And Today, the Irony was Palpable

Merlin Mann once said that when he was seventeen years old, he felt his sole job in the world was to expose all hypocrisy. At the time, at seventeen myself, I laughed; however, a couple of years later the same thing has become true of myself: very few things annoy me as much as hypocrisy these days, and the very closely-related phenomenon of the double standard drives me insane. Today, in a fantastically ironic turn of events that came to my attention through an article on SFGate, UnCrunched discovered that OkCupid’s CEO, Sam Yagan — one of the most vocal critics of Brendan Eich — once supported a congressman known for his huge opposition of anything to do with homosexuals. The same man who played such a pivotal role in the ruin of Brendan Eich’s career, claiming that his support of California’s Proposition 8 nearly a decade ago made him an abhorrent individual unfit to lead Mozilla, supported a congressional candidate that goes even farther than Proposition 8 did. Absolutely incredible.

After the debacle with Brendan Eich, I hope to see the petitioning for Yagan’s removal as OkCupid’s CEO within the next twenty-four hours. I did not support Eich’s removal from Mozilla in the first place, but now that his career has gone down the tubes thanks in large part to Sam Yagan’s actions, anything less than the same outcome would be an incredibly inappropriate double standard of judgment. The public has decided that political contributions made even a decade ago can come back to haunt the donors, as evidenced by Eich’s removal as Mozilla’s CEO after just eleven days; it’s time to apply that precedent to Sam Yagan as well.