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Thursday, April 21, 2005

Another reason to hate Microsoft
Posted by Jill | 2:39 PM

As if buggy operating systems and Big Brother tactics, along with having more money than God wasn't enough, now we have Big Bad Microsoft capitulating to one -- yes, ONE -- Christofascist preacher:

In a move that angered many of the company's gay employees, the Microsoft Corporation, publicly perceived as the vanguard institution of the new economy, has taken a major political stand in favor of age-old discrimination.

The Stranger has learned that last month the $37-billion Redmond-based software behemoth quietly withdrew its support for House bill 1515, the anti-gay-discrimination bill currently under consideration by the Washington State legislature, after being pressured by the Evangelical Christian pastor of a suburban megachurch. The pastor, Ken Hutcherson of Antioch Bible Church in Redmond, met with a senior Microsoft executive in February and threatened to organize a national boycott of the company's products if it did not change its stance on the legislation, according to gay rights activists and a Microsoft employee who attended a subsequent April 4 meeting where Bradford L. Smith, Microsoft's senior vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary, told a group of gay staffers about Hutcherson's threat. Hutcherson also unsuccessfully demanded that the company fire two employees who had testified in favor of the bill.


I guess that gay Microsoft employees are supposed to take comfort in the fact that those two gay employees still have their jobs. This, of course, is like saying that Jews in Poland in the 1930's should have been grateful when their neighbors next door were taken instead of them.

As John Aravosis, who along with some good friends of mine (sorry, SS, but if you'll put your web site back up, I'd love to link to you too), has a personal, not just an ideological stake in this, so succinctly puts it:

Dear Microsoft,

You messed with the wrong faggots.

You thought you were avoiding a religious right boycott by suddenly going anti-gay. And 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."

But here's something you didn't count on. You messed with the wrong faggots.

We have no intent of launching a boycott. Boycotts are hard to enforce, especially when dealing with a monopoly. And in any case, we're smarter than that. We're the country's top lobbyists, and grassroots activists, and lawyers, and politicos, and bloggers working in both Washingtons (state and DC).

When we fuck back, we don't launch boycotts. When we fuck back, we go for the jugular.

Changing the subject, we understand congratulations is in order. You're planning a 2.2 million square foot expansion of the Microsoft campus in Redmond over the next ten to twenty years. The expansion, we hear, would allow you to hire 10,000 to 20,000 new employees.

Well bully for you. You must be quite excited about that.

We also hear that you're going to need a lot of help - a LOT of help - from the state legislature and the Redmond city council to actually make that expansion work, for highway and road improvements and the like, and that not everybody is real happy about it.

Well, wouldn't it be funny if some really smart faggots decided to use their political expertise to kill any possibility of you getting the legislation and city council approval you need to make that expansion happen? And wouldn't it be even funnier if those same faggots went to your competitors and asked them to finance the entire campaign to kill your expansion?

It'd be pretty hard to hire those extra employees without your expansion, wouldn't it? I'm not saying anyone is going to do that to you. I'm just saying it would be really funny.

Best of luck to you with the legislative session over the next 24 hours.

Yours truly,

One of the faggots you just screwed


Now, I don't know John Aravosis any better than I know most of the bloggers I read. But I don't have to know a person to recognize rage and pain when I read it. I'm fortunate in that I've never had to personally deal with entire political blocs who not only hate me for what I am, but want to see me have no rights in this society. Yes, I've had family members I never knew experience that. They were Jews in Russia and Poland during the 1930's, they were my grandparents' parents and siblings, and they ended up pretty much where most Jews in Russia and Poland ended up.

This is no different. It's not being done through government, the way the Nazis did it -- but only because so far they haven't been able to (though believe me, that's what DeLay and Frist are working on even as we speak). But it doesn't matter. American citizens are being persecuted, and no, it's not the Christofascists.

As I wrote to my local paper not too terribly long ago, I've been married to the same, my first and only, spouse, for almost 20 years (which is more than most House Republicans can say). And I will be no less married on the days I dance at the weddings of my gay friends.

And neither will you, and neigher will Tom DeLay or Bill Frist or the Rev. Fred Phelps, or any of the other hatemongers who seem to think that allowing gay Americans their place in society is somehow a horseman of the very Apocalypse they want so badly.

Here's who to call to speak out:

Jack Krumholtz
Microsoft Director of Government Relations
202-263-5900

- Jim Desler,
Microsoft US
425-703-6061
jdesler@microsoft.com

- Dirk Delmartino,
Microsoft Europe
+32 (0)2 550 06 21
dirkdelm@microsoft.com

- The firm handling public policy for Microsoft in DC:
The Glover Park Group
Washington, DC
202-337-0808

- The firm handling Microsoft's "rapid response" to questions:
Waggener Edstrom Rapid Response Team
rrt@wagged.com
503-443-7070

- Media Relations for Microsoft
Global Communications & Television
(212) 339-9920
mediarelations@gctv.com

- Microsoft Investor Relations
Curt Anderson
(425) 706-3703

- Walt McGraw, Edelman, (206) 223-1606, walt.mcgraw@edelman.com

- Shon Damron, Edelman, (323) 857-9100, shon.damron@edelman.com

- Carlos de Leon,tel. 425-703-3824, or carlosde@microsoft.com

- Katie Goldberg, tel. 206-268-2244, or katie.goldberg@edelman.com

- Shoreen Maghame, Edelman, (323) 202-1061

- Sean Durkin, Edelman, (206) 268-2229

UPDATE (from Americablog):

The gay rights bill just lost in the Washington state Senate by a 24-25 vote, i.e., by one vote.

All the Republicans voted against the bill, and at least one Democrat. Apparently the forces of good did win a procedural vote to force the bill out of committee and onto the Senate floor, but then it was killed by the 24-25 vote. As an interesting aside, if you can call it that, one of the moderate Republicans voting against the bill was the guy representing Redmond, Microsoft's district.
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