Something was awakened in post-America by the Mozilla situation

Mollie Hemingway has a powerful piece at The Federalist today.   It's one of those in which nearly every paragraph offers an idea - or, in a lot of cases, a timeless truth - that could launch an exploration on its own.

The overall point is that we must be clear about the grounds for any backlash against the Mozilla situation.

A writer at Slate actually tried to justify the termination as a good thing. Libertarian Nick Gillespie said he was “ambivalent” about Eich’s removal but that Eich’s resignation simply “shows how businesses respond to market signals.” And even conservatives weren’t rallying behind Eich on the grounds that marriage is an institution designed around sexual complementarity so much as by saying that even if he’s wrong, conscience should be protected. 

At the end of the day, they’re all wrong. Or at least not even close to understanding the problem with Eich’s firing. Political differences with CEOs, even deep political differences, are something adults handle all the time. Most of us know that what happened held much more significance than anodyne market forces having their way. And Eich shouldn’t be protected on the grounds that one has the right to be wrong. See, Eich wasn’t hounded out of corporate life because he was wrong. He was hounded out of corporate life because he was right. His message strikes at the root of a popular but deeply flawed ideology that can not tolerate dissent.

And what was he right about?

So why is marriage singled out throughout all time and human history as a different type of recognized relationship?
Well, what singled it out was that sex was involved. Sex. Knocking boots. The bump and grind. Dancing in the sheets. Making the beast with two backs. Doing the cha-cha. And so on and so forth. And why does that matter? Well, there’s precisely one bodily system for which each of us only has half of the system. It’s the one that involves sex between one man and one woman. It’s with respect to that system that the unit is the mated pair. In that system, it’s not just a relationship that is the union of minds, wills or important friendships. It’s the literal union of bodies. In sexual congress, in intercourse between a man and a woman, you are literally coordinated to a single bodily end.

In every other respect we as humans act as individual organisms except when it comes to intercourse between men and women — then we work together as one flesh. Coordination toward that end — even when procreation is not achieved — makes the unity here. This is what marriage law was about. Not two friends building a house together. Or two people doing other sexual activities together. It was about the sexual union of men and women and a refusal to lie about what that union and that union alone produces: the propagation of humanity. This is the only way to make sense of marriage laws throughout all time and human history. Believing in this truth is not something that is wrong, and should be a firing offense. It’s not something that’s wrong, but should be protected speech. It’s actually something that’s right. It’s right regardless of how many people say otherwise. If you doubt the truth of this reality, consider your own existence, which we know is due to one man and one woman getting together.  

Hemingway mentions Vaclav Havel's 1978 essay "The Power of the Powerless," focusing particularly on a scenario Havel constructs to illustrate how totalitarianism stifles dissent:

To explain how dissent works, Havel introduced the manager of a hypothetical fruit-and-vegetable shop who places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” He’s not actually enthusiastic about the sign’s message. It’s just one of the things that people in a post-totalitarian system do even if they “never think about” what it means. He does it because everyone does it. It’s what you do to get along in life and live “in harmony with society.” (For our purposes, you can imagine that slogan is a red equal sign that you put up on your Facebook page.)

The subtext of the grocer’s sign is “I do what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me.” It protects him from supervisors above and informants below.

She continues to quote the essay, specifically the part where Havel explains why Solzhenitsyn was such a threat to the Soviet Union:  He dared to invite his fellow comrades to see the brittleness of the state's control, to consider that they were only one free thought away from initiating the rpocess by which the whole facade would crumble.

It was just such an act of defiance that launched the 22-year period in Cuban dissident Armando Valladares's life in which he was separated from his family, imprisoned, tortured, interrogated and subject to unspeakable humiliation.  In his book Against All Hope, he describes how, in 1960, one year into the Castro revolution, he had a job at a postal savings bank.  Some regime henchmen wanted to put a placard on his desk that   read, "If Fidel is a Communist, sign me up.  He's got the right idea!"  Valladares refused to let them. A few nights later, regime goons burst into the apartment he shared with his wife and mother, searched and upended everything, and then arrested him.

That's called a moment of moral decision.  We here in post-America will not be able to avoid our own such moments.

Oh, and I will also include a link that Hemingway includes in her piece.  It's to a must-read piece by Brendan O'Neill at Spiked.     I realize this post is already rather excerpt-intensive, but here's a taste of what O'Neill is saying:

In truth, the extraordinary rise of gay marriage speaks, not to a new spirit of liberty or equality on a par with the civil-rights movements of the 1960s, but rather to the political and moral conformism of our age; to the weirdly judgmental non-judgmentalism of our PC times; to the way in which, in an uncritical era such as ours, ideas can become dogma with alarming ease and speed; to the difficulty of speaking one’s mind or sticking with one’s beliefs at a time when doubt and disagreement are pathologised. Gay marriage brilliantly shows how political narratives are forged these days, and how people are made to accept them. This is a campaign that is elitist in nature, in the sense that, in direct contrast to those civil-rights agitators of old, it came from the top of society down; and it is a campaign which is extremely unforgiving of dissent or disagreement, implicitly, softly demanding acquiescence to its agenda.

So for all the comparisons of the gay-marriage movement to the civil-rights movement, in fact the most striking thing about gay marriage is its origins among the elite. As Caldwell says, ‘never since the Progressive Era has there been a social movement as elite-driven as the one for gay marriage’. In his new book, Michael Klarman describes how judges, not streetfighthers, spearheaded the gay-marriage campaign; he even bizarrely calls judges a ‘distinctive subculture’ of the cultural elite, which ‘tends to be even more liberal than the general public on issues such as gender equality and gay equality’. Another favourable account of the rise of gay marriage notes how it was led by ‘lawyers and professors’, who counselled against engaging with the public since making ‘open demands for gay marriage [could] trigger a backlash’ (1).

This movement wasn't born on the barricades.  It germinated in the muckety-muck salons and dinner parties of the overlord class.

The ones who dress up in smiley-face delivery their demand of compliance.

The ringing spiritual truth, though, is that you still have a choice.