Acting the Fool
The Sterling situation bothers me a heck of a lot less than the Mozilla situation did. In both cases, the specious arguments abound on both sides regarding freedom of speech and right to privacy. In both cases it’s really a “fabric of society” question more than a freedom or rights issue. The question is more about: what kind of jackasses will we allow to operate unmolested in our society?
In a sense, society discriminates against those whom it deems to be jackasses, informally (behaviorally) to a much greater extent than formally (legally). While you see what, in the present day, amount to vestigial firebreaks like anti-sodomy laws, anti-fornication laws, and legally-protected frameworks for discrimination (racially-restricted country clubs and the like), most of the time the real societal verdict is passed down by people voting with their feet. Not doing business with somebody, not hiring somebody, not actively recruiting somebody, not making them feel welcome in church or at the park or whatever. You normally don’t need the court system to ruin someone, or at least to make them miserable.
In the Mozilla case, the new CEO was deemed a jackass (specifically a bigot) by a highly vocal majority within his sphere of concern (the San Francisco genus of software developer). Outside that little ecosystem, this “majority” would probably be seen by average Americans as a 10%-of-the-survey nutball protest crowd. Even if many “average” Americans agreed with them philosophically about gay marriage, the CEO writing a check to support a contested yet legitimate, mainstream political movement would generally not be seen as a firing offense.
The most well-formed of the rhetoric coming from the nutballs was centered around the idea that an organization like Mozilla would not tolerate a lack of toleration, but only in the case of intolerance against people deemed tolerable, nay favorable and protected, by the nutballs. They say this in the name of “universal” tolerance, but at the same time they themselves would be quite intolerant of female genital mutilation apologists, holocaust deniers, and animal sacrifice advocates. People tolerant to those things are intolerant to tolerable classes (women, Jews, and animals, respectively), and therefore are intolerable themselves.
What this boils down to, and what concerns me about it, is that they’re really saying that you can’t run a nonprofit organization that the nutballs support unless you basically agree with them on everything they find important, even if it’s not job-related (which this is almost certainly not).
The interesting thing about Sterling is that, say, 70 years ago, you might have imagined him getting banned because he had a publicized affair. 150 years ago, he probably would have gotten banned for both the affair and the fact that the woman was of African and Latino origin. There’s always a protest crowd, but their signs are always changing.
In an era of settled science, we also have settled morality, but neither is standing still. Torquemada presided over an era of settled philosophy, but the nutballs have moved away from that. The scary thing is the thought that the sands could be swept from beneath your own feet in relatively little time.
Sterling’s beliefs are certainly unbecoming, but he got targeted because he was an embarrassing asshole. An embarrassing asshole whose organization belongs to what amounts to a club of marketing and popular entertainment organizations. The racism, albeit a fascinatingly odd and self-contradictory form of racism, only brought about his banishment by virtue of its embarrassment to the NBA. Tomcatting around with gold diggers is not sufficiently embarrassing, so that’s okay for an owner in this era, but racism definitely crosses the line. And being an embarrassing public figure is certainly job-related for him.
It seems like a totally rational and appropriate move on the part of the NBA to use published and agreed bylaws and contractual terms to remove someone from a consortium who has done damage to its members.
While you could certainly contend that the Mozilla CEO was just as embarrassing and just as much an asshole, I don’t see it. At the least, I have trouble seeing how advocating a ballot measure that was successful in the election could be seen as an outside-normal-bounds position (a la racism). Even if his position was a 10%-of-the-survey nutball position, taking a side in a relevant, contemporary public debate seems nowhere near holding racist sentiments in the modern era.
Or maybe we’re all guilty to some degree.