[umvi]

I liked it better when organizations that weren't intrinsically political didn't get politically entangled with local politics at every opportunity... seems like a fad now (coming up with political reasons not to host your conference at X location or allow Y speaker to come and speak)

[chomp]

I propose that non-political organizations have always gotten entangled with local politics, when it mattered to a specific demographic, historically.

You might be confusing the fact that non-profit organizations are banned in the US by the IRS from endorsing candidates or engaging in political campaigns. Outside of those organizations, politics has always been intertwined with sports, with the performing arts, with extracurriculars (e.g. Scouting and nature hobbyist activities), schooling, businesses in unrelated domains (e.g. the outpouring of businesses in support for renewing the Voting Rights Act 20 years ago, musicians against the Vietnam war/Iraq war), and so on and so on.

The only people who do not get politically entangled with politics are ones who are used to politics leaving them alone.

[shuntress]

Any choice that affects people is inherently political.

You seem to be conflating this fact with the so-called "fad" of leveraging decisions for clout in an overtly partisan context.

[lostgame]

I was immediately reminded of a meme I saw yesterday that said 'corporations during June' and featured logos from a handful of fictitious but wholly evil companies like SkyNet, Umbrella Corp, inGen; etc, but painted with rainbow colours for Pride.

I have a bit of a crisis of conscience about this stuff. On one hand, especially with the oppression the LGTBQ+ community continues to face worldwide; any and all additional awareness and acceptance we can get is obviously so important.

On the other hand, it's obviously pandering, and a lot of these companies that fly the flag during Pride month have serious issues within their companies like fair treatment of employees, or whatever-have-you.

I'm actually more grateful, I think; for mandatory sensitivity training modules in most corporate businesses these days that essentially explain flat-out that homophobia and transphobia is not tolerated, and also help people who might genuinely not fully even know about things like proper usage of pronouns for trans people, for people who identify as gender neutral, etc.

My Dad is one of those homophobic/transphobic Christian nuts who thinks it's cool to use the name of God in order to belittle us, etc - he actually disowned me for a year when he found out I was transgender.

But - he had to undergo some sensitivity training through Microsoft, where he works - and eventually told me he had to work with transgender people at a couple points.

It helped him come around and decide to treat me like a person, too. So that kind of thing clearly helps, and I think it's awesome that companies are legitimately proactive on LGTBQ+ issues - not just during Pride month. :)

link to the related meme (I think it's actually pretty HN-suited): https://shorturl.at/aioqM

[jfengel]

It's good to hear that the mandatory training actually did some good. It's so easy to imagine that people like that react negatively to the training, and do the opposite out of sheer spite. At least they've heard it, so perhaps it sinks in eventually. And at the very least, they can't deny that they've been told what's expected of them.

[eesmith]

Is it really "a fad now"? Or is it that you don't know about older actions?

What about the 1970s when some bars stopped serving Coors to protest of the company's anti-labor and anti-LGBT policies? ("As late as 2019, Coors beer was difficult to find in any gay bar in San Francisco." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coors_strike_and_boycott )

Or 1969 when the AMS decided to move the spring meeting from Chicago to Cincinnati, in response to the brutal police attacks on political protestors during the 1968 DNC meeting? https://books.google.com/books?id=UnkYqxyWGz8C&pg=PA88&dq=mo...

Or even earlier in the 1960s when MLK proposed a boycott on Mississippi products? Quoting https://books.google.com/books?id=qcADAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA50&dq=%2...

> When millionaire Flint merchant Joseph Megell, 51, short, stocky aggressive president of 'Yankee Stores, Inc., announced that his buyers would boycott Mississippi-made products, he hoped that other large buyers of Mississippi goods would follow suit. Megdell, whose 18 stores, located in eight Michigan cities gross millions annually, launched the boycott because of the "ugly racial situation" in the state.