On Firefox and Wedding Photographers
The OK Cupid website is protesting the Mozilla CEO's past donations to anti-gay-marriage campaigns by asking visitors to use something other than Firefox to browse their site. Readers will know that I have actually led a past Equal Marriage effort in Arizona, so while sympathetic to the cause here, I don't think I would go so far as to block a browser to my website. Establishing this precedent that I would boycott services and products based on the political views of company employees (which is the issue here, Mozilla does not have any official position on gay marriage that I know of), I could consume my whole life doing research. And then I would be stuck with questions like "Are the gay marriage opinions of the Firefox CEO better or worse than Google/Chrome's enabling of censorship in China? As I have told some folks before, if I really wanted to do do business only with those who agree with me politically, I would find myself stuck for life listening to a couple of Rush albums and watching Firefly and Wire reruns all day.
But anyway, OK Cupid is a private company and I presume they do this with their owner's approval so all's fair in conducting commerce or choosing not to conduct commerce. Except that just a few weeks ago everyone was arguing that photographers should be forced to serve gay weddings even when they do not wish to do so. Is this any different? If we are going to establish a public accommodation standard that a business cannot turn away customers based on political or religious preferences, then don't we have to enforce that in a value-neutral way?
