Interesting. Going through my RSS feeds, I came across Robert Scoble’s response to Steve Balmer’s memo on MicroSoft’s retreat on the WA gay rights bill. Scoble also links to a post from Adam Barr critiquing part of Balmer’s memo. Barr doesn’t quite buy the part of Balmer’s memo that suggests MicroSoft was worried that its anti-gay employees might feel discriminated against because of MicroSoft’s previous stance on the bill. Will companies now start opting for neutrality on civil rights issues, as Vic Goduntora’s response to Scoble suggests? Is that a good thing?
In my experience, corporate America has been one of the gay communities greatest allies in the fight against discrimination. (It’s one of the the issues I worked on during my time at HRC; my first job in D.C.) Check out HRC’s database of employees with non-discrimination policies, and the list of corporations and small businesses endorsing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). Passing ENDA seems to be an uphill battle even with corporate support. If our biggest allies remain personally supportive, but become publicly and politically neutral, are we actually losing our biggest allies? What good is personal or private support that doesn’t translate into public and political support? Should we do anything but fondly wave goodbye as our allies distance themselves from us publically and politically?
And if this MicroSoft’s reponse to religious right objections to it’s support for this legislation, how will MicroSoft respond if/when it faces the same thing because of its internal policies? Don’t think that’s on the religious right’s agenda? Don’t kid yourself.
Glancing at the feed from my Technorati references, I came across this post on Snarkmarket, which puts an interesting spin on the controversy surrounding MicroSoft and Washington state’s gay rights bill.
While I don’t know that there are any progressives out there who want corporations to have no voice in civil affairs, I do think this is a matter best decided by the Washington state legislature, not Microsoft. A solid, coherent progressive strategy on this front might be to say, “Oh, so you’re withdrawing your voice on legislation now? How about you dial down your attacks on some of these antitrust laws then?” I have a sneaky suspicion that using this to rally for Microsoft’s greater withdrawal from public affairs would have a more positive effect than excoriating them for dooming this bill.
It’s not Microsoft’s fault that employers can still discriminate against gays in Washington, it’s the fault of the legislature. Let’s not forget that.
Yesterday I had a chat with a friend via IM, during which he suggested that people might be overreacting to this whole MicroSoft thing, running the risk of alienting one of the gay communities long-time corporate allies.
So I’m asking, how should people respond to this? Obviously, it’s a disappointment that’s made that much worse by the reality that right afterwards the gay rights bill—which gays in Washington have been trying to pass for three decades—failed by one vote.
For my part, I think the gay community—after some crushing defeats in the the last election, and watching the country drift further right—is at a point where it seems even our friends are not our friends in the current political landscape. In the case of MicroSoft, we’re talking a long term friend of the community that seems to have bailed for reasons that, on their face, seem rather weak.
So, what’s the best response? Shrug it off and come back next year?
It’s a matter of turning righteous anger into the right actions. In its policies regarding gays and lesbians at its own company, Microsoft remains “our friend,” and we seriously need to keep that in mind. If we interpret any ratcheting-down of MS’s support for the community as wholesale abandonment, and abandon Microsoft in turn, we send a bad message to any company that is considering supporting gay rights. If we turn this into a battle with another of Microsoft’s customer bases for “the soul of the company,” then Microsoft (and others) will reasonably assume that it wasn’t worth stepping into this matter in the first place. And that’s not what we want.
A Los Angeles-based gay and lesbian organization has asked Microsoft to return a four-year-old award for its stellar record on gay rights. Who’s the fair-weather friend here?
Our best response isn’t a choice between attacking Microsoft and shrugging this off. Our best response would be to identify who our chief antagonists are — the Washington legislature? the church that threatened the boycott? — and then figure out how to best win over or neutralize those antagonists. Alienating all our allies because we don’t consider them tough enough is not a strategy.
Progressives, in general, have this tendency of looking 10 years down the line at the worst, most extreme possibilities on the horizon, and shrieking about them in bloody terror till people just start tuning us out. Yet in the long term, things are getting better for us (gays at least), not worse. Even as 11 states vote to preemptively take away rights we were never going to get anyway, other states have started voluntarily giving us rights we never had before. As we decry Microsoft’s weakened position on gay rights, we fail to notice that even without MS, the bill — which has been around for the last 25 years — came closer to passing than it ever has before. If gays and lesbians in Washington could have convinced just one Senator to switch, the bill could have become law. I believe the focus on Microsoft just distracted the queer orgs from their true purpose.
Watching from the outside, it looks like gays and lesbians in the U.S. are in a heap of trouble, in part because the gay community seems to have no one it can count on as a friend. There’s something decidedly creepy about the way public policy in the U.S. seems to be held hostage by religion in the worst way.
I think someone needs to figure out an effective form of mass civil disobedience that can dramatize what all this discrimination written into law really means on a human level.
Crosposted to Matt’s post on Snarkmarket.
The problem, I think, is that there’s nothing most of us can do about it. As a gay man who doesn’t live in Washignton state, there’s little affect I can have on the Washington legislature or the church involved. They don’t extend into my back yard. I can’t do more than write an angry letter However I still have some investment in bills like the one in Washington happening. The only player here that I might have some influence with, as a consumer, is MicroSoft, because they’re the only player that reaches beyond Washington state.
Otherwise, there’s little I can do in this specific situation than just sit here and shake my head. Maybe it’s not my problem, because I don’t live in Washington state.
On another note, I think we still have to figure out what to do in situations like this, where a major ally goes neutral. On bills like this, one of the most powerful lobbying tools we have is the ability to show broad corporate and business support. We can wait and see if anyone follows in MicroSoft’s footsteps, but we’ll probably come up short if we do; especially if MicroSoft is able to walk away without paying a price on some level.
Make it easy for MicroSoft to walk away, and others won’t have to think twice about it. If we lose the ability to show broad corporate and business support, we lose an imporant tool in arguing for non-discrimination bills like this one.
Also x-posted (there should be an automatic way to do this):
That sense of isolation and abandonment you feel isn’t limited to gays, Terrance. This is the nature of — Tim said it — coalition politics as it’s played in America. Every liberal constituency, from the gays to the pro-choicers to the environmentalists, often feels powerless, too small to effect genuine change. And that’s partially because we isolate ourselves, obsessing over our pet issues instead of uniting to forge a grand strategy.
In situations like this, our problem is that our best “major ally” is Microsoft. That’s not the way it should be. Microsoft is always going to act in the best interest of its bottom line, above all things. While we should welcome and seek the support of corporations, our first allegiance and our strongest alliances should be with other grassroots constituencies. With a strong grassroots coalition, broad corporate support will follow.