My day job is as a scientist. In science, individual researchers put forth many different ideas, some right, some wrong. Over time, we come to a consensus on which ideas are right and wrong, and the right ideas are kept and the wrong ideas are dropped.

However, we don't blackball people who had the wrong ideas: on the contrary, we want to encourage diverse ideas and opinions because it is only through the conflict of these ideas that truth emerges.

I don't want to live in a society where people have to fear for their jobs or a public mob action because they espoused an unpopular opinion. I disagree with Eich's opinion today, but tomorrow I could be in the minority. Yes, the wrong ideas can be harmful, but in my opinion if we have an open marketplace of ideas, rather than the "chilling effects" of political correctness (or religion, or any other force that says that there are unspeakable ideas), the truth will eventually out.

Case in point: gay marriage itself. A few years ago it was a radical idea, now it's just a matter of time before it becomes legal nationwide in the US. Ironically, the only reason there was enough political force to oust Eich is because his viewpoints are now in the minority.

And I don't want to live in a society where we tacitly accept discrimination because it is labeled as political opinion.

There is a huge difference between politics and science. It is a terrible analogy. Scientific hypothesis, by definition, can be tested. If someone is wrong, that can be proven. Even if an entire body of work has been built on a wrong hypothesis, that work can be tossed out or modified in the face of new evidence. It can be painful, sure, but there is a mechanism in place for just such an occurrence.

Law and policy are made of pure, sloppy human thought-stuff. Some things might be testable but, in general, that is not the rule. If we allow a body of work to develop under bad ideas they take on a life, an inertia, of their own. We do not have any generally agreed upon or foolproof mechanisms to dismantle such an edifice. In fact, most of the mechanisms are designed to make them as permanent as possible -- to bolster the image of institution and consistency. We do not have the luxury of suspending our judgement in the political realm.

Would anyone seriously argue that our political system, despite all its flaws, is not better now than when we had slavery, only white male landowners voting, regularly massacred Native Americans and invaded neighbors, and had no union rights or worker protection laws? Would any nitpicker say that because we cannot precisely quantify the degree of betterness that it isn't better?

Every one of those progressive ideas started out as a niche, minority opinion, and many of them were repressed, not by the government, but by social mores. Liberals who seek to repress the opinions of social conservatives -- who, by the way, have lost the war, long-term -- are being profoundly shortsighted, not to say hypocritical.

Finally, I'm not saying that individuals should suspend their judgement. You should feel absolutely safe to speak publicly in favor of gay rights, and, say, donate $1000 to your favorite gay rights organization without the fear of losing your job. But you cross a line when you seek to repress other viewpoints.

All of these things, to you and me, seem obviously like backward movement in terms of general well-being.

We don't hear about these extreme views because they are abhorrent to most people and the people that hold them get ridiculed. Can you not see someone losing their job is they publicly support a return to slavery? Would that be repression of that idea?

I would argue, no, its not. The discourse has reached a societal consensus that slavery is bad. Why? Because it violates some very fundamental rights of human beings. I think we have reached that threshold with the rights of people with various modes of sexual choice.

The trouble with using "societal consensus" to determine which views should be repressed is that sometimes the consensus is wrong. We cannot know a priori whether the majority or minority is right, so we need to protect all viewpoints, even if it means some wrong ones will persist a little longer. It's ok; eventually they will die off -- two generations from now, a anti-gay-marriage person will be almost as rare as a slavery advocate is today.

We absolutely do not have to protect all viewpoints. We need to allow people to have them and their freedom to express them but, in the same motion, we must protect others freedom to express disgust.

We cannot allow the behemoth of government acting as referee and thus control the conversation. But the conversation must be allowed to take its natural course.

1. An idea is self-evidently wrong to the vast majority of educated people; e.g., the earth is flat, slavery is good. In this case, the idea can be safely ignored because it has no political power.

2. A bad idea (from our perspective) has the support of a decent-sized group; e.g., opposing gay marriage. In this case, the idea should be vehemently opposed by reasoned argument and political protest, but I think for the reasons given above that it is unethical and unwise to persecute the advocates of the idea themselves. It's perfectly okay to be disgusted with the idea of suppressing rights for a group of citizens, and to express that disgust.

If a big group believes something differently from me, there must be a reason why. In the case of the majority of Californians who voted in favor of Prop 8, they didn't do so because they are fundamentally evil bigots. They did it (in the most common case) because they have been raised to believe a relatively literal interpretation of the Bible, which if read straightforwardly, condemns homosexuality and sees it as a harbinger of a corrupt society.

Aggressively coming out and calling them bigots and publicly ousting people supporting their viewpoint is not persuasive; given their worldview, it will only strengthen their conviction that society around them is corrupt and harden their resolve. If, on the other hand, we make a reasoned and compassionate case that gay rights are a good idea on libertarian grounds and as a way of maximizing the well-being of our fellow citizens, people will, and have, come around.

So, in short, personal attacks like what happened to Eich are neither ethical nor effective as a persuasive tactic.

If you're the CEO of a company and you are a known bigot, you are a a ticking HR timebomb. Eich can find plenty of jobs in the industry, but he isn't fit to lead as CEO given his prejudices and his unwillingness to admit his mistakes