Well look at you. This is good, Tim. Opposed to what though, treating everybody differently? According to race as our governments do? Or making news items and covering them according to racial script as our legacy media does? Or adjudicate cases of sexual predation by sex of the accused as our courts and our colleges do? You're cute, Tim. I like this part best, "no matter who they love." That's so sweet, because it so breezily and summarily dismisses everything surrounding the issue and looks only at the puffy little cotton ball of love blowing around in the shoebox corner that occurs here and there in and out for romantic love between two people is tender and evanescent, and everyone loves love.
Shit. I guess I have to read the whole thing now even though I flatly don't care what Tim Cook thinks.
He opens ominously that something very dangerous is happening all across the country. Waves of legislation introduced in several states will allow people to discriminate based on their religious prejudices. They can actually cite their religious beliefs to refuse service.
The audacity. Like bakers chosen for being Christian being forced by the state of Colorado to bake a wedding cake for out-of-state activist customers mobilized specifically to challenge their basic beliefs that fill their spiritual lives, their business that is specifically Christian that funds their economic lives, and the state laws that govern their operations? And then, get this, the owners must endure some sort of attitude rehabilitation classes run by the state, and they must also keep records of how many minorities they serve and which type of minority. Nobody is interested in that except government. NOBODY! But, that's how our state government rolls. Those neighbors, Tim?
But Tim would never have that problem, he'd sell his computers to anybody anywhere. It's a wide open global business model unlike a small local Christian bakery.
I don't know what that means.
Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Tim cites Texas considering legislation that would strip clerks who issue marriage licenses to gays of their salaries and their pensions no matter what the Supreme Court does with their ban on single sex marriages. He counts nearly 100 such bills.
The next paragraph is a cartoon suitcase bulging with presumption on its stand trembling under strain about to burst its faulty lock. Tim dismisses opposition with a breath.
...rationalize injustice by pretending to defend something many of us hold dear.
They're pretending.
They go against the very principles our nation was founded on,
Founded on the principles of gay sex. He means equality, of course. My conversations on this go off the rails when I dare mentioning that gay males always had and always used legal equality to marry any female they want. Looking at it from the interest of state, whatever legal benefit proffered by state or derived by couples from this marriage between male and female, whatever subsidies, tax breaks come to a marriage that is acknowledged by government with their license is a form of bribery by government to coerce two impossibly divergent sub-species to cohabit long enough to possibly pull off raising a few children and supply good solid citizens for the state in their fashion.
Weren't expecting that, were you?
Of course they mean
especially-equal, not
equally-equal.
Now that wee bit of economic coercion hasn't the effect it once did as government makes itself more and more useful in fulfilling functions that families once fulfilled, we gave government that power to pick up where extended families once functioned and make themselves indispensably useful as surrogate husbands in the realm of nuclear families, so marriage itself is redefined by the support that government gives and so is economic success redefined. Yet marriage laws and tax laws, and inheritance laws, reflect the original almost pioneer era coercion. Why else have them? That is one of the perceived threats to marriage, the loss of government lagniappes. And now as consequence to all this equalizing between especial equalities we're creating inequality between married and unmarried. Why the discrimination? How can this unequal treatment between marrieds and unmarrieds be tolerated?
Our cue ball sets up the next shot.
This all seems so last century yet here we are Tim is finally catching up to the bandwagon. Welcome aboard, Tim, what took so long?
Tim lectures us.
The picture on Washington Post shows Tim with his mouth open in a lecture-y stance. His body configuration reads: "this pile of mud here." If I were a comic I would put one arm akimbo and with the other presenting an invisible pie and say, "For you see...
America’s business community recognized a long time ago that discrimination, in all its forms, is bad for business.
Touching. Then no need for Apple to interfere. That bit is self-correcting.
Apple won't discriminate against anybody who can both afford and decides to purchase their axiomatically overpriced products. No matter what. Tim says Apple strives to do business in a way that is just and fair and that is why he is standing up to oppose this new wave of legislation. He wants to start a movement and hopes we will join. He says the bills will hurt job growth and economic vibrancy [but doesn't say how] in these southern places where 21st century economy was once welcomed.
Tim says he has great reverence for religious freedom. He cites his own religious experiences. He recalls his life in the south in the 60's and 70's how difficult discrimination is to extinguish, how it moves to shadows and embeds in our laws.
The rest is a good load of tripe, horn tooting, platitude, bromide, homily and
tardiness.
Our message, to people around the country and around the world, is this: Apple is open. Open to everyone, regardless of where they come from, what they look like, how they worship or who they love. Regardless of what the law might allow in Indiana or Arkansas, we will never tolerate discrimination.
You're full of shit, Tim. You do tolerate discrimination, you exercise discrimination against anyone unwilling to go along with your company's well known marked up prices. And now you are practicing discrimination against entire states attempting to wrest control of language concerning the institution of marriage. Frankly, it's none of your business's business but if you make it so it will be so and to your company's detriment and that is not good stewardship.
Tim goes on about our fighting men and women and what they fought for: Gay marriage. He means equality, of course.
We owe it to them to continue to fight. Tim blends military personnel, patriotic duty, race civil rights and sexual preferences again with reference to "whites only" signs on shop doors.
Speaking of that, I actually did see one those signs hand written on a board above an exterior door to a crumby looking place. But that was what, some three lifetimes ago. We were sitting in a restaurant in Bossier City very close to Barksdale AFB, across the street from the main gate actually, perfect Mayberry type restaurant or similar to AFB tarmac type cafes and I asked Mum, "What kind of laundry only does whites?" Seemed a strange business model. I don't know what Tim is on about mixing these two things like this with such glib ease.
A glance at the last paragraph, bink, limelight.
This isn’t a political issue. It isn’t a religious issue.
Yes it is, and yes it is. Moreover it's an economic issue too if you persist in blending your politics and your evolving secular faith with your company's prospects.
This is about how we treat each other as human beings. Opposing discrimination takes courage. With the lives and dignity of so many people at stake, it’s time for all of us to be courageous.
Yes, of course it's about how we treat each other, but it takes no courage to oppose discrimination, simply stop doing it. As you do discriminate, right here, Tim, against southern states. Starting out by telling us under your leadership following your spiritual humanity how much better Apple is than all those southern states that are far less righteous than yourself and that fail to follow the cues dropped by your Democratic Party.
Comments at Washington post to the article are useless. They're still piling up as I write this.
Back to Twitter.
Toot toot.
