Same can be said about militant gays/christians/atheists/whatever.
If you didn't notice, cramming those things down customer's throats results in the employee getting fired.
I don't mean to strawman so I'll ask this hesitantly: Are you taking a "not tolerating intolerance is hypocritical" stance?
Of course not. Fundraise the fuck out of turning public opinion in your favour, knocking down every piece of legislation this guy supports, call him out when and where he preaches his intolerance and, in fact, participate in an active campaign to fight it.
The problem here isn't that people might not tolerate his intolerance, it's that people have apparently decided they aren't going to tolerate
people who disagree.
Here's the thing - I'm not saying this guy doesn't deserve to lose his job (from my understanding, Mozilla management is shit and they and the board all deserve to go). I'm not saying people shouldn't fight against the homophobes.
I'm questioning whether taking someone down, like this, for this sort of thing, is "good". Maybe it's a necessary evil because the ends justify the means, that's a situation where something can be ugly, but still the right decision. But I can't even see
that here - what was the practical gain of doing this? What are the
repercussions?
It reminds me of the old question - You're running as a progressive in a conservative state. You get details that you're super-conservative male opponent is involved in a gay affair. If you out him, publicly, you are a shoe in - all you need to do is plaster the airwaves with ads that imply that people shouldn't vote for this guy because he is gay, and you're going to win.
Do you do it?
Either way, in my opinion, the result is
ugly. It's a horrible, evil thing to do. That you're doing it to a person who does not mind doing evil horrible things may make the act
justified, but it doesn't make it any less
ugly, if you understand what I'm trying to say here. You're normalizing outing gay people for personal benefit, while reinforcing and relying on people's negative opinions about gays. Even if it's
worth it, it doesn't mean it's
good.
To me, this is the same situation - I don't like this guy. I think he's a bad guy. But trying to get people fired for having a political opinion you see as wrong... that's horrendous looking, to me. It's just ghastly. Even if it can be justified, is that something we
want a precedent for? Is it something who's precedent we want to reinforce? Can we make a coherent argument as to why it should apply in
this case but not in all the
other cases where people will surely want to do it?
It's the hatred in the unambiguous support for this I've seen that bothers me - it's not people arguing "it's worth it", it's people arguing "this is a good thing even if it has no good consequences. Punishing someone for disagreeing with me
about a single thing, no matter what else he has done or who he is, is enough in and of itself to be a good thing". Is that something people can really read and not think is a horrible opinion to hold?