(If his personal beliefs do pollute his work then do as you will, run the guy out of town on a rail if you must)
Just a disclaimer: I fully support discrimination against bigots such as refusal of service.
I'm not even sure what I think about it, but I can't reject silverstorm's point out of hand.
Why, specifically, is it okay for Eich to fund the oppression of homosexuals and not okay for people to say that they find that upsetting and therefore would prefer not to use or serve products he's associated with? What level would his bigotry have to ascend to before people were no longer obligated to use these products or, at least, not tell anyone they're not using them and why?
"big·ot·ry ˈbigətrē/Submit noun 1. bigoted attitudes; intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself."
Gays who want to oppress anyone for not thinking like them are also being bigots by that definition. Marriage has been between a man and a woman throughout the history of humans. I think Gays should have legal equality. They can not usurp a word that has had such a clear meaning throughout the core existence of humankind.
I see this repeated often in these discussions, and it's a breathtakingly arrogant assertion. How the hell do you know? Have you spent years studying anthropology?
In fact, sexual mores have varied quite substantially throughout the thousands of years of human history and the hundreds of civilizations that have come and gone in that time. I think if you actually look into the matter, you'll discover this "fact" you keep repeating is anything but.
Retreating to dictionary definitions does not make a point, nor does asserting that prejudice by an oppressive class against an oppressed class is the same as the converse.
Well, yea, actually, it made it quite clearly, hence my post.
>> nor does asserting that prejudice by an oppressive class against an oppressed class is the same as the converse.
Oppression is oppression, elegance and articulation do not change that. Your attempt to say that my belief and understanding of the meaning if a single word describing a single legal institution is oppression underestimates what I was stating originally; that we who believe and understand the meaning of the word marriage are being oppressed by a very vocal, sometimes very vocally belligerent and socially irreverent group in context minimally and notwithstanding.
Are you being beaten to death for your sexual orientation? Are you having your fostered children of many years removed from your family? Are you being denied the right to be with your spouse in the hospital or on their deathbed?
You are in no sense "being oppressed". This is the way in which your "oppression" is not oppression, and one of many reasons why retreating to dictionary definitions of words is a cowardly, useless way to argue.
In the same sense, one might say that overthrowing a fascist dictator is more morally justified than overthrowing a peaceful democracy to install said dictatorship. Both are violence against a government, but they exist in different moral contexts.
Pretty much every law in the common law system, including the constitution, is a law that denies rights to subsets of the population.
The only question is whether you are in favor of such regulation. I'm personally not in favor of regulating homosexuality or marriage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Michael Walzer asks "Should we tolerate the intolerant?" He notes that most minority religious groups who are the beneficiaries of tolerance are themselves intolerant, at least in some respects. In a tolerant regime, such people may learn to tolerate, or at least to behave "as if they possessed this virtue". Philosopher Karl Popper asserted, in The Open Society and Its Enemies Vol. 1, that we are warranted in refusing to tolerate intolerance. Philosopher John Rawls concludes in A Theory of Justice that a just society must tolerate the intolerant, for otherwise, the society would then itself be intolerant, and thus unjust. However, Rawls also insists, like Popper, that society has a reasonable right of self-preservation that supersedes the principle of tolerance: "While an intolerant sect does not itself have title to complain of intolerance, its freedom should be restricted only when the tolerant sincerely and with reason believe that their own security and that of the institutions of liberty are in danger."