Tech industry enters culture wars

The tech industry is throwing its weight around in the new culture wars over same-sex marriage.

Companies such as Microsoft and Apple flexed their muscle in opposition to an Indiana law that critics said would give businesses license to discriminate against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

The vocal opposition of Silicon Valley was one of the reasons why Indiana legislators changed the law this week, emboldening tech leaders who want to take a firm line in favor of gay rights.

{mosads}“It certainly affects the tech sector. It affects our employees, friends, and family who either live, work, or travel in states that do not protect all of their citizens from discrimination,” entrepreneur Max Levchin — who has held key roles at PayPal and Yelp, among other companies — said in an email to The Hill.

“We are talking about basic civil rights — no one should ever have to worry about being denied a job, housing, or service at a business, because of who they love.”

More than 70 tech industry executives this week signed on to a statement organized by Levchin condemning state religious freedom laws. Among the dozens of names on the letter were Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Twitter head Dick Costolo and Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich.

“The names are still coming in as we speak,” said Ryan Metcalf, Levchin’s chief of staff. “My inbox is still adding of people wanting to be on the list and getting upset that I cant get them on the list fast enough.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook made waves of his own with a scathing op-ed in the Washington Post comparing the state laws to the “days of segregation and discrimination marked by ‘Whites Only’ signs on shop doors, water foundations and restrooms.”

Marc Benioff, the head of cloud computing company Salesforce, has been perhaps the most vocal critic of the religious freedom laws.

He has actively helped to move his own employees out of Indiana, in the wake of that state’s passage a law that was considered particularly sweeping in its exemptions for businesses opposed to gay marriage.

In part, executives say the focus is driven by business concerns.

Benioff noted that Salesforce has thousands of workers in Indiana.

“They are all very upset about this law, and how it potentially impacts their personal freedom in the state,” he wrote in a Facebook post describing his opposition to the law.

The tech industry has long pledged a commitment to diversity, though their workforce remains lopsided. At Google, for instance, 70 percent of workers are men and 61 percent are white.

The visibility of people such as Cook, who announced last October that he was gay, seemed to solidify support in the industry for LGBT rights.

“It’s hard to overestimate the impact that last year Tim Cook’s coming out had on business, and especially the tech industry,” said Christopher Wood, the executive director of the LGBT Technology Partnership and Institute.

“Even being in and around the tech field when he came out, I was extremely proud of the fact that he took a lead on LGBT issues and stood up and said discrimination in the tech industry — against anybody but especially against LGBT individuals — is not acceptable,” he added.

Silicon Valley executives who speak out also don’t have to worry about backlash from their employees, observers say.

“The tech sector skews libertarian, so it makes sense that companies would oppose RFRAs [Religious Freedom Restoration Acts] on principle,” one industry employee who works in Washington said.

The companies are also “full of young, well-educated employees who live in the Bay Area,” the employee added. “Industry affiliations aside, these demographics strongly support gay rights.”

Still, the industry’s advocacy against the religious freedom laws risks stirring a backlash from conservatives, potentially hurting sales.

Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina, who is considering a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, assailed Cook’s opposition to Indiana’s religious freedom law as “hypocrisy.”

“When Tim Cook is upset about all the places that he does business because of the way they treat gays and women, he needs to withdraw from 90 percent of the markets that he’s in, including China and Saudi Arabia,” Fiorina told The Wall Street Journal. “But I don’t hear him being upset about that.”

For now, the tech industry’s advocacy seems to have had its desired impact.

On Thursday, both Indiana and Arkansas Govs. Mike Pence (R) and Asa Hutchinson (R) signed revised versions of legislation that added measures to explicitly prevents companies from using religion to discriminate against LGBT people.

The show of support from Silicon Valley was at least partly responsible for the reversals.

“I think the effect of their collective voice on the national conversation as well as the ongoing debates in states in which there are actively moving RFRAs is profound,” said Jason Rahlan, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign.

“When they see that this massive industry is speaking out so aggressively and so uniformly against these laws, I think it’s forcing a lot folks to reconsider what they originally through was the right path.”