SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- New Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich came under fire by OkCupid and internal employees after his donations to support California’s Proposition 8, a bill that intended to strike down marriage equality in the state, were uncovered in public listings. Eich issued a statement Monday confirming Mozilla’s commitment to diversity and equality despite his personal loathing of such things. Late Monday evening, however, anti-gay “heterequality” activists launched their own stunning attack against Eich, disavowing themselves of his support and accusing him of hypocrisy for frequently experimenting with “same-origin policy” during his development of JavaScript.
Online match-making site OkCupid openly protested the use of the Firefox web browser amid revelations of Eich’s anti-gay stance and offered users links to download several alternatives, affirming its philosophical support of gay marriage and the same-sex couples that make up eight-percent of its business. It stopped short, however, of urging a ban on JavaScript, which Eich invented and which is utilized by all of the other recommended browsers. Interestingly, several key elements that power OkCupid’s web pages and forms also run JavaScript.
When asked about this perceived conflict of interest, spokespeople from OkCupid said: “Let’s not be silly. That would be like if Google had bankrolled Prop. 8. You know, if that were the case, you’d stop using Gmail or Drive or Chrome, not Search or Android OS. We’re not trying to destroy the Internet or impede the march of commerce. We’re merely demonstrating support for nearly ten-percent of our revenue generating clients in a symbolic and fiscally responsible way. We’re OkCupid, not OkCheGuevara.”
Business experts agreed. OkCupid’s gesture, they pointed out, was a highly effective public relations campaign that required no capital expenditure, whereas allocating funds from the corporate coffers to finance LGBT lobbies, associations and political advocacy groups could chip away at profits.
Responding to OkCupid’s slings and arrows, Mozilla representatives told the press: “Mozilla supports equality for all, including marriage equality for LGBT couples. No matter who you are or who you love, everyone deserves the same rights and to be treated equally. It is in this same spirit that we embrace Mr. Eich and his right to bigotry and insensitivity, and ask you to treat him equally regardless of whom he loves...a group that ostensibly does not include homosexuals, but is most likely populated with frightened evangelists who enjoy protesting LGBT weddings or funerals, and who revel in the idea that these people will someday burn in Hell.”
Countless Mozilla employees also took to social media to voice their dissent with Eich’s myopic views, with some directly calling for his resignation. Tweets posted from Mozilla employees ranged from concern about the direction of the company to demands for Eich to step down. All the messages carried common themes about Mozilla’s mission to promote openness, empowerment and freedom of expression. Their concerns, similarly, focused on the new leader’s ability to champion that vision by representing the values of diversity in his actions.
But in a strange twist Monday night, anti-gay conservatives in the technology sector joined their progressive counterparts in deriding Eich’s contributions to Proposition 8.
“In our opinion, Brendan Eich donated money to support a legitimate marriage protection bill for illegitimate reasons,” complained Gregory Flugelnusse, CTO for San Narciso’s foremost conservative political action committee, the Association of Republican Seniors, Wives, Young Professionals and Entrepreneurs (ARSWYPE).
“His code tells the real story, and it’s pretty gay code,” Flugelnusse added. “Pretty gay, kinky code, actually.”
Flugelnusse was referring to Eich’s reliance on a homogeneous web application security model that would dominate the traditional heterogeneous protocol that came before it.
“Prior to 1995, all browsers implemented some form of the traditional cross-origin policy, as the creator intended,” Flugelnusse explained. “After that, as the web moved from static content to more complex applications, Eich and his beatnik, heathen friends at Netscape decided to abandon the true word of the creator and start messing around with forbidden abominations. He perverted cross-origin policy -- the most important cornerstone of digital society -- into this same-origin sin. How can Eich spend his personal money fighting gay marriage when he essentially blessed it and fought for it in his scripting?”
Prior to the integration of same-origin policies, traditional couples were paired from different origins who were encouraged to send and receive packets between each other. But then Eich began experimenting with taboo structures, going so far as to enforce a same-origin policy that not only permitted objects of the same origins to share each other’s resources, but ultimately restricted them from engaging in relationships with those of other origins.
“This is disgusting,” Flugelnusse said. “Eich went out of his way to destroy traditional interactions between the Xs and the Ys, so to speak. Now only Xs can congregate with other Xs -- because, if you believe Eich’s blasphemy, traditional heterogeneous unions are ‘dangerous’ and increase exposure to ‘malicious attacks’ and open the door for some perverted thing called ‘clickjacking.’ But in Eich’s orgiastic, homogeneous sin-fests, members of the same origins are allowed to frolic together in ungodly, reckless abandon. They can access each other’s DOM with no restrictions… I feel dirty even repeating that. But of course, they’re forbidden to access the DOM of a different origin, which the manual tells us is the righteous path.”
Given Eich’s rather bohemian past and his lurid history of same-origin policies, Flugelnusse believes the guilt of Eich’s latent tendencies -- combined with a desire to rid himself of what conventional society would deem deviant behavior -- led him to make the donation to Prop. 8 supporters.
“Who’s the biggest zealot?” Flugelnusse asked. “The addict, that’s who. The reformed sinner. The loudest praise on the pulpit often springs from the former junkie or prostitute. The most obnoxious non-smoker burned through two packs-a-day at one point in time. The driest, soberest critic of alcoholism was once a sloppy, promiscuous drunk. And for all of Eich’s bluster in opposition to same-sex couplings, all I hear is that same recovering addict protesting too much, to paraphrase Shakespeare.”
2014. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. See disclaimers.