Steve Ballmer Responds to Discrimination Issue

sriram_2001 writes "In a long email to all Microsoft employees, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer laid out the reasons for Microsoft changing its stance to neutral on the anti-discrimination bill. He explains that Microsoft wanted to focus on fewer legislations and that the anti-discrimination bill was one of the bills that they didn't have the resources to follow. Also, far from caving in to Rev.Hutcherson, Microsoft told him to take a hike when he asked them to fire 2 employees for testifying during the legislation consideration period. He goes on to explain how though he personally supports the bill, a lot of employees and shareholders don't. Finally, he raises the question on whether corporations should get involved in social issues."

Comments

Corporations not getting involved?

[All_Star25]

Apparently Google thinks otherwise.
http://google.org/
Philanthropic = humanitarian.
Humanatarian = "[devotion] to the promotion of human welfare and the advancement of social reforms" (Thanks dictionary.com)

Re:Corporations ARE involved in social policy

[Lemmy Caution]

As long as corporations employ people who are affected by social legislation, then the difference truly is slight. Despite every impression to the contrary, first and foremost a corporation is a network of relationships among real live human beings; the money is simply an abstraction of certain types of value.

Historically, the very first laws against child labor (in the UK) were brought into existence at the behest of a coalition of factory owners, who wanted to stop the practice, but could not do so unilaterally and remain competitive: the only way that they could have the practice stop was to remove the possibility of competitive advantage from employing children. Likewise, Microsoft has gay and lesbian employees and shareholders, and their well-being is directly affected by the absence of this legislation.

Where do you live?

[Infonaut]

Microsoft has bought wholesale into the media-generated myth that religious issues matter to the majority of the populace...

If you live on the West or East Coast, religious issues may not matter to the majority of the populace, but if you've lived in Middle America or been in the military, you understand that while religious issues don't matter to everyone, they are hugely important across broad swaths of America.

I don't like it, but in my experience the upward climb of reactionary religion in America is far more widespread nationally than it is where I live (California). If anything, the mainstream media has been very slow in understanding this trend towards religious illiberalism.