As a gay man, I don't think I'll ever be able to like that guy. He spent money to try and prevent me from getting married.

Suppose you believed that California with gay marriage would receive a similar fate to Sodom or Gomorrah, what's morally wrong with spending the money to try and avert that fate? It's nothing personal.

You probably believe in curtailing certain personal freedoms for other reasons and you are morally justified to do so. Again, nothing personal.

I'm going to ignore your crazy theory that California might be subject to biblical catastrophe.

> You probably believe in curtailing certain personal freedoms for other reasons and you are morally justified to do so. Again, nothing personal.

The key difference is that I don't want to limit personal freedoms for a specific class of people. That's when it does get personal.

> I'm going to ignore your crazy theory that California might be subject to biblical catastrophe.

That's not "a theory" I have, that's a sincere belief that religious person might have. Had you been born a century earlier, it probably wouldn't have seemed so crazy to you.

> The key difference is that I don't want to limit personal freedoms for a specific class of people.

You probably do, but you'd just arbitrarily define what is and isn't a (protected) class of people, so I'll leave it at that.

I'm confused by this argument.

Of course the steps from 'insane belief' and 'act perceived as immoral' can involve specific steps of reasoning which seem morally correct within the context of the insane belief. That's not the point, not a good justification for the act, and not something that we as a society should tolerate.

Some kind of incompetence, delusion, or misunderstanding is very often the cause of an immoral act.

It's not only "morally correct" within the context of the belief, it's not immoral in the general context. Doing a wrong thing based on false information but in good faith is not morally wrong. At the very least, you must accept innocence on ground of insanity.

You'd be an asshole for trying to impose your personal beliefs on others.

We're imposing our personal beliefs on everyone all the time, it's just that those beliefs are shared 99% of the time, so we don't notice.

People dig it up from time to time on Twitter.

Scary times we live in.

I’m sure the 1.3 million gay residents of California [1] won’t easily forget how much Eich hates them. That kind of stink doesn’t wash away.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_Unite...

I don’t see how one could conclude Eich has any hate for anyone based on one political donation 12 years ago.

Gay men and women who had worked alongside and under Eich for years at Mozilla were appalled at the controversy and said he had always treated them kindly and was a great friend.

I see how this thread maybe isn’t helpful — except that it demonstrates that people still have hard feeling towards him (though I doubt anyone who knew him personally would, gay or not). But it’s bringing up the old controversy yet again. Sorry.

Do you seriously believe that (as of the time of the prop 8 vote in 2008), 52% of the California electorate actually hated those 1.3 million residents?

Can you not imagine that it's possible to disagree with someone on social issues without hating them?