Newt Gingrich has joined the chorus of
conservatives outraged at a Silicon Valley CEO's decision to step
down over his opposition to gay marriage.
Brendan Eich quit as CEO of Mozilla
last week over a $1,000 donation to the campaign to approve
Proposition 8, California's 2008 voter-approved constitutional
amendment restricting marriage to heterosexual couples. Proposition
8 stood until last year, when the Supreme Court left in place a lower
court ruling knocking it down.
(Related: Brendan
Eich steps down as Mozilla CEO over past support for Proposition 8.)
Mozilla employees, a gay software
developer and a dating site with only few (8%) gay and lesbian users
led in calling for Eich's resignation.
“If you're a young faculty member, in
a lot of places, if you're a young member of a news department and
you have the wrong views, meaning conservative, you have no career,”
Gingrich said Sunday on ABC News' This Week. “This is just
the most open and blatant example of the new fascism, which says if
you don't agree with us 100%, we have the right to punish you.
Unless you're like Hillary [Clinton] and like Barack Obama, and you
recant. They both had the same view on 2008 as he did.”
Alicia Menendez, host of cabler
Fusion's AM Tonight, challenged Gingrich: “But there is a
difference between actively campaigning to define marriage as being
between one man and one woman and not being a supporter of marriage
equality.”
“I think the question is: Do you want
to live in an open and tolerant society, or do you want to impose
your views at the cost of people's jobs?” Gingrich later
rhetorically asked. (The video is embedded on this page. Visit
our video library for more videos.)
Other conservatives who have used
similar arguments to criticize Eich's resignation include Rush
Limbaugh, who denounced “fascism on the left,” Glenn Beck, who
accused gay rights groups of “becoming terrorist organizations,”
and George Will, who
called gay rights activists “sore winners.”