I'm a vaguely left-libertarian-ish person, so my view on gay marriage is that I cannot see a reason why it should not be allowed and, beyond that, it's pretty much none of my business. But I do find it difficult to draw a line at which marriage should not be allowed. People like to raise the issue of polygamy, and I can't honestly think of a good reason why polygamous marriage shouldn't be allowed either. The examples after that get more troublesome: should a man be allowed to marry his own daughter? How about siblings marrying each other? In the realms of absurdity, we might consider marriage to non-humans, to dead people, to inanimate objects or to imaginary beings (and, since this is HN, we should probably give serious thought to people marrying their devices, or at least the AIs that may inhabit them in the future).

Part of me doesn't really care - I have no particular interest in "protecting the sanctity of marriage" because I think that personal relationships are personal and don't require anyone else's validation. But I can't imagine that society as a whole would agree with me on that. For better or worse, we need some way of delineating what is considered to be acceptable marriage and what isn't, and this is largely an arbitrary choice. You can probably ground it in the notion of consent, which would rule out marriage to dead people, imaginary beings, non-humans (that we've encountered so far) and inanimate objects. It would still leave polygamous and incestuous marriage open, but maybe that's OK (and rare enough that nobody really needs to care).

So, as a disinterested party I can kinda see where the anti-gay-marriage people are coming from, in an anthropological observation sense - they're aware that an arbitrary choice must be made somewhere, they've made their choice and they don't see why they should change. If you truly believe that marriage is something that can only happen between a man and a woman, that it's sanctified by tradition and some ineffable spiritual wisdom, then you won't think of yourself as denying homosexual couples the right to marry. You'll be utterly perplexed by the fact that they want to - you'd see it as a doomed enterprise, people pretending to be what they cannot. The thing is, this has really nothing to do with what you think of homosexual people in general, you just believe that they can't marry, in much the same sense that they can't fly, shape-shift or shoot lightning from their fingertips. It just doesn't work! Weirdly, civil partnerships can still make perfect sense because there's an obvious reason for them to exist (people can still love each other and spend their lives together even if they're not, or can't become, married).

I'm probably being overly-charitable here. Some anti-gay-marriage people are probably homophobic bigots who just enjoy telling people what to do and punishing those who aren't exactly like them. Even the ones who have some internally-consistent reasoning behind their position and don't otherwise dislike or discriminate against gay people can be faulted for their sheer lack of empathy. In the end there is no point in trying to argue the specifics because everything hinges on whether you believe marriage between two people of the same sex is a legitimate concept. I'm a little bit ambivalent about this, because I don't really see a reason why there couldn't be some special club for straight people who want to commit to each other, and traditionally that's what marriage has been. I suspect, however, that there will be no great call for such an institution to be created, now that "marriage" is open to everyone.

Now, on the actual matter-in-hand, I don't think Brendan Eich deserves to be vilified. Not because I think he's right about gay marriage (I don't), but because I believe that people are entitled to think and act how they like when in private, and they should conversely be held to rigorous standards in their public conduct. We're all adults and we're all capable of putting our private beliefs aside when conducting a public role. The fact that Eich's views are public should actually make it easier to hold him to account for his public actions as Mozilla CEO. Debates about gay marriage are good for our society, but it's the debate about the issues that is healthy, not the attacks on particular individuals.

I must admit that his stance makes me think less of him as a person. But it doesn't really make me think less of him as a technologist, advocate for Mozilla, or CEO. If he uses his position to advance an exclusionary political agenda then I would think very much less of him as a CEO, and that's where the distinction between private beliefs and public actions is relevant for me.