On CBC this weekend, Jim Brown, host of The 180 interviewed Molly Sauter a McGill University PhD candidate who says corporate boycotts of political jurisdictions that pass anti-LGBTQ laws are undemocratic.
I have to admit, my knee-jerk reaction was that here is a very smart person, who happens to be not very smart. Being as this is a column called Thinking Critically, however, a knee-jerk reaction is uncharitable at best.
Defending or condemning the corporate response to legislation is a really complicated business. The danger of hypocricy abounds.
The legislation in question, which has been enacted in North Carolina, allows “faith-based” organizations or businesses to refuse service to gay people and forces transgender people to use public restrooms in accordance with the gender they were assigned at birth. I say that in that particular way because although people tend to think of transgender people as confused about their sexuality, there are actually a significant number of cases, and a variety of genetic and anatomical conditions that complicate matters.
“If you ask experts at medical centers [sic] how often a child is born so noticeably atypical in terms of genitalia that a specialist in sex differentiation is called in, the number comes out to about 1 in 1500 to 1 in 2000 births,” states the Intersex Society of North America. “But a lot more people than that are born with subtler forms of sex anatomy variations, some of which won’t show up until later in life.”
Statistically, the bottom line is, the total number of persons whose bodies differ from standard male or female is one in 100 births. One or two in 1,000 receive surgery at birth to “normalize” their genitalia.
Ultimately, none of that is relevant except to say gender ambiguity is a more common and complicated than people think.
The bottom line, though, is discrimination on any basis is wrong. Following the passage of North Carolina’s anti-LGBT bill, companies such as Apple, Amazon, Google, Target, Monsanto, Unilever and Intel started flexing their economic muscles. Filmmkaers such as Rob Reiner called for a boycott and entertainers such as Bruce Springsteen and, more recently, Pearl Jam, cancelled concerts.
Molly Sauter makes no distinction between corporations and big name acts such as Springsteen and Pearl Jam.
“As private citizens, they can hold whatever political rules they want,” she said. “They can certainly say whatever they want, they can certainly go out in public and state their displeasure at these laws, which are, in fact, horrible. But at the point where they’re cancelling concerts, these large-scale stadium concerts, and using their power as essentially very powerful economic oligarchs and corporations, to remove money and jobs from the state, that’s where I start to have a problem.”
That is a very idealistic view, not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with being idealistic. It also brings up an interesting point about hurting people you’re trying to help, or at the very least hurting innocents.
She also warns against the implications of replacing of political power with economic power.
“When you have a corporation that has a great deal of economic power, and it uses that power to intervene directly in the legislative process, it is stepping outside the bounds of what we believe democracy is, which is: that in a democratic society, the basic unit of power is the citizen, and the citizen’s vote,” she said.
“But if corporations, which don’t have votes, which at least in many interpretations of democracy shouldn’t have speech rights, when those entities are able to exert power over a democratically elected legislature in order to change laws, then that means we’ve now stepped outside the democratic process and are instead dealing with a much more fundamentally oligarchical and neo-liberal system.”
It’s a powerful argument, if perhaps naive. The law North Carolina has passed is almost certainly unconstitutional. One could argue that it should be left to the courts or the voters to overturn it, but corporations or entertainers acting like corporations also have a great deal of freedom.
Ah, and therein lies the potential hypocrisy. By defending the actions of these entities, do we not also have to protect the right of another business to refuse service to whomever it pleases?
It is a tough question, one I don’t know if I have an answer for. As long as we’re talking democracy, though, Sauter’s premise is a populist, i.e., majority rules, point-of-view, which is undemocratic in and of itself in an advanced society.
This is why we have the rule of law. Governments in countries such as the United States and Canada that have at their foundation a constitution based on human rights cannot, or should not, be able to pass discriminatory laws no matter how popular they may be.
Corporations tend to stick pretty close to their bottom lines. The cynic in me, tends to think these companies recognize these laws are not popular and are looking out for their best interest.
Rather than leading the public, are they not perhaps following the public’s desire to overturn an unjust law?
Ultimately Sauter makes a great point that whether we agree with corporate pressure on a particular issue, we must be mindful of lending our support blindly.
“It’s very easy to agree with people who are on your side, and it’s very easy to fall into a mindset of ‘well in this case, the ends justify the means’,” she said. “But I disagree with many of these corporations in terms of environmental policy, or trade policy, or surveillance policy, or other areas where they’ve exerted lobbying power and suasion over the federal law making process. And just because they’re on the right side of history today, doesn’t mean they’ll be on the right side of history tomorrow.”
