Livre d'Or

Yeah, I am with you that calling the petition hate speech is a bit much. I generally sympathize with tim's political views but I find his belligerent style very offputting. I imagine that's even more the case for you, you really really hate the language of privilege and oppression. For my part I think the world needs nukers as well as appeasers, so I try not to put too much weight on my own discomfort with that style of responding to homophobic opinions.

I basically don't care what a homophobic preacher or UKIP think; they're not going to support my causes no matter what arguments I martial. And I have little patience for trying to make this kind of debate into a free speech issue. Yes, fine, Gerv has the right to express his opinions about gay marriage, but the rest of us have the right to express our opinions that he is wrong and offensive. Duh.

The issue with Mozilla is really complicated and part of the problem here is that a bunch of people are weighing in who don't really understand what Planet Mozilla is, and whether Gerv could be said to be speaking in an "official" capacity. Planet is not just a blog aggregator, it's something more than that, and to a large extent I think this is what the debate's really about, not about whether same-sex marriages should be called marriages or not. Which is rather a minor issue for the rest of the internet, but of course people like to weigh in about that kind of thing, that's the nature of internet debates. I don't think there's a symmetry between left-wing causes and homophobia, or atheism and homophobia, though. I would expect Mozilla, if they wanted to create a positive, diverse working environment, to allow people to post saying they want to raise taxes for social welfare programmes, and to post saying that God doesn't exist (both of which would doubtless offend people like Gerv, but people have to deal with being offended in a diverse workplace). I would not expect them to allow posts saying that Christians are all horrible bigots and should be stripped of their rights. But it's perfectly possible to hold left wing and / or atheist views without in any way going near that kind of thing, and I think it's a mistake to concede the argument that the mere expression of unbelief or caring about social justice is inherently oppressive to Christians or conservative people.