These interactions came to mind on Thursday, when Eich, the pro-Proposition 8 donor, stepped down as CEO of Mozilla, a company he co-founded, because various stakeholders at the company objected to his political donation from six years ago.

At that time, a majority of Californians and an even bigger majority of Americans, including Barack Obama, the commander-in-chief who "evolved" to end the ban on gays and lesbians in the military, believed that gay marriage ought to be illegal. (In fact, that same year, around 40 percent of Americans thought gay sex should be illegal.) Now? "The backlash against Mozilla, which produces the Firefox Web browser, included calls for his resignation from developer groups and Mozilla's employees," the San Jose Mercury News reported, "as well as a widely discussed block on Firefox browsers by the dating site OKCupid, which asked users to switch their choice of Web browsers to show their support for gay marriage."

Eich was not saved by a blog post he wrote making these commitments to Mozilla employees:

Active commitment to equality in everything we do, from employment to events to community-building.

Working with LGBT communities and allies, to listen and learn what does and doesn’t make Mozilla supportive and welcoming.

My ongoing commitment to our Community Participation Guidelines, our inclusive health benefits, our anti-discrimination policies, and the spirit that underlies all of these.

My personal commitment to work on new initiatives to reach out to those who feel excluded or who have been marginalized in ways that makes their contributing to Mozilla and to open source difficult. More on this last item below.

In other words, no one had any reason to worry that Eich, a longtime executive at the company, would do anything that would negatively affect gay Mozilla employees. In fact, Mozilla Executive Chairwoman Mitchell Baker, his longtime business partner who now defends the need for his resignation, said this about discovering that he gave money to the Proposition 8 campaign: "That was shocking to me, because I never saw any kind of behavior or attitude from him that was not in line with Mozilla’s values of inclusiveness." It's almost as if that donation illuminated exactly nothing about how he'd perform his professional duties.

But no matter.

Calls for his ouster were premised on the notion that all support for Proposition 8 was hateful, and that a CEO should be judged not just by his or her conduct in the professional realm, but also by political causes he or she supports as a private citizen.

If that attitude spreads, it will damage our society.

Consider an issue like abortion, which divides the country in a particularly intense way, with opponents earnestly regarding it as the murder of an innocent baby and many abortion-rights supporters earnestly believing that a fetus is not a human life, and that outlawing it is a horrific assault on a woman's bodily autonomy. The political debate over abortion is likely to continue long past all of our deaths. Would American society be better off if stakeholders in various corporations began to investigate leadership's political activities on abortion and to lobby for the termination of anyone who took what they regard to be the immoral, damaging position?