If Brendan Eich lost his job for supporting Prop 8, and James Damore lost his job for writing his famous memo, of course a company can fire someone who flips off the President. For better or worse (my opinion is worse), Internet activists have created strong precedents for private companies to terminate employees who aggrieve the Internet with their off-duty activities.
I won't speak to Damore's essay except to say that I thought it revealed Damore to be somewhat intellectually immature.
But Eich supported something that actively aimed to rob people of the right to pursue their own happiness through marriage. That's a big step beyond giving the bird to one of the richest and most powerful men in the world because he's doing a shitty job as a public servant.
Somehow I don't think Eich and supporters of Prop 8 would characterize it that way. You believe that Eich is evil but it is possible that he is on the correct side of the issue and you are on the incorrect side. In any case he was participating in politics just like everybody does and should. He was fired for disagreeing.
The bicyclist was fired because she worked for a government contractor that felt it necessary to do its own kind of virtue signalling, to ward off the potential for lost business.
I never called him evil. I doubt he is, but I don't know him personally.
What he did, though, is he supported something specifically aimed at curtailing someone else's freedoms for no good reason. It's weird that people on Hacker News seem so okay with this, given how angry people seem to get about the abrogation of freedoms in the world of tech and business.
Imagine Eich supported a law that specifically barred you from marrying the person you loved. And by "supported" I mean "financially supported to the tune of $1000." Would you be so easy-going about it?
Should gay people be so easy-going about someone who wishes to rob them of freedoms the rest of us enjoy?
I think that the idea that there is a "correct" and "incorrect" side is a cognitive trap. If we try to break free of this trap, even for the things where there seems so clearly to be a correct side, we can better understand and talk to each other.
In 2008, there was something like one or two US states and Canadian provinces that allowed same-sex marriage, and a couple or so European countries, and a few cities here and there. (Many others did provide alternatives to marriage, such as civil unions or domestic partnerships).
It wasn't until 2012, I believe, that same-sex marriage achieved enough support in any US state to actually win on the ballot [1]. It wasn't until 2013 that the ball really started rolling in Europe.
It seems kind of ridiculous to fire someone for supporting what was the mainstream position of the vast majority of the Western world at the time.
[1] Washington. That was a memorable vote, as not only did voters here approve same-sex marriage, they also approved recreational marijuana.
"The cyclist actively undermined the freely and fairly elected President of the United States and the only person with a credible plan to make America great again. That's a big step beyond supporting a set of traditions that go back thousands of years and had majority support in California at the time."
