[Advocacy Advisors] Topic scope inquiry; legal question about Harald Bischoff

Mon Jul 27 13:20:41 UTC 2015

Delurking momentarily, might I say that in a Mozilla context we have
found this:

On 26/07/15 21:11, James Salsman wrote:
> I am of the often non-unanimous opinions that the Foundation should, in
> complete yet indirect accordance with its mission, take at least pro
> forma and ideally active stances in favor of social issues such as free
> public education through college, universal preventative health care,
> income equality, gender wage equity, and greenhouse gas mitigation.

to be a spectacularly bad idea.

People support <ORGANIZATION> because they agree on the explicit goals
of <ORGANIZATION>. There is no guarantee whatsoever that they will agree
on other goals, and to make <ORGANIZATION> support them institutionally
risks alienating volunteers and supporters for negligible gains.

You may think it's obvious that anyone who supports the goals of
<ORGANIZATION> must also support these other "obviously good" things ("I
support them! So therefore every right-thinking person does!"), but I
would say that people are more complex than you think, and (at the very
least) you need to admit that people can be inconsistent, and that
should be OK.

Gerv