Should Traditional-Marriage-Only Supporters Have a Voice?
Little more than a month after Mozilla Firefox CEO Brendan Eich resigned, following a revelation that he had donated $1,000 to a 2008 campaign seeking to ban same-sex marriage in California, same-sex marriage supporters are actively debating whether supporters of traditional marriage should always be equated with hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.
Last week, over 50 academics and intellectuals published an op-ed entitled Freedom to Marry, Freedom to Dissent: Why We Must Have Both, where they pledged support for gay marriage and but also for keeping the public square respectful towards those who disagree with their perspective.
"Much of the rhetoric that emerged in the wake of the Eich incident showed a worrisome turn toward intolerance and puritanism among some supporters of gay equality—not in terms of formal legal sanction, to be sure, but in terms of abandonment of the core liberal values...