April 24th, 2005 |
565 people have read this post.
As a general rule, I don’t talk about my work on my blog. This isn’t a
technical blog and even though I am a geek, I have a lot of other interests. It
is also just easier, in so many ways, to "not go there" given the controversies
around my employer with various factions. Some critics have good points that I
even occasionally agree with but I’ve always thought that it was best to stay
out of the line of fire.
I’m breaking this unwritten rule because I’ve been pretty pissed off the last
few days about the current controversy around Microsoft and Gay Rights,
specifically the bill that Microsoft pulled its backing from in the Washington
State legislature to extend the anti-discrimination laws to gays and lesbians.
On Thursday, I found the following online. The Stranger is a local
paper that I've read since I was in college, off and on.
Another reason to switch?
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/index.html?blog=/politics/war_room/2005/04/21/msft/index.html
Maybe Microsoft isn’t the Great Satan that it once was —
in the public imagination, Wal-Mart has pretty much overtaken that role
– but there are still plenty of folks who hold a special place in the
darkest corners of their hearts for the world’s largest software
company.
According to
The Stranger, an alternative weekly from Seattle, there’s a whole
new reason to dislike Microsoft: The company, the paper says, withdrew
its support from legislation in the state of Washington that would have
outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
The bill was
defeated in the Washington Senate this afternoon, 25-24.
According to The Stranger, Microsoft withdrew its support for the bill
after the leader of a mega-church from Redmond threatened a boycott of
Microsoft’s products. Earlier this month, the paper says, a Microsoft senior
vice president told a group of gay and lesbian employees about the
threatened boycott — and explained that Microsoft would henceforth be
"neutral" on a bill it had previously supported. War Room contacted
Microsoft for a response this morning; while a member of Microsoft’s "rapid
response" PR team promised us we’d be hearing from a Microsoft spokeswoman
promptly, we’re still waiting.
Although Microsoft is generally considered a gay-friendly employer, news
that it may have waffled on the anti-discrimination measure — especially in
the face of a single threat from an NFL
linebacker-turned-evangelical-minister — has gay-rights activists none too
happy with the company. "Apparently, Microsoft’s new motto is ‘your
potential, our passion, as long as you’re not gay or lesbian,’" Dan Kully, a
spokesman for Equal Rights Washington, told us this afternooon. Earlier
today, John Aravosis of
AMERICAblog suggested in an open letter to Microsoft that advocates of
gay rights in Washington could retaliate against the company by organizing
concentrated local opposition to its plan to expand its Redmond campus.
"You may have thought ‘Hell, the evangelicals boycott us, the gays
boycott us — we’ve got to choose one, and the evangelicals are in power, so
let’s screw the gays,’" Aravosis wrote. "But here’s something you didn’t
count on. You messed with the wrong faggots." Aravosis wrote those words
just as the story of Microsoft’s position on the bill was first making the
rounds on the internet — and before the state senate had rejected the bill
by a single vote. If Microsoft was beginning to feel the pain then, we can
only imagine what life is like in Redmond right now.
Later, this same news made it into The New York Times and the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, among other papers.
On Thursday, before the shitstorm had completely hit the media, I quoted the
bit above and wrote an e-mail to the Vice President of my organization at work.
I don't know him well but he knows me by name because of shared history, time in
the same organization, and a number of meetings where I and others have
presented to him on minor issues. I wanted to express my concerns.
In my e-mail, I expressed my anger and dismay about this if it was true. I
made it clear that I recognized that he wasn't likely to have been involved in
this whole thing but I wanted to communicate it up the food chain at work. He
wrote me back on Thursday evening (after work) and made it clear that he hadn't
known about this before it got brought up on Thursday and he took it seriously.
The next morning, before I got to work, I had another e-mail from him where he
cc'd his head of human resources and told me that Stafford Mays, who does a lot
of the diversity work in our Human Resources at Microsoft, would be giving me a
call on Friday. If I didn't hear from him, I should let my VP know. About 20
minutes after this e-mail was sent (again, before I'd even gotten in), I had a
voice mail from Stafford trying to reach me. He called me back shortly after
work and had a good conversation.
All of this left me unhappy with the overall situation but happy that the
people that I work with were taking it seriously and that there was activity
going on. I was told to expect that an e-mail to the entire company would be
going out about it. That happened late Friday. Robert Scoble, a Microsoft
blogger, links to it
here.
I've been doing a lot of thinking about this memo. I'm not happy with it at
all. I think it sets a bad precedent. It also doesn't address some of the
factual issues raised in the article in The Stranger and in subsequent
reports from talking to legislature. It feels, to me, like corporate spin and
damage control and, actually, it pisses me off.
Some people that I know at work say "We shouldn't be involved in any of this
legislation. We should only be making money for shareholders." I think that's
bunk. Business is not separate from the rest of society and companies can and do
take a moral stance on issues. If this was the early 1960s and we were talking
about race, would people still feel that not supporting the bill would be ok?
To be clear, since some people are painting this as a culture war or gay
activism issue, all the bill was going to go is extend the existing state
wide anti-discrimination laws to include sexual orientation. This isn't a gay
marriage law or the like. This is strictly a bill about anti-discrimination. The
same rules are already in effect in King County, where Microsoft is based, and
have been for years.
Microsoft already has very progressive internal rules and policies about
discrimination, including based on sexual orientation. I have been required to
take anti-harrassment training (and they check if you do it) in an effort to
promote this. Microsoft's benefits extend to domestic partnerships for gays and
lesbians. This is about walking the talk. If it is good enough to be progressive
within the company, why not back a bill that extends anti-discrimination outside
the company? It is inconsistent, at best, not to do so. The only explanation
that I see is that Microsoft's leadership is afraid of being seen as being
pro-gay rights. Well, I'm sorry folks but Microsoft internal policies and
benefits already put us in that particular camp. Anyone that would go after the
company for backing the bill is going to have their knickers in a twist about
the internal policies.
I find it sad that Boeing and Washington Mutual, for example, could continue
to back this bill without blinking an eye but Microsoft, who has been backing a
version of this bill every year for 13 years, blinked when challenged by the
kind of people that want to dehumanize our fellow citizens. It isn't right.
Update: New York Times coverage of the controversy: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/22/national/22gay.html.
