The Media Research Center has worked up predictable outrage over the ouster of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, displayed most typically in an April 5 NewsBusters post by Tim Graham.
Graham complains about “an obnoxious blog post by Farhad Manjoo in The New York Times,” who points out that “Mozilla is not a normal company. It is an activist organization.” Graham huffs that “activists apparently find it very distasteful to be less than ‘militantly tolerant,'” adding: “In other words, those ‘thoughtful Mozillians’ believed Eich apparently needed to undergo ‘conversion therapy’ and become an ‘ex-Anti-Gay,’ and then he would be ‘rehabilitated.'”
Graham seems to want us to believe that conservative organizations would never behave in such a manner. But is that really true?
Suppose a prominent MRC official was discovered to have donated $1,000 to to an anti-Proposition 8 campaign (Eich got in trouble for donating to a pro-Prop 8 campaign). How many MRC board members would resign, as happened at Mozilla? How harsh would the condemnation be in the right-wing media? How many times would it be described as a betrayal of the MRC’s principles, which prominently includes denigration and hatred of gays and other LGBT individuals?
Would that MRC official last any longer in his job than Eich did? Would he not be encouraged, if not coerced, into leaving? Wouldn’t MRC employees also publish “thoughtful” posts on the subject, all of them concluding with a desire to be rid of this burden? Wouldn’t his former boss, Brent Bozell, express disappointment that he could not could rehabilitate his ideas about gay marriage?
After all, it appears that not hating gays is a disqualification for employment at the MRC. So let’s not pretend that Graham and his co-workers would be any less tolerant if they were in the same situation.