Glenn has been talking about the importance of finding common ground with people of all ideologies. As a result, you may find yourself aligning with strange bedfellows every once in a while. After hearing the news that, following weeks of controversy over his $1,000 donation to Proposition 8, Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich resigned, Glenn passionately defended Eich’s right to free speech and free expression. As it turns out, openly gay leftist author and blogger Andrew Sullivan and Slate’s William Saletan have both condemned the movement that led to Eich’s ouster as well.

“When you find yourself standing next to somebody and saying, ‘Holy cow. They're right, and I never thought I would say that about that individual.’ That's when you know you're on the right track,” Glenn said. “I want you to know, when you come into these positions, you can either choose to be what people on the extremes of each side are… or you can actually be a better human being and say, ‘Yeah, I may disagree with them on a lot of things, but on this one, they're right’… Andrew Sullivan and Slate [are] not people I generally find myself in agreement with.”

In a post on his blog The Dish on Thursday, Sullivan had this to say of Eich’s resignation:

Will he now be forced to walk through the streets in shame? Why not the stocks? The whole episode disgusts me – as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society. If this is the gay rights movement today – hounding our opponents with a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else – then count me out. If we are about intimidating the free speech of others, we are no better than the anti-gay bullies who came before us.

Read the whole blog post HERE.

“Amen. Andrew Sullivan, I commend you,” Glenn said. “We don't agree on very much, I'm sure. You will probably think I'm the stereotype that you make for religious people… I hope someday that we'll be able to have a conversation, so you can see that not all religious people – in fact, most religious people are not like that. But amen on this, brother. Amen. I stand with you.”

Over at Slate, Saletan took a pithier approach to the topic. His article, which is entitled “Purge the bigots,” begins on an interesting note. “Brendan Eich is just the beginning,” he writes. “Let’s oust everyone who donated to the campaign against gay marriage.”

As it turns out, Saletan actually spends the rest of the article sarcastically arguing the insanity of that point:

Some of my colleagues are celebrating. They call Eich a bigot who got what he deserved. I agree. But let’s not stop here. If we’re serious about enforcing the new standard, thousands of other employees who donated to the same anti-gay ballot measure must be punished.

More than 35,000 people gave money to the campaign for Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure that declared, “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” You can download the entire list, via the Los Angeles Times, as a compressed spreadsheet. (Click the link that says, “Download CSV.”) Each row lists the donor’s employer. If you organize the data by company, you can add up the total number of donors and dollars that came from people associated with that company.Looking at the list from the LA Times, you find more than 1,300 individuals from 37 companies gave nearly $1 million to the campaign for Prop 8. Furthermore, 435 people from 25 tech companies gave more than $300,000.

“Many of these employees gave $1,000 apiece, if not more,” Saleton writes. “Some, like Eich, are probably senior executives. Why do these bigots still have jobs? Let’s go get them.”

Saletan took the “purge” a step further, compiling the financial data into three tables that show where the support for Prop 8 was coming from. With that data now clearly organized, Saleton end the article with the following conclusion:

If we’re serious about taking down corporate officers who supported Proposition 8, and boycotting employers who promote them, we'd better get cracking on the rest of the list. Otherwise, perhaps we should put down the pitchforks.

Check out his entire article HERE.

“Fortunately there's still people who believe in the U.S. Constitution,” Pat said.

“And I contend that they are the majority of Americans both left and right. I really believe that,” Glenn concluded. “We have been taught – to quote South Pacific – very, very carefully taught to hate. We have been taught to hate each other and to think the other side is nothing but bigoted one way or another on one thing or another. I don't believe that that is true.”