On Thursday, Apple CEO Tim Cook broke a secret even more shocking than Rosie O’Donnell’s: he is gay. Writing for Businessweek, he wrote that he had always “tried to maintain a basic level of privacy.” No longer: “I’ve come to realize that my desire for personal privacy has been holding me back from doing something more important…I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me.”
Put aside the religious objections to Cook’s statement, and the ambiguity as to whether he considers his sexual drive a gift from God or his choices about how to act on them a gift from God – the latter of which would be squarely antithetical to basic notions of free will. Put aside his puerile suggestion that being gay somehow makes people more empathetic and confident. Put aside Cook’s own self-aggrandizing nonsense about announcing his sexual predilections in order to help others, and his ridiculous arrogant references to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.
Focus in on the fact that Cook doesn’t just come out as gay, he then says that he will use Apple as a political tool in the fight for homosexual rights:
The company I am so fortunate to lead has long advocated for human rights and equality for all. We’ve taken a strong stand in support of a workplace equality bill before Congress, just as we stood for marriage equality in our home state of California. And we spoke up in Arizona when that state’s legislature passed a discriminatory bill targeting the gay community. We’ll continue to fight for our values, and I believe that any CEO of this incredible company, regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation, would do the same. And I will personally continue to advocate for equality for all people until my toes point up.
No conservative is going to launch a boycott against Apple over this. Nor should they – we are not the ideological totalitarians those on the left are.
When news broke that Brendan Eich, CEO of Mozilla Firefox, had given money to the pro-traditional marriage Proposition 8 measure in California in 2008, he was quickly ousted from his position by the company after a boycott by OKCupid. In that case, Mozilla didn’t even endorse Eich’s position – he was a private person against whom there were zero accusations of mistreatment of homosexuals. That didn’t matter. He was ousted nonetheless. Being a Christian in today’s America means risking your career.
When Hobby Lobby, a company owned by the religious Christian Green family, cited religious freedom in refusing to pay for insurance coverage containing certain types of birth control pills, the left went fully berserk. The Obama administration attempted to force Hobby Lobby to pay for the pills; the left trotted out Hobby Lobby as the great representative of all conservative evil for not paying to violate its own religious convictions.
When Chick-Fil-A COO Dan Cathy commented on his opposition to same-sex marriage, the left launched nationwide boycotts against the chain. When it came out that the Cathy-family-operated WinShape Foundation made donations to a pro-traditional marriage group, the Chick-Fil-A boycott redoubled.
The left’s hypocrisy is truly unbounded here. They may see Tim Cook as a hero; that’s their prerogative, although his own overweening sense of self-righteousness is quite galling. But for them to then attempt to silence the personal views of corporate heads with whom they disagree – and for them to boycott companies that aren’t even acting out those personal views – demonstrates their tyrannical mindset.
Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the new book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). He is also Editor-in-Chief of TruthRevolt.org. Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.
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