
But there's another side of the Rude Pundit that's just kind of sick of the shit that we take. We on the left have allowed what we believe to be degraded and dragged through the mud to the point that simply wanting everyone to have health care is equated with terrorism. Yet when the right makes policy out of utterly repellent ideologies, we're supposed to sit back and fight another day. We had to exist for years with "liberal" being a dirty word.
So this side, which is really hard to resist, says, "Fuck you" to the banshees of the right. Yeah, executives in Silicon Valley and people everywhere should be afraid to espouse certain conservative views. "Cut taxes on the wealthy" is one thing. "Climate change isn't proven science" is something totally different. There are dangerously foolish and explicitly harmful things that, if believed, should turn people into pariahs. You believe God shit out the earth in a day? You don't get to have any goddamn role in making economic policy.
We have indulged the children long enough. We have allowed them to run the house, and they have left it filthy and falling apart. Perhaps it's time to give up on our tolerant attempts at convincing them to behave. Perhaps a little punishment is in order.
Oh, dear. You don't think we should act like our opponents? Then content yourself with losing far more battles than you win.
