Remember Larry Garfield, the software developer expelled from the Drupal project over his “offensive” BDSM proclivities? It turns out that leftist members of the project were compiling Garfield’s political heresies long before they seized on his sexual habits as an excuse to get rid of him.
A Google document was recently leaked to Breitbart from Drupal’s Diversity & Inclusion (DD&I) group. The Garfield dossier was created by Nathaniel Catchpole, a member of Drupal’s Core Development Team. Josh Koenig, another Drupal core developer, also contributed comments to the document.
The document contains 17 pages worth of research on Larry Garfield, a leading Drupal developer who faced a sustained effort to expel him from the programming community. The document collects instances of Garfield making public comments that the document creators deem politically incorrect.
Garfield was eventually expelled, allegedly because of his identification with “Goreanism,” a BDSM subculture based on roleplaying the themes of sexual dominance and submission found in author John Norman’s sci-fi “Chronicles of Gor” series.
The document shows that “diversity advocates” within Drupal were targeting Garfield for a myriad of political reasons unrelated to his sexual proclivities. Revelations about his involvement in a BDSM subculture were apparently seized upon as the most convenient excuse to publicly ostracize him.
The contributors to the dossier raised a number of “issues” with Garfield’s behaviour, including:
A “minor but general pattern of ‘random links to anti-feminist think pieces'”
Favoriting a tweet citing the book The Essential Difference, by Simon Baron-Cohen, which contains the cognitive scientist’s research on innate sex differences.
The following comment, which was deemed to be “transphobic”: I truly do not care what sex you are, what gender you are, what sex you wish you were, what gender you wish you were, or whatever else. In the context of d.o, I care about how good your coding, documenting, or usability skillz are. That’s it. There are contexts in which I do care, and they do not involve Drupal.
A blog post claiming that human psychology is shaped in part by evolution, which has led to sex differences.
A tweet claiming that “reverse discrimination is still discrimination.”
The document acknowledges from the start that all of Garfield’s statements (which they accuse of “trivialising gender identity, minimizing chattel slavery [and] suggesting that not drinking is the best rape prevention”) are politely worded. In other words, no-one took an issue with Garfield’s manner: it was his political opinion alone that marked him for purging.
According to the document’s properties tab, it is owned by Nathaniel Catchpole, a Drupal core developer and release manager. His profile on Drupal.org lists him as a senior performance engineer, who has contributed to the Drupal project since 2006. In his Twitter bio, he identifies his interests as “improvised music, Drupal, communism.”
Josh Koenig, another Drupal core developer, also contributed comments to the document. Koening is also an owner of Pantheon, a website management service for Drupal and WordPress that holds a number of government contracts.
The White House’s website is powered by Drupal, as is the official website of the French government and the city of London. It is also used by the BBC, NBC, MTV UK, Amnesty International, and the University of Oxford.
Many of the public sector clients served by Drupal and Pantheon are bound by clauses that prevent them giving business to contractors that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. While BDSM is not typically regarded as a sexual orientation, under the ever-expanding umbrella of left-wing identity politics, this may be changing.
