"The people who were criticizing Brendan [Eich] were people who have advocated passionately for the rights of the oppressed."

"For them to turn on someone this way is wrong," said Geoffrey Moore (identified in the NYT as "a Silicon Valley consultant and author who has worked closely with Mozilla"):

Mr. Eich, he added, is a very analytical person who got into a situation he did not have the social skills to navigate. “My bet is he’s feeling very wounded. He gave his life and soul to this. Sometimes a community doesn’t really know what it’s doing,” Mr. Moore said.

Community speech — collective speech — it matters. But it doesn't really know what it's doing.

AND: Andrew Sullivan prints and responds to some reader mail he got after he wrote about what happened to Eich.

Morality has always been about keeping society on the same page. If you violate the the norms, then you are shamed and ridiculed. The ultimate “victory” of the gay rights movement will be that those discriminating against homosexuals will be ridiculed and isolated as bigots. Ultimately we can only hope that the best values win out, and that we will always find outcasts in society that share our values, should our values violate the norm.

There you have the illiberal mindset. Morality trumps freedom. Our opponents must be humiliated, ridiculed and “isolated as perverts”. I mean “bigots”, excuse me.

NOTE: I'm adding this note to make that double indentation clear. The single indent is Sullivan's response to his reader. I wouldn't put the punctuation outside of the quotation mark like that, by the way.