Microsoft Comes Under Fire for Reversal on Gay Rights Bill

[Jon8503]

By SARAH KERSHAW
Published: April 22, 2005

SEATTLE, April 21 - The Microsoft Corporation, at the forefront of corporate gay rights for decades, is coming under fire from gay rights groups, politicians and its own employees for withdrawing its support for a state bill that would have barred discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

Many of the critics accused the company of bowing to pressure from a prominent evangelical church in Redmond, Wash., located a few blocks from Microsoft's sprawling headquarters.

The bill, or similar versions of it, has been introduced repeatedly over three decades; it failed by one vote Thursday in the State Senate. Gay rights advocates denounced Microsoft, which had supported the bill for the last two years, for abandoning their cause. Blogs and online chat rooms were buzzing on Thursday with accusations that the company, which has offered benefits to same-sex partners for years, had given in to the Christian right.

"I think people should feel betrayed," said Tina Podlodowski, a former Microsoft senior manager and former Seattle city councilwoman who now runs an advocacy group for AIDS patients. "To me, Microsoft has been one of the big supporters of gay and lesbian

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/22/national/22gay.html?hp&ex=1114228800&en=ae09414715e2bbf0&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[dsc]

1. The solution here is obvious

First, every gay person in the US should boycot Microsoft. If they did this due to fearing a Christian lead boycot let them have a gay lead one in its place.

Second, every gay Microsoft employee should stage sickouts. To the extent they can use vacation days legally to do this they should pick random days that every gay employee, without exception, doesn't show for work. If they didn't want to offend their Christian employees let them see what it is like when they offend their gay ones.

[arwalden]

2. Piracy Guilt... GONE!

[Liberal Veteran]

3. I stopped having piracy guilt when MS shipped my job to India.

But this certainly didn't help.

[DBoon]

4. We need a lavender Linux distro!

support GLBT open source software!

Seriously, put together a Linux distro with OSS replacements for Microsoft products and sell it as a fundraiser for GLBT causes.

[renaissanceguy]

5. That would be a good idea...

if only a majority of software out there wasn't only MS compatible. I don't think people would want to give up that comfort.


http://www.cafepress.com/liberalissues/466053

[Kelvin Mace]

6. Actually, John Avorosis has a better idea

http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/04/dear-microsoft-you-messed-with-wrong.html

Dear Microsoft, 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

[Chicago Democrat]

7. WRITE TO MICROSOFT CALL 425-882-8080

Dear Bill Gates and the Management of Microsoft Corporation,

I am so incredibly disappointed and angered by your decision to cave in to anti-gay fanatics and withdraw support for local gay rights legistlation. I am baffled. I am horrified. Why?


Why have you forsaken us?

What the heck happened here? We gay people have supported you for years and now when we are under attack you pull the rug out. I trying to avoid your products for a period of time until I see some kind of apology or appropriate gesture on the part of you or Microsoft. I am using Firefox and SBC browser now. I may even buy an apple. I am disappointed in you Mr. Gates. What a leader you have been in the past for all people and especially gay people.

Its really a sad, sad day for gay rights and freedom in general in America and the world.

Your sad, gay customer,

-------------------------------------------


Call or Email TODAY!


http://www.microsoft.com/

[Casablanca]

8. More seeds of Microsoft's inevitable destruction

I know three gay people who still work for Microsoft who are either blowing out a jugular right now or are selling even more of their souls to the Dark Side in placing the value of their paycheck over their own civil rights.

But there are many more gays that I've never met that will probably choose to stay at Microsoft. One of the gays I know works as a Senior Programmer in the Windows division. I'm sure he knows others in Microsoft's gay activist community as well. Some in that community are program and group managers. All programmers are aware of the practical impossibility of policing thousands of programmers churning out thousands of lines of code every single day of the year for the most bloated operating system in history.

Without getting into too many more specifics, there are a lot of very subtle, untraceable, and serious damage these programmers can do to the Longhorn codebase before rollout in retaliation. And they would get away with it too. It's not as if Microsoft's shipping hobbled code has ever cost these programmers their paycheck in the past. And it's not as they have to create the malicious code themselves, they can just leave an exploit open and anonymously send the word around to the worldwide hacker community.

Steve Jobs is probably laughing his ass off at Microsoft right now, and so am I. Because we both know that even if it takes a few years, Microsoft IS going down, for many karmic reasons.