Here’s an analogy I hadn’t seen before

Fanaticism on both sides of gay-rights issue

The gay-rights side — the side I’m on — has just about won. But now we’re starting to act as intolerant as what we defeated.

When the Boy Scouts ousted a Seattle troop leader last week because he told a news crew he was gay, his troop rightly noted that to them, his sexuality was irrelevant. He was doing a good job.

“This is a nonissue here. We’ve gotten no complaints from parents,” said the head of the church that had asked him to be the troop leader.

So the real reason the national scouting organization moved to get rid of him was image. We don’t condone this, so we can’t be associated with it. No offense.

It’s an outrage that a person can be purged not for anything to do with his job, but simply because of who he is.

Except that also last week, a Silicon Valley technology firm, Mozilla, buckled to public pressure and ousted its new CEO, Brendan Eich, when it was revealed he had given $1,000 to Proposition 8 opposing gay marriage six years ago.

Officially he resigned, but you can be sure he was told to go. There was no evidence his views against legalizing gay marriage had any effect on his various jobs at the company, including in his treatment of gay co-workers. (He’d been there since the 1990s.)

So this was also a decision about image. Mozilla decided that a marriage traditionalist, a one-man, one-woman devotee, made the company look archaic or bigoted. So he was purged.

I realize these cases have differences — in the facts and in all the history that came before. But they are not that different in sensibility. One was hounded out for who he is, the other for what he believes.

What happened to live and let live?