If you need to preface it with "If X had happened" then it's not an example of something happening.

I think that's the core of our disagreement. I'm not in favor of harassing Eich with 2 AM phone calls or flaming bags of dogshit on his front porch or whatever it was that people were doing to his family. But I'd like to think that if I worked for Mozilla, I'd do whatever I could to get him ejected from the company, or at least from my part of the org chart. He doesn't need my sympathy, after all, with over half the voting population of California on his side. I'm sure he'll land on his feet.

Do you even realize how big of an assumption this is? "I suspect" is definitely not sufficient to justify ruining people's careers. To the contrary, it's emblematic of mob justice.

Specifically demanding that I provide proof that the events I'm concerned about have in fact happened is a great example of sealioning. It's a DoS attack against the conversation. You'll either move the goalposts as soon as I cite anything concrete, or dismiss highly-plausible predictions as merely hypothetical, as you've done here.

I could have cited the story behind Loving v. Virginia or any number of similar cases, but in past debates, people on the other side of the fence have answered that by saying that unlike race, sexual orientation is a choice and consequently shouldn't be protected by law. So then, all of a sudden, I have to defend that proposition.

The general rhetorical strategy you've employed here is to force your opponent to think multiple moves ahead, as in a chess game. That's fine in a classical game where there's a well-defined victory condition that we can both strive to reach, but in the game of direct democracy we're literally making up the rules as we go along. Eich's side fights dirty, so is it surprising that the other side thinks it has to as well?

Secondly, canceling is a pretty shitty way to fix this problem, don't you think? So shitty you might even call it counterproductive? You don't think this is going to lead to more bottled up hate down the road? You don't think this kind of thing is exactly what got Trump elected in the first place?

That's certainly a valid threat. We'll see how it plays out this time around. Fox News is a helluva drug, and it's entirely possible that we're beyond redemption as a society. Re-electing Trump will certainly reinforce that notion, but I don't think it's going to happen. Americans are good at taking down cardboard heroes once we catch on.

Still, I won't lie -- when I looked up the voting statistics on Prop 8 for the earlier reply, I was pretty bummed. The proposition received an order of magnitude more 'yes' votes, in California of all places, than I thought it did. Eich's position is a strong one.

Regarding your last sentence - you obviously support gay marriage, do you think you're open minded? Are you really?

A few years ago I'd have agreed with you in principle here, but recent events have convinced me that Karl Popper's 'paradox of tolerance' is a valid concern.

https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/paradox-tolerance supports your position by quoting Popper himself: "I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise." The trouble is that religion trumps rational argument. Seven million people voted for Proposition 8 because people like Eich told them they would go to hell if they didn't. Being "open-minded" enough to tolerate this point of view appears to be suicidal, because any sort of atrocity can be justified the same way.

(Note that nothing I've written requires me to support gay marriage, any more than what you've written requires you to be against it. But when you're making up the rules for either a game or a government, it's best to think abstractly.)