Mother Jones: OkCupid Push Against Mozilla CEO Looking More Like a PR Stunt Than a Protest
Brendan Eich recently resigned as CEO of Mozilla after OkCupid drew attention to a donation he made in favor of California's Proposition 8, the anti-gay marriage ballot initiative.
Now the magazine Mother Jones has uncovered that the CEO of OkCupid, Sam Yagan, has himself previously donated money to a cause unfriendly to gay rights.
According to Mother Jones, in 2004 Yagan donated $500 to Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah), who served in Congress until 2007 and consistently voted against gay-friendly legislation and in favor of bills that weren't. Cannon supported a constitutional amendment to define marriage and legislation to prohibit homsexuals from adopting.
Mother Jones would maybe like to give the Utah Republican, and Yagan, some benefit of the doubt:
It's possible that Cannon's opinions have shifted, or maybe his votes were more politics than ideology; a tactic by the Mormon Rep. to satisfy his Utah constituency. It's also quite possible that Yagan's politics have changed since 2004: He donated to Barack Obama's campaign in 2007 and 2008. Perhaps even Firefox's Eich has rethought LGBT equality since his 2008 donation. But OkCupid didn't include any such nuance in its take-down of Firefox. Combine that with the fact that the company helped force out one tech CEO for something its own CEO also did, and its action last week starts to look more like a PR stunt than an impassioned act of protest.
Who needs nuance when you can play the game of outrage?
