In Conservative Chile, a Push for ChangeGays and Others Grow Bolder in Their Challenge to Nation's Cultural Arbiters
By Monte ReelWashington Post Foreign ServiceThursday, November 30, 2006; A14
SANTIAGO, Chile -- Emma de Ramón recently bought a condo here. But even before she moved in, she said, everyone in the building knew one fact about her: She's gay.
De Ramón and her partner, Karen Atala, a judge, have become unintentional celebrities since waging a battle against Chile's Supreme Court, which forced Atala to surrender custody of her three daughters because of her relationship with de Ramón.
Now the couple has become emblematic of a segment of the population growing noticeably bolder recently: those eager to shed Chile's questionable label as the most culturally conservative country in Latin America.
Some of those seeking change have challenged powerful institutions, which they say don't represent the public will. Atala and de Ramón have taken their fight outside the country to an international human rights commission in Washington, which they hope can convince the Chilean government that its highest court was wrong.
"Oh, we're famous now," said de Ramón, a historian who met Atala after the criminal court judge separated from her husband in 2001. "As for myself, when I'm out in public I usually don't feel like I'm the target of discrimination, and I don't hear disparaging comments. That's only from the Supreme Court."
Groups that have historically determined Chile's cultural norms -- including the Supreme Court, the Catholic Church and a traditional class of political elites -- are now being tested on multiple fronts.
A new national policy, for example, offers free morning-after pills to anyone 14 or older. Congress is debating proposals to explicitly protect the legal rights of gays and other minorities. Another proposal that would allow "merciful deaths" to terminally ill patients has ignited a debate about euthanasia. And a government-funded AIDS prevention campaign launched this month shows school-age girls and a gay couple, among others, promoting condom use. The campaign has riled Catholic Church leaders.
For a country that legalized divorce just two years ago, the pace of the changes is remarkable. The church remains influential and is viewed favorably by most Chileans, but its leaders say they are concerned about a general movement away from its teachings. This month, the country's Catholic bishops issued what they termed a moral wake-up call to the nation, citing "strange currents" running through society that are distancing people from their religious foundations.
"We will not stop saying what we have to say and doing what we have to do," the bishops said in their statement. "There are moments in history when they listen to us, blessed be God, and there are moments when they do not listen."
As president, Michelle Bachelet -- an agnostic, separated mother of three -- stands at the center of many of the cultural disputes. She was inaugurated in March after running a campaign that emphasized social tolerance. Though she is part of the same governing coalition that has held the presidency since Gen. Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship was ousted 16 years ago, her style of governance at times has been markedly different from those of her predecessors.
For example, Bachelet, a former health minister and pediatrician, pushed for the distribution of free morning-after pills without extensive consultation with more conservative members of the ruling coalition -- lawmakers who for years have successfully put the brakes on culturally divisive proposals. Bachelet's political alliances with those members make radical changes very difficult, but analysts say she is willfully trying to break up the influence of the traditionally powerful classes.
"She didn't consult with them because if she had, it wouldn't have passed," said Marta Lagos, a political analyst and pollster in Santiago. "So there is a tension now that has a lot to do with the way the traditional ruling elite -- which is very conservative -- views the way she exercises her leadership. It's very startling for them, but the general population couldn't care less."
Though it was a bitter fight in political circles, the morning-after pill issue didn't affect Bachelet's approval rating, which increased slightly after the controversy. One poll conducted about three weeks ago placed her approval rating at 59 percent, higher than the 53 percent of the total vote she was elected by in January.
"There's a difference in attitudes between those in the higher levels of society and the rest of the population, I think," said Daniela Ullrich, 23, a university student in Santiago. "Like with the morning-after pill -- powerful people from high society were against it, but they always could get the pills at any time, if they wanted them. But the rest of the people couldn't, and they were the ones who supported the proposal."
Macarena Saez, the attorney handling the Atala custody case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, said a growing recognition of the distances separating Chile's general population and its institutions make her hopeful that the government will reach an amicable agreement in the case.
"We're facing a society that is way more open than its institutions, and that's a good sign for us," Saez said.
Saez is part of a group of lawyers who first challenged Chile's justice system by disputing its strict censorship laws. In 2003, their efforts prompted a constitutional change of censorship laws after the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ruled that the Supreme Court was wrong in upholding the ban on films such as Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ."
Now Saez and her colleagues are hoping the commission, part of the Organization of American States, will issue a similar ruling about the Atala case, resulting in new anti-discrimination legislation that would specifically ban child custody decisions based on the sexual orientation of the parent. For Juan Ignacio Correa, who is working on the Atala case in Santiago, such a change would represent a victory for democracy.
"The group of society that wants to preserve the status quo is very powerful, but I believe that there exists a much more massive group beneath them in society that wants change," Correa said.
Felipe Rivas, who four years ago founded a student group for gay men and lesbians at the University of Chile, said the Atala case and the possibility of anti-discrimination legislation are viewed as important steps for gays, but said they also hold broader meaning here.
"In Chile, human rights has always meant torture and the crimes of the dictatorship," said Rivas, 23. "But now the definition is changing, and people are seeing that human rights abuses can extend to a lot of other areas, too."
Friday, December 01, 2006
How Corporate America fell in love with gays and lesbians. It's a movement.
By Marc Gunther, Fortune senior writer
November 30 2006: 3:41 PM EST
(Fortune Magazine) -- Business is booming at Raytheon (Charts), the $22-billion-a-year defense contractor that sells Tomahawk cruise missiles, laser-vision goggles and advanced radar systems to the Pentagon. This, improbably, is good news for the gay-rights movement.
A platoon of Raytheon employees wearing identical blue-and-black bowling shirts, pins with the company's logo and black pants proudly walked the halls of this fall's convention of Out & Equal, an organization that brings together the networks of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people - GLBT, in the argot of the moment - that have taken root at America's big companies.
Proud parents: After Mike Syers and partner Darryl Hudak adopted Holly, Syers became a leader of a GLBT group at Ernst & Young.
Members of bEYond, the GLBT and ally network at Ernst & Young.
For three days in Chicago, with about 1,700 delegates from other companies, the 67 members of Raytheon's GLBT network could attend workshops with such titles as The Cost of Transgender Health Benefits, Breaking Through the Lavender Ceiling and Male-on-Male Sexual Harassment: An Emerging Issue.
As a high-profile supporter of gay rights, Raytheon of course provides health-care benefits to the domestic partners of its gay employees. It does a lot more, too. The company supports a wide array of gay-rights groups, including the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay-advocacy group. Its employees march under the Raytheon banner at gay-pride celebrations and AIDS walks.
Corporate America backs gay rights
And it belongs to gay chambers of commerce in communities where it has big plants. Why? you may ask. Not because gay people buy missiles or radar - at least as far as we know. No, it's because the competition to hire and retain engineers and other skilled workers is so brutal that Raytheon doesn't want to overlook anyone.
To attract openly gay workers, who worry about discrimination, a company like Raytheon needs to hang out a big welcome sign. "Over the next ten years we're going to need anywhere from 30,000 to 40,000 new employees," explains Heyward Bell, Raytheon's chief diversity officer. "We can't afford to turn our back on anyone in the talent pool."
Corporate America embraces GLBT
Last June the gay rights movement quietly achieved a milestone: For the first time, more than half of Fortune 500 companies - 263, to be precise - offered health benefits for domestic partners, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Ten years ago only 28 did.
Along with health benefits for their families, many workers also get bereavement leave when their same-sex partner dies, adoption assistance or paid leave if they have children and relocation assistance for their partners if they are transferred. Put another way, gay marriage - an idea that has been banned by all but one of 27 states that have voted on it - has become a fact of life inside many big companies.
"Corporate America is far ahead of America generally when it comes to the question of equality for GLBT people," says Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign.
Solmonese is right. The nation's Roman Catholic bishops last month advised gays to be celibate because the church considers their sexuality "disordered." Prominent evangelical minister Ted Haggard stepped down from his church after he was accused of having an affair with a gay man. Social conservatives flock to the polls to oppose gay marriage.
Business is different. "It's not a faith-based community," says Ed Offshack, a chemical engineer and gay activist at Procter & Gamble (Charts). "It's a logic-based community." The changes in attitudes toward gays and lesbians have been swift, deep, and altogether remarkable. People who once were shunned and then merely tolerated are today being embraced by corporate America. Yes, embraced. And not just on Seventh Avenue and in Hollywood:
When Justin Nelson was trying to get the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce off the ground in 2003, IBM (Charts) offered its support. "If they hadn't joined, there wouldn't be a chamber," Nelson says. Big Blue was followed by Wells Fargo, Motorola, Intel, American Express and recently, Wal-Mart (Charts). Today the Washington-based gay chamber, which has 24,000 members, certifies small businesses as gay-owned so that they can qualify for supplier-diversity programs at big companies. Think about that: Homosexuality, once a career-killing secret, has become enough of a competitive advantage in some circles that certification is needed to deter straight people from passing as gay.
Companies are taking their support for gay rights into the political arena.
Last spring, after internal soul-searching, Microsoft (Charts) was persuaded by its GLBT employee group, GLEAM (Gay and Lesbian Employees at Microsoft) to support state legislation to ban discrimination against gays. CEO Steve Ballmer said, "Diversity in the workplace is such an important issue for our business that it should be included in our legislative agenda."
Some companies are grappling with how to manage employees switching from one sex to another. American Airlines and its HR people helped a 58-year-old pilot - an ex-Marine and Vietnam combat veteran - go from being Robert to Bobbi. Energy giant Chevron (Charts) published "Transgender@Chevron," an eight-page guide to the issues that come up when a worker changes gender identity, ranging from the bureaucratic (don't forget to get a new security badge) to the everyday (when it's appropriate to move from the men's room to the ladies' room or vice versa).
Yes, the world of work is changing - though not without a backlash.
Backlash
When Walgreens, Kraft and Harris Bank signed up to sponsor the 2006 Gay Games, a weeklong festival in Chicago that attracted 11,000 athletes, conservative Christian groups attacked.
Peter LaBarbera, the president of Americans for Truth, which calls itself the only national organization devoted exclusively to exposing and countering the homosexual activist agenda, wrote to Walgreens: "Make no mistake: The 'Gay Games' was conceived as a way to build acceptance for homosexuality in the name of sport - a perversion of the athletic ideal."
A Walgreens' store manager in Alabama quit in protest. Chief executive David Bernauer got 250,000 e-mails, most from a Web site of the American Family Association, another Christian group. "Having the CEO's server crash was not a positive thing," says Phil Burgess, national director of pharmacy operations at Walgreens.
Burgess, who is gay, said the company made the $100,000 donation to support its GLBT employees and let gay and lesbian customers know that they are welcome at Walgreens. The company writes more prescriptions for AIDS-related drugs than any other pharmacy chain.
Some people may simply wish all the controversy would go away. "It's a distraction," says Stephen Viscusi, the (gay) owner of an executive-search firm. "You should be defined by the work you do." People can do whatever they want in bed, this line of thinking goes, but in the workplace, sexual orientation shouldn't matter.
The trouble is, it still does: In 34 states it's legal to fire an employee simply for being gay. Last winter a photographer named Laurel Scherer, who took pictures of skiers at the Wolf Laurel Ski Area near Asheville, N.C., lost her contract with the resort after she and her partner were married in Massachusetts and ran their wedding announcement in the Asheville Citizen Times. The Human Rights Campaign gets about 25 to 30 complaints a month about workplace discrimination.
Pioneering change
What would people think? Mike Syers, a 42-year-old partner at Ernst & Young, was coming out in a very big way. About 3,000 partners of the firm had gathered in Orlando for a conference last year. A two-minute video of Syers played on giant TV screens throughout the convention center. He sat in the audience watching himself.
"When I started in public accounting," the onscreen Syers said, "I really didn't think there was a long-term career opportunity for me. Being a gay man, I didn't see gay partners." But things were different at E&Y, he said. He felt comfortable and welcomed.
As the screen went dark, Syers's BlackBerry began vibrating. Messages of support poured in. Afterward a partner came up to him to say that his son was gay, and that he would call home that night to tell his son how proud he was to work at E&Y.
E&Y had asked Syers to make the video because he is a leader of bEYond, the company's GLBT employee group. bEYond is only two years old, but it sent 72 people to this fall's Out & Equal convention. It also sponsored the 2006 Reaching Out MBA conference, a gay and lesbian recruiting event that attracted about 700 MBA students to New York. Courting them were Accenture, Dell, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, Lehman Bros., McKinsey, Merrill Lynch, Microsoft, Target and Toyota, among others.
This is how workplace changes typically happen at big companies - from the inside out. Gay and lesbian employees come out of the closet. They find one another. They organize. They enlist straight allies. And they take their concerns to top managers.
The first company-sanctioned network of gays, called League, was formed by gay employees at AT&T in 1987. Now more than 110 company-supported GLBT employee groups have registered with Out & Equal.
These gay networks customarily meet in company facilities, use the company intranet, and receive financial support. Some get more respect than others. Jeff Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, makes it a point to clear his calendar each year for the annual gatherings of the African American and women's networks at GE, but he has never met with the GLBT group. That's caused some bad feelings.
When Ernst & Young hired Syers in 2002, he decided to be more open about being gay, partly because he and his partner had just adopted a daughter. "I will never, ever let her think that her family is something to be ashamed of," he says.
When he mentioned his new baby to an E&Y colleague, she asked, "So what does your wife do?" He replied, "Actually, my daughter has two dads." She said, "That is so cool."
Things hadn't always gone so smoothly. Years earlier he'd come out only to a few friends and co-workers; his best friend from high school never spoke to him again. So Syers wasn't sure what to expect when he and Chris Crespo, a lesbian colleague, went to see John Ferraro, the firm's senior vice chair, to ask for company recognition of a gay employee group that had begun to meet informally.
Ferraro listened. The 51-year-old Boston native had not spent much time with gay people - he'd been raised in a religious family, with ten brothers and sisters - and he was surprised to learn that some GLBT employees felt uncomfortable at Ernst.
He offered to become the executive sponsor of bEYond. "It was obvious that they had to make decisions every day on whom they could talk to and how much of themselves they could bring to work," Ferraro says. "I can't imagine coming to work every day and feeling afraid. It just felt wrong." It was wrong for the business, too, he says. "Do the percentages. Whether it's ethnicity, gender or GLBT, people are our top asset."
The Cincinnati affair
There may be places in America where companies can sidestep the controversy over gay rights. Cincinnati is not one of them.
In 1993, Cincinnati voters, by a 65 to 35 percent margin, adopted Article 12, a charter amendment that prohibited the city from passing any law to protect gays against discrimination. It was put on the ballot by conservative Christians. In 2004, the voters repealed Article 12 by a 54 to 46 percent margin. In between, business stepped in.
The day after the 1993 anti-gay vote, Ed Offshack, an Ivy League-educated chemical engineer at P&G, came to work in a sour mood. He announced to his manager that he intended to do what he could to make the company more gay-friendly.
Offshack, 46, is a second-generation P&Ger - his father worked as an hourly employee at a big manufacturing plant in Mehoopany, Pa. - and he had no complaints about how he'd been treated by the firm. In 1989 his supervisors arranged for Offshack's partner to accompany him when he was transferred to the Philippines. "I've always felt supported," he says.
But P&G was at first reluctant to support gay people in a public way. Not until 1996 did the company permit GABLE, its gay and lesbian employee group, to create an e-mail network. Two years later children of same-sex parents were not allowed to attend a P&G-sponsored "family" event at a local amusement park.
Gradually P&G came around to GABLE's point of view. At the group's urging, it pulled its ads from talk-show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger's program after she was accused of being anti-gay. It offered domestic-partner benefits in 2002.
Not long afterward P&G agreed to support the repeal of Article 12. In a speech to the regional branch of the National Conference for Community and Justice (formerly the National Conference of Christians and Jews), CEO A.G. Lafley said, "Article 12 is neither inclusive nor just, and it has severely harmed the economic vitality of our city."
P&G donated $40,000 to gay-rights group Citizens to Restore Fairness. Lafley gave about $5,000 in company stock. Susan Arnold, a lesbian who is P&G's vice chairman and a possible heir apparent to Lafley, gave $10,000. GE Aircraft Engines, Kroger, Federated and Hewlett-Packard all gave money to Citizens to Restore Fairness, and some urged their employees to vote against Article 12.
Christian conservatives were aghast. The company and its executives have "publicly thrown their support and money behind the homosexual political agenda," said the Rev. Donald Wildmon, president of the American Family Association.
He also objected to P&G's decision to offer same-sex-partner health benefits and to its advertising on gay-themed TV shows such as NBC's "Will & Grace." The AFA, Focus on the Family and an Ohio-based group called Citizens for Community Values called for a boycott of Tide, Crest and Pampers.
Phil Burress, president of Citizens for Community Values, which opposes gay marriage and pornography, still can't understand why P&G would insert itself into the culture wars. "Why in the world would corporations get involved in something as murky as people's sexual lives?" he asks.
Burress, 64, is a force in Ohio politics: Citizens for Community Values has eight staff members and a $1.5 million annual budget. Burress is also a board member of Exodus International, a group that helps people walk away from homosexuality by finding Christ, and is a key member of the Arlington Group, a high-powered Washington, D.C.-based coalition of groups opposing same-sex marriage.
P&G has reached out to Christian conservatives like Burress, and he says the firm is listening. Unlike Wildmon, he does not object to P&G's decision to provide domestic-partner benefits. "What they do on the inside, that's their business," he says.
But Burress thinks it's wrong for P&G to support what he calls "special rights" for gays - by which he means legal protection against discrimination. Prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, he says, interferes with other people's rights to be guided by their own moral values when deciding, for example, whether to rent an apartment to a same-sex couple or hire homosexuals in their business. "This is a battle of rights," he says.
The Christian groups called off their boycott last year. Says Burress: "P&G has quietly backed away from promoting homosexuality, but they'll never admit it."
He may be right on both counts. P&G's score on the Corporate Equality Index, an annual rating of companies by the Human Rights Campaign, has dropped in recent years. What do P&G executives say about this? We can't tell you. They declined to be interviewed.
Big Blue on the cutting edge
I
n 1953, Thomas J. Watson Jr., the president of IBM, issued a written policy promising that the company would hire people based on their ability, "regardless of race, color or creed." This was a bold move, coming as it did a year before the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown decision and 11 years before the Civil Rights Act.
IBM was planning to build plants in Kentucky and North Carolina, and Watson wanted to make sure they were integrated. With that history it's no surprise that IBM is now at the cutting edge when it comes to promoting gay rights:
Among corporations, IBM is the No. 1 financial supporter of gay rights groups in the U.S.
To export its gay-friendly culture, IBM supports employee GLBT groups in 23 countries, including Singapore, Slovakia and Colombia. There's plenty to do: In 80 countries homosexual acts are illegal, as they were in parts of the U.S. until a few years ago.
Last year IBM convened a group of gay college students at the Human Rights Campaign to form a national organization of students in science and technology.
IBM persuaded Dr. Marci Bowers, one of the world's leading sex-reassignment surgeons and herself a transgendered person, to participate in the company's health insurance program.
IBM stepped up its diversity efforts in 1995, when Louis V. Gerstner, then CEO, formed eight executive-level task forces, one each for women, African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, people with disabilities, employees with work-life issues, GBLT people and men. Men? "Everyone needs a support system," says Ron Glover, the company's vice president of global workforce diversity.
Each task force was asked four questions: How can IBM attract the most talented people from your group? How can the company keep them engaged and productive? How should IBM market to them? And which outside groups should become IBM's partners? The goal was for IBM to get better at attracting talent and selling to broader sets of customers. "It was pretty simple at one level and pretty profound at another," Glover says.
The IBM of today looks very different from the IBM of 1995. The number of female executives worldwide has increased by 490 percent. The number of self-identified GLBT executives has grown even faster - and the number of executives with disabilities has more than tripled. IBM buys $2.1 billion worth of goods and services from suppliers owned by women, minorities or GLBT people, and it sells more than $500 million of goods and services by marketing to those groups.
Randy Foster is one name behind the numbers. A former U.S. Air Force captain, he got very good at keeping secrets during his eight-year military stint. Foster could not tell his family or friends about his work with the National Reconnaissance Office, a classified government agency that builds spy satellites. And he could not tell anyone in the military that he was gay. Rather than lie about his sexual orientation, the South Carolina native left the service in 1995.
After working at defense contractors TRW, Boeing and General Dynamics, Foster settled at IBM, where he sells technology and services to the defense industry and the government. "Come hell or high water, I wanted to live one life," he says. "The only things I have to hide now are national security secrets, and those are good secrets."
Foster didn't join the gay employee groups at any of the companies where he has worked. "I'm not an activist," he says. But he does want to feel welcomed.
"The most incredible thing about IBM is that since the day I arrived, I've never thought about being gay and how it might affect my job," Foster says. "IBM's a notch above."
The movement goes to Bentonville
So where is the corporate gay-rights movement going from here? To Bentonville, Ark. Yep, Wal-Mart's getting gay-friendly. Or as an HR manager for the company put it during a workshop at the Out & Equal conference, which Wal-Mart sponsored: "We're here, we're queer and we're proud to be here."
Wal-Mart has invited gay-rights leaders to Bentonville and hired Witeck-Combs, the preeminent gay marketing and consulting firm. It is organizing workshops with the national gay chamber of commerce. It sponsored a panel at a conference of gay journalists, sent a small group to the Human Rights Campaign's annual dinner, and donated three scholarships to the Point Foundation, which provides support and mentoring to students who are marginalized or cast out by their families because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
Wal-Mart becomes gay-friendly
Ken Pearson, a middle manager at Wal-Mart University, got Pride, the company's GLBT employee group, started just last year. He said the group has made headway with the company by arguing the business case for gay-friendly policies - that they will help Wal-Mart attract more skilled employees, reach a broader range of customers and expand into urban markets.
This year the company tried selling gay-themed jewelry and promoted the DVD release of the gay love story "Brokeback Mountain." Domestic-partner benefits are now being talked about by America's largest private employer. "I didn't expect this much movement this quickly," Pearson says.
Here comes the backlash. The American Family Association called for a Thanksgiving-weekend boycott (called off at the last minute). Phil Burress, the Cincinnati-based activist, says, "Wal-Mart has no idea what they have taken on here. This Christmas, Wal-Mart's going to take a huge hit for what they've done."
It's possible, but the truth is that for the past 15 years, boycotts or no boycotts, corporate America has been moving in only one direction, and at a pretty rapid pace.
Do you recall that the restaurant chain Cracker Barrel fired gay workers back in 1991 for not having "normal heterosexual values"? Well, a few years ago, when a Kodak employee sent an e-mail to co-workers objecting to the company's endorsement of National Coming Out day as "disgusting and offensive," he was the one who was fired when he declined to apologize. He was entitled to his beliefs, the company explained, but his behavior was not aligned with Kodak's values.
So it's clear where big business is going. What's interesting is to watch it pull the rest of the country along. It turns out that the most important factor shaping people's feelings about gay issues is not their age or even their religion - although those do matter - but whether they have relatives, friends or co-workers who are gay.
"The more out and open people are, the more changed the straight people are all around them," says Joe Solmonese, the Human Rights Campaign president. HRC began organizing workplaces to secure benefits for gay employees. This has inadvertently become a shrewd political strategy as well. "To move the mindset of the American people, we need to find the places where they congregate," Solmonese says. "Priority one is corporate America."
__________________
Religious group calls off Wal-Mart boycott
ExxonMobil's gay problem
From the December 11, 2006 issue
By Marc Gunther, Fortune senior writer
November 30 2006: 3:41 PM EST
(Fortune Magazine) -- Business is booming at Raytheon (Charts), the $22-billion-a-year defense contractor that sells Tomahawk cruise missiles, laser-vision goggles and advanced radar systems to the Pentagon. This, improbably, is good news for the gay-rights movement.
A platoon of Raytheon employees wearing identical blue-and-black bowling shirts, pins with the company's logo and black pants proudly walked the halls of this fall's convention of Out & Equal, an organization that brings together the networks of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people - GLBT, in the argot of the moment - that have taken root at America's big companies.
Proud parents: After Mike Syers and partner Darryl Hudak adopted Holly, Syers became a leader of a GLBT group at Ernst & Young.
Members of bEYond, the GLBT and ally network at Ernst & Young.
For three days in Chicago, with about 1,700 delegates from other companies, the 67 members of Raytheon's GLBT network could attend workshops with such titles as The Cost of Transgender Health Benefits, Breaking Through the Lavender Ceiling and Male-on-Male Sexual Harassment: An Emerging Issue.
As a high-profile supporter of gay rights, Raytheon of course provides health-care benefits to the domestic partners of its gay employees. It does a lot more, too. The company supports a wide array of gay-rights groups, including the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay-advocacy group. Its employees march under the Raytheon banner at gay-pride celebrations and AIDS walks.
Corporate America backs gay rights
And it belongs to gay chambers of commerce in communities where it has big plants. Why? you may ask. Not because gay people buy missiles or radar - at least as far as we know. No, it's because the competition to hire and retain engineers and other skilled workers is so brutal that Raytheon doesn't want to overlook anyone.
To attract openly gay workers, who worry about discrimination, a company like Raytheon needs to hang out a big welcome sign. "Over the next ten years we're going to need anywhere from 30,000 to 40,000 new employees," explains Heyward Bell, Raytheon's chief diversity officer. "We can't afford to turn our back on anyone in the talent pool."
Corporate America embraces GLBT
Last June the gay rights movement quietly achieved a milestone: For the first time, more than half of Fortune 500 companies - 263, to be precise - offered health benefits for domestic partners, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Ten years ago only 28 did.
Along with health benefits for their families, many workers also get bereavement leave when their same-sex partner dies, adoption assistance or paid leave if they have children and relocation assistance for their partners if they are transferred. Put another way, gay marriage - an idea that has been banned by all but one of 27 states that have voted on it - has become a fact of life inside many big companies.
"Corporate America is far ahead of America generally when it comes to the question of equality for GLBT people," says Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign.
Solmonese is right. The nation's Roman Catholic bishops last month advised gays to be celibate because the church considers their sexuality "disordered." Prominent evangelical minister Ted Haggard stepped down from his church after he was accused of having an affair with a gay man. Social conservatives flock to the polls to oppose gay marriage.
Business is different. "It's not a faith-based community," says Ed Offshack, a chemical engineer and gay activist at Procter & Gamble (Charts). "It's a logic-based community." The changes in attitudes toward gays and lesbians have been swift, deep, and altogether remarkable. People who once were shunned and then merely tolerated are today being embraced by corporate America. Yes, embraced. And not just on Seventh Avenue and in Hollywood:
When Justin Nelson was trying to get the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce off the ground in 2003, IBM (Charts) offered its support. "If they hadn't joined, there wouldn't be a chamber," Nelson says. Big Blue was followed by Wells Fargo, Motorola, Intel, American Express and recently, Wal-Mart (Charts). Today the Washington-based gay chamber, which has 24,000 members, certifies small businesses as gay-owned so that they can qualify for supplier-diversity programs at big companies. Think about that: Homosexuality, once a career-killing secret, has become enough of a competitive advantage in some circles that certification is needed to deter straight people from passing as gay.
Companies are taking their support for gay rights into the political arena.
Last spring, after internal soul-searching, Microsoft (Charts) was persuaded by its GLBT employee group, GLEAM (Gay and Lesbian Employees at Microsoft) to support state legislation to ban discrimination against gays. CEO Steve Ballmer said, "Diversity in the workplace is such an important issue for our business that it should be included in our legislative agenda."
Some companies are grappling with how to manage employees switching from one sex to another. American Airlines and its HR people helped a 58-year-old pilot - an ex-Marine and Vietnam combat veteran - go from being Robert to Bobbi. Energy giant Chevron (Charts) published "Transgender@Chevron," an eight-page guide to the issues that come up when a worker changes gender identity, ranging from the bureaucratic (don't forget to get a new security badge) to the everyday (when it's appropriate to move from the men's room to the ladies' room or vice versa).
Yes, the world of work is changing - though not without a backlash.
Backlash
When Walgreens, Kraft and Harris Bank signed up to sponsor the 2006 Gay Games, a weeklong festival in Chicago that attracted 11,000 athletes, conservative Christian groups attacked.
Peter LaBarbera, the president of Americans for Truth, which calls itself the only national organization devoted exclusively to exposing and countering the homosexual activist agenda, wrote to Walgreens: "Make no mistake: The 'Gay Games' was conceived as a way to build acceptance for homosexuality in the name of sport - a perversion of the athletic ideal."
A Walgreens' store manager in Alabama quit in protest. Chief executive David Bernauer got 250,000 e-mails, most from a Web site of the American Family Association, another Christian group. "Having the CEO's server crash was not a positive thing," says Phil Burgess, national director of pharmacy operations at Walgreens.
Burgess, who is gay, said the company made the $100,000 donation to support its GLBT employees and let gay and lesbian customers know that they are welcome at Walgreens. The company writes more prescriptions for AIDS-related drugs than any other pharmacy chain.
Some people may simply wish all the controversy would go away. "It's a distraction," says Stephen Viscusi, the (gay) owner of an executive-search firm. "You should be defined by the work you do." People can do whatever they want in bed, this line of thinking goes, but in the workplace, sexual orientation shouldn't matter.
The trouble is, it still does: In 34 states it's legal to fire an employee simply for being gay. Last winter a photographer named Laurel Scherer, who took pictures of skiers at the Wolf Laurel Ski Area near Asheville, N.C., lost her contract with the resort after she and her partner were married in Massachusetts and ran their wedding announcement in the Asheville Citizen Times. The Human Rights Campaign gets about 25 to 30 complaints a month about workplace discrimination.
Pioneering change
What would people think? Mike Syers, a 42-year-old partner at Ernst & Young, was coming out in a very big way. About 3,000 partners of the firm had gathered in Orlando for a conference last year. A two-minute video of Syers played on giant TV screens throughout the convention center. He sat in the audience watching himself.
"When I started in public accounting," the onscreen Syers said, "I really didn't think there was a long-term career opportunity for me. Being a gay man, I didn't see gay partners." But things were different at E&Y, he said. He felt comfortable and welcomed.
As the screen went dark, Syers's BlackBerry began vibrating. Messages of support poured in. Afterward a partner came up to him to say that his son was gay, and that he would call home that night to tell his son how proud he was to work at E&Y.
E&Y had asked Syers to make the video because he is a leader of bEYond, the company's GLBT employee group. bEYond is only two years old, but it sent 72 people to this fall's Out & Equal convention. It also sponsored the 2006 Reaching Out MBA conference, a gay and lesbian recruiting event that attracted about 700 MBA students to New York. Courting them were Accenture, Dell, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, Lehman Bros., McKinsey, Merrill Lynch, Microsoft, Target and Toyota, among others.
This is how workplace changes typically happen at big companies - from the inside out. Gay and lesbian employees come out of the closet. They find one another. They organize. They enlist straight allies. And they take their concerns to top managers.
The first company-sanctioned network of gays, called League, was formed by gay employees at AT&T in 1987. Now more than 110 company-supported GLBT employee groups have registered with Out & Equal.
These gay networks customarily meet in company facilities, use the company intranet, and receive financial support. Some get more respect than others. Jeff Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, makes it a point to clear his calendar each year for the annual gatherings of the African American and women's networks at GE, but he has never met with the GLBT group. That's caused some bad feelings.
When Ernst & Young hired Syers in 2002, he decided to be more open about being gay, partly because he and his partner had just adopted a daughter. "I will never, ever let her think that her family is something to be ashamed of," he says.
When he mentioned his new baby to an E&Y colleague, she asked, "So what does your wife do?" He replied, "Actually, my daughter has two dads." She said, "That is so cool."
Things hadn't always gone so smoothly. Years earlier he'd come out only to a few friends and co-workers; his best friend from high school never spoke to him again. So Syers wasn't sure what to expect when he and Chris Crespo, a lesbian colleague, went to see John Ferraro, the firm's senior vice chair, to ask for company recognition of a gay employee group that had begun to meet informally.
Ferraro listened. The 51-year-old Boston native had not spent much time with gay people - he'd been raised in a religious family, with ten brothers and sisters - and he was surprised to learn that some GLBT employees felt uncomfortable at Ernst.
He offered to become the executive sponsor of bEYond. "It was obvious that they had to make decisions every day on whom they could talk to and how much of themselves they could bring to work," Ferraro says. "I can't imagine coming to work every day and feeling afraid. It just felt wrong." It was wrong for the business, too, he says. "Do the percentages. Whether it's ethnicity, gender or GLBT, people are our top asset."
The Cincinnati affair
There may be places in America where companies can sidestep the controversy over gay rights. Cincinnati is not one of them.
In 1993, Cincinnati voters, by a 65 to 35 percent margin, adopted Article 12, a charter amendment that prohibited the city from passing any law to protect gays against discrimination. It was put on the ballot by conservative Christians. In 2004, the voters repealed Article 12 by a 54 to 46 percent margin. In between, business stepped in.
The day after the 1993 anti-gay vote, Ed Offshack, an Ivy League-educated chemical engineer at P&G, came to work in a sour mood. He announced to his manager that he intended to do what he could to make the company more gay-friendly.
Offshack, 46, is a second-generation P&Ger - his father worked as an hourly employee at a big manufacturing plant in Mehoopany, Pa. - and he had no complaints about how he'd been treated by the firm. In 1989 his supervisors arranged for Offshack's partner to accompany him when he was transferred to the Philippines. "I've always felt supported," he says.
But P&G was at first reluctant to support gay people in a public way. Not until 1996 did the company permit GABLE, its gay and lesbian employee group, to create an e-mail network. Two years later children of same-sex parents were not allowed to attend a P&G-sponsored "family" event at a local amusement park.
Gradually P&G came around to GABLE's point of view. At the group's urging, it pulled its ads from talk-show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger's program after she was accused of being anti-gay. It offered domestic-partner benefits in 2002.
Not long afterward P&G agreed to support the repeal of Article 12. In a speech to the regional branch of the National Conference for Community and Justice (formerly the National Conference of Christians and Jews), CEO A.G. Lafley said, "Article 12 is neither inclusive nor just, and it has severely harmed the economic vitality of our city."
P&G donated $40,000 to gay-rights group Citizens to Restore Fairness. Lafley gave about $5,000 in company stock. Susan Arnold, a lesbian who is P&G's vice chairman and a possible heir apparent to Lafley, gave $10,000. GE Aircraft Engines, Kroger, Federated and Hewlett-Packard all gave money to Citizens to Restore Fairness, and some urged their employees to vote against Article 12.
Christian conservatives were aghast. The company and its executives have "publicly thrown their support and money behind the homosexual political agenda," said the Rev. Donald Wildmon, president of the American Family Association.
He also objected to P&G's decision to offer same-sex-partner health benefits and to its advertising on gay-themed TV shows such as NBC's "Will & Grace." The AFA, Focus on the Family and an Ohio-based group called Citizens for Community Values called for a boycott of Tide, Crest and Pampers.
Phil Burress, president of Citizens for Community Values, which opposes gay marriage and pornography, still can't understand why P&G would insert itself into the culture wars. "Why in the world would corporations get involved in something as murky as people's sexual lives?" he asks.
Burress, 64, is a force in Ohio politics: Citizens for Community Values has eight staff members and a $1.5 million annual budget. Burress is also a board member of Exodus International, a group that helps people walk away from homosexuality by finding Christ, and is a key member of the Arlington Group, a high-powered Washington, D.C.-based coalition of groups opposing same-sex marriage.
P&G has reached out to Christian conservatives like Burress, and he says the firm is listening. Unlike Wildmon, he does not object to P&G's decision to provide domestic-partner benefits. "What they do on the inside, that's their business," he says.
But Burress thinks it's wrong for P&G to support what he calls "special rights" for gays - by which he means legal protection against discrimination. Prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, he says, interferes with other people's rights to be guided by their own moral values when deciding, for example, whether to rent an apartment to a same-sex couple or hire homosexuals in their business. "This is a battle of rights," he says.
The Christian groups called off their boycott last year. Says Burress: "P&G has quietly backed away from promoting homosexuality, but they'll never admit it."
He may be right on both counts. P&G's score on the Corporate Equality Index, an annual rating of companies by the Human Rights Campaign, has dropped in recent years. What do P&G executives say about this? We can't tell you. They declined to be interviewed.
Big Blue on the cutting edge
I
n 1953, Thomas J. Watson Jr., the president of IBM, issued a written policy promising that the company would hire people based on their ability, "regardless of race, color or creed." This was a bold move, coming as it did a year before the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown decision and 11 years before the Civil Rights Act.
IBM was planning to build plants in Kentucky and North Carolina, and Watson wanted to make sure they were integrated. With that history it's no surprise that IBM is now at the cutting edge when it comes to promoting gay rights:
Among corporations, IBM is the No. 1 financial supporter of gay rights groups in the U.S.
To export its gay-friendly culture, IBM supports employee GLBT groups in 23 countries, including Singapore, Slovakia and Colombia. There's plenty to do: In 80 countries homosexual acts are illegal, as they were in parts of the U.S. until a few years ago.
Last year IBM convened a group of gay college students at the Human Rights Campaign to form a national organization of students in science and technology.
IBM persuaded Dr. Marci Bowers, one of the world's leading sex-reassignment surgeons and herself a transgendered person, to participate in the company's health insurance program.
IBM stepped up its diversity efforts in 1995, when Louis V. Gerstner, then CEO, formed eight executive-level task forces, one each for women, African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, people with disabilities, employees with work-life issues, GBLT people and men. Men? "Everyone needs a support system," says Ron Glover, the company's vice president of global workforce diversity.
Each task force was asked four questions: How can IBM attract the most talented people from your group? How can the company keep them engaged and productive? How should IBM market to them? And which outside groups should become IBM's partners? The goal was for IBM to get better at attracting talent and selling to broader sets of customers. "It was pretty simple at one level and pretty profound at another," Glover says.
The IBM of today looks very different from the IBM of 1995. The number of female executives worldwide has increased by 490 percent. The number of self-identified GLBT executives has grown even faster - and the number of executives with disabilities has more than tripled. IBM buys $2.1 billion worth of goods and services from suppliers owned by women, minorities or GLBT people, and it sells more than $500 million of goods and services by marketing to those groups.
Randy Foster is one name behind the numbers. A former U.S. Air Force captain, he got very good at keeping secrets during his eight-year military stint. Foster could not tell his family or friends about his work with the National Reconnaissance Office, a classified government agency that builds spy satellites. And he could not tell anyone in the military that he was gay. Rather than lie about his sexual orientation, the South Carolina native left the service in 1995.
After working at defense contractors TRW, Boeing and General Dynamics, Foster settled at IBM, where he sells technology and services to the defense industry and the government. "Come hell or high water, I wanted to live one life," he says. "The only things I have to hide now are national security secrets, and those are good secrets."
Foster didn't join the gay employee groups at any of the companies where he has worked. "I'm not an activist," he says. But he does want to feel welcomed.
"The most incredible thing about IBM is that since the day I arrived, I've never thought about being gay and how it might affect my job," Foster says. "IBM's a notch above."
The movement goes to Bentonville
So where is the corporate gay-rights movement going from here? To Bentonville, Ark. Yep, Wal-Mart's getting gay-friendly. Or as an HR manager for the company put it during a workshop at the Out & Equal conference, which Wal-Mart sponsored: "We're here, we're queer and we're proud to be here."
Wal-Mart has invited gay-rights leaders to Bentonville and hired Witeck-Combs, the preeminent gay marketing and consulting firm. It is organizing workshops with the national gay chamber of commerce. It sponsored a panel at a conference of gay journalists, sent a small group to the Human Rights Campaign's annual dinner, and donated three scholarships to the Point Foundation, which provides support and mentoring to students who are marginalized or cast out by their families because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
Wal-Mart becomes gay-friendly
Ken Pearson, a middle manager at Wal-Mart University, got Pride, the company's GLBT employee group, started just last year. He said the group has made headway with the company by arguing the business case for gay-friendly policies - that they will help Wal-Mart attract more skilled employees, reach a broader range of customers and expand into urban markets.
This year the company tried selling gay-themed jewelry and promoted the DVD release of the gay love story "Brokeback Mountain." Domestic-partner benefits are now being talked about by America's largest private employer. "I didn't expect this much movement this quickly," Pearson says.
Here comes the backlash. The American Family Association called for a Thanksgiving-weekend boycott (called off at the last minute). Phil Burress, the Cincinnati-based activist, says, "Wal-Mart has no idea what they have taken on here. This Christmas, Wal-Mart's going to take a huge hit for what they've done."
It's possible, but the truth is that for the past 15 years, boycotts or no boycotts, corporate America has been moving in only one direction, and at a pretty rapid pace.
Do you recall that the restaurant chain Cracker Barrel fired gay workers back in 1991 for not having "normal heterosexual values"? Well, a few years ago, when a Kodak employee sent an e-mail to co-workers objecting to the company's endorsement of National Coming Out day as "disgusting and offensive," he was the one who was fired when he declined to apologize. He was entitled to his beliefs, the company explained, but his behavior was not aligned with Kodak's values.
So it's clear where big business is going. What's interesting is to watch it pull the rest of the country along. It turns out that the most important factor shaping people's feelings about gay issues is not their age or even their religion - although those do matter - but whether they have relatives, friends or co-workers who are gay.
"The more out and open people are, the more changed the straight people are all around them," says Joe Solmonese, the Human Rights Campaign president. HRC began organizing workplaces to secure benefits for gay employees. This has inadvertently become a shrewd political strategy as well. "To move the mindset of the American people, we need to find the places where they congregate," Solmonese says. "Priority one is corporate America."
__________________
Religious group calls off Wal-Mart boycott
ExxonMobil's gay problem
From the December 11, 2006 issue
Ruling Lets Women Share Rights Custody Fight
By ADAM LIPTAK
Lisa Miller and Janet Jenkins had a child while joined in a same-sex civil union in Vermont.
The breakup of their relationship, and what it means for their daughter, Isabella, has for years been a source of tension between the Vermont courts, which recognize both women as Isabella’s mothers, and a Virginia judge who granted sole custody to Ms. Miller, Isabella’s biological mother, reasoning that Virginia law makes same-sex unions “void in all respects.”
But yesterday a three-judge panel of the Virginia appeals court unanimously accepted a ruling of the Vermont Supreme Court that conferred parental rights on both women.
The decision averted, at least temporarily, a collision between the civil unions for same-sex couples recognized in Vermont and the Virginia law.
The court ruled that a 1980 federal law, the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act, required Virginia to defer to the Vermont court.
The law requires states to give full faith and credit to other states’ custody determinations. Because Ms. Miller filed papers in Vermont to dissolve her union to Ms. Jenkins in 2003, the appeals court said, the Vermont courts thereby gained sole jurisdiction over custody and visitation issues concerning Isabella.
Neither the federal Defense of Marriage Act nor the Marriage Affirmation Act of Virginia overrode the 1980 law, the appeals court ruled.
The Defense of Marriage Act, or D.O.M.A., enacted in 1996, said that states need not recognize judicial proceedings from other states “respecting a relationship between people of the same sex.”
“This case,” Judge Jere M. H. Willis Jr. wrote for the Court of Appeals of Virginia, in Alexandria, “does not place before us the question whether Virginia recognizes the civil union entered into by the parties in Vermont.
“Rather, the only question before us,” Judge Willis wrote, is whether under the 1980 law “Virginia can deny full faith and credit to the orders of the Vermont court.”
To the extent that the Virginia marriage law applied, he continued, it was overridden by the 1980 federal law.
Mathew Staver, a lawyer for Ms. Miller, said he would ask the full appeals court and, if necessary, the Virginia Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court to hear the case.
“Our client is certainly not giving up, is in this for the long haul and, since her daughter is at stake, is prepared to take this as far as she has to,” Mr. Staver said.
Ms. Miller and Ms. Jenkins had lived together for several years in Virginia before traveling to Vermont in 2000 to enter into a civil union. Isabella was born in Virginia in 2002, after Ms. Miller was impregnated with sperm from an anonymous donor whom Ms. Jenkins helped select. Ms. Jenkins was present in the delivery room.
When Isabella was 4 months old, the women moved to Vermont, where they lived for about a year before separating. Ms. Miller and Isabella moved back to Virginia.
Ms. Miller has said that she no longer considers herself a homosexual. She said that she was Isabella’s only mother and that she did not want Ms. Jenkins to have visitation rights.
Greg Nevins, a lawyer for Ms. Jenkins, said the Virginia decision was a straightforward application of binding federal law. The court, he said, “didn’t get caught up in a lot of the more sensational-type issues.”
Mr. Staver said the court focused on the wrong part of the legal landscape.
“We believe the federal D.O.M.A. controls the matter and allows Virginia to set its own marriage policy,” Mr. Staver said. “Virginia clearly does not recognize same-sex marriages, same-sex civil unions or any law that derives from those unions.”
Ms. Jenkins has not seen her daughter since June 2004. Though the appeals court instructed the trial judge “to extend full faith and credit to the custody and visitation orders of the Vermont court,” it was not clear whether Ms. Jenkins would see Isabella before the case is concluded.
By ADAM LIPTAK
Lisa Miller and Janet Jenkins had a child while joined in a same-sex civil union in Vermont.
The breakup of their relationship, and what it means for their daughter, Isabella, has for years been a source of tension between the Vermont courts, which recognize both women as Isabella’s mothers, and a Virginia judge who granted sole custody to Ms. Miller, Isabella’s biological mother, reasoning that Virginia law makes same-sex unions “void in all respects.”
But yesterday a three-judge panel of the Virginia appeals court unanimously accepted a ruling of the Vermont Supreme Court that conferred parental rights on both women.
The decision averted, at least temporarily, a collision between the civil unions for same-sex couples recognized in Vermont and the Virginia law.
The court ruled that a 1980 federal law, the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act, required Virginia to defer to the Vermont court.
The law requires states to give full faith and credit to other states’ custody determinations. Because Ms. Miller filed papers in Vermont to dissolve her union to Ms. Jenkins in 2003, the appeals court said, the Vermont courts thereby gained sole jurisdiction over custody and visitation issues concerning Isabella.
Neither the federal Defense of Marriage Act nor the Marriage Affirmation Act of Virginia overrode the 1980 law, the appeals court ruled.
The Defense of Marriage Act, or D.O.M.A., enacted in 1996, said that states need not recognize judicial proceedings from other states “respecting a relationship between people of the same sex.”
“This case,” Judge Jere M. H. Willis Jr. wrote for the Court of Appeals of Virginia, in Alexandria, “does not place before us the question whether Virginia recognizes the civil union entered into by the parties in Vermont.
“Rather, the only question before us,” Judge Willis wrote, is whether under the 1980 law “Virginia can deny full faith and credit to the orders of the Vermont court.”
To the extent that the Virginia marriage law applied, he continued, it was overridden by the 1980 federal law.
Mathew Staver, a lawyer for Ms. Miller, said he would ask the full appeals court and, if necessary, the Virginia Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court to hear the case.
“Our client is certainly not giving up, is in this for the long haul and, since her daughter is at stake, is prepared to take this as far as she has to,” Mr. Staver said.
Ms. Miller and Ms. Jenkins had lived together for several years in Virginia before traveling to Vermont in 2000 to enter into a civil union. Isabella was born in Virginia in 2002, after Ms. Miller was impregnated with sperm from an anonymous donor whom Ms. Jenkins helped select. Ms. Jenkins was present in the delivery room.
When Isabella was 4 months old, the women moved to Vermont, where they lived for about a year before separating. Ms. Miller and Isabella moved back to Virginia.
Ms. Miller has said that she no longer considers herself a homosexual. She said that she was Isabella’s only mother and that she did not want Ms. Jenkins to have visitation rights.
Greg Nevins, a lawyer for Ms. Jenkins, said the Virginia decision was a straightforward application of binding federal law. The court, he said, “didn’t get caught up in a lot of the more sensational-type issues.”
Mr. Staver said the court focused on the wrong part of the legal landscape.
“We believe the federal D.O.M.A. controls the matter and allows Virginia to set its own marriage policy,” Mr. Staver said. “Virginia clearly does not recognize same-sex marriages, same-sex civil unions or any law that derives from those unions.”
Ms. Jenkins has not seen her daughter since June 2004. Though the appeals court instructed the trial judge “to extend full faith and credit to the custody and visitation orders of the Vermont court,” it was not clear whether Ms. Jenkins would see Isabella before the case is concluded.
Christian groups assail video game
By Jeff Brumley - Florida Times-UnionFriday, December 01, 2006 - Web Link
November 30, 2006
Shoppers should reject the Left Behind: Eternal Forces video game and the false theology behind the best-selling books that inspired it, a coalition of liberal Christian groups, including one in Jacksonville, said Tuesday.
The Christian Alliance for Progress and three other organizations held a news conference in Phoenix blasting Chicago-based Tyndale House, publisher of the popular Left Behind series, for its support of the video game released just in time for the Christmas shopping season.
The Rev. Tim Simpson, a Jacksonville Presbyterian minister and president of the Christian Alliance for Progress, said the newly released game mangles biblical prophecy and promotes religious intolerance and violence.
Left Behind Games disagrees. The California company says its apocalypse-themed game provides biblical teaching in a format appealing to the video-game generation. In a statement earlier this year, Tyndale House President Mark Taylor said it worked closely with Left Behind Games to ensure the game is appropriate.
The fictional Left Behind series by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye presents a dramatic interpretation of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Jesus. In the real-time strategy game, the rapture has already taken the faithful to heaven. Those left behind must fight the Antichrist's forces in New York City.
Gamers conduct military and spiritual warfare, use prayer to strengthen troops, recover ancient scriptures and control various unit types such as prayer warriors, hellraisers, tanks, spies and special forces. Players can also assume the role of the Antichrist's Global Community Peacekeepers to fight the good guys, namely the Tribulation Force.
The game is rated "T" for teens.
"There is no blood or gore" in the game, Troy Lyndon, chief executive of Left Behind Games, said on the company's Web site. "The game is designed to be a classic battle between good and evil, but it does not gratuitously depict violence or death."
Lyndon countered criticism of the books' and game's theology, saying it is fiction meant to "encourage gamers to think about matters of eternal significance, a topic largely ignored by modern games."
Simpson acknowledged "that you don't see intestines" in the game but that it does present faith-based killing.
And the game's theology, like that of the Left Behind books, rejects accepted biblical scholarship by misreading prophetic books like Revelation, Simpson said.
The protest was organized by the Arizona-based CrossWalk America. Also participating were the Beatitudes Society of Palo Alto, Calif., the Center for Progressive Christianity of Gig Harbor, Wash., and Simpson's organization from Jacksonville.
By Jeff Brumley - Florida Times-UnionFriday, December 01, 2006 - Web Link
November 30, 2006
Shoppers should reject the Left Behind: Eternal Forces video game and the false theology behind the best-selling books that inspired it, a coalition of liberal Christian groups, including one in Jacksonville, said Tuesday.
The Christian Alliance for Progress and three other organizations held a news conference in Phoenix blasting Chicago-based Tyndale House, publisher of the popular Left Behind series, for its support of the video game released just in time for the Christmas shopping season.
The Rev. Tim Simpson, a Jacksonville Presbyterian minister and president of the Christian Alliance for Progress, said the newly released game mangles biblical prophecy and promotes religious intolerance and violence.
Left Behind Games disagrees. The California company says its apocalypse-themed game provides biblical teaching in a format appealing to the video-game generation. In a statement earlier this year, Tyndale House President Mark Taylor said it worked closely with Left Behind Games to ensure the game is appropriate.
The fictional Left Behind series by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye presents a dramatic interpretation of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Jesus. In the real-time strategy game, the rapture has already taken the faithful to heaven. Those left behind must fight the Antichrist's forces in New York City.
Gamers conduct military and spiritual warfare, use prayer to strengthen troops, recover ancient scriptures and control various unit types such as prayer warriors, hellraisers, tanks, spies and special forces. Players can also assume the role of the Antichrist's Global Community Peacekeepers to fight the good guys, namely the Tribulation Force.
The game is rated "T" for teens.
"There is no blood or gore" in the game, Troy Lyndon, chief executive of Left Behind Games, said on the company's Web site. "The game is designed to be a classic battle between good and evil, but it does not gratuitously depict violence or death."
Lyndon countered criticism of the books' and game's theology, saying it is fiction meant to "encourage gamers to think about matters of eternal significance, a topic largely ignored by modern games."
Simpson acknowledged "that you don't see intestines" in the game but that it does present faith-based killing.
And the game's theology, like that of the Left Behind books, rejects accepted biblical scholarship by misreading prophetic books like Revelation, Simpson said.
The protest was organized by the Arizona-based CrossWalk America. Also participating were the Beatitudes Society of Palo Alto, Calif., the Center for Progressive Christianity of Gig Harbor, Wash., and Simpson's organization from Jacksonville.
Conservative faith groups urge cuts to AIDS fund
By John Donnelly - Boston GlobeFriday, December 01, 2006 - Web Link
December 1, 2006
LAKE FOREST, Calif. -- Some leading Christian conservatives, angry over the Global Fund to Fight AIDS's promotion of condoms and its perceived lack of support for faith-based programs, are pushing Congress to cut US support for the AIDS initiative, which was initiated by President Bush in a Rose Garden ceremony five years ago with a $200 million commitment.
The fund -- whose full name is the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria -- has become one of the pillars of the international effort to fight infectious diseases, growing into a $6.6 billion organization that supports programs in 136 countries.
It is a primary vehicle for the AIDS-fighting efforts of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The only larger HIV and AIDS program in the world is the president's $15 billion, five-year plan.
But the Global Fund, which works closely with foreign governments, is not nearly as popular among conservative Christians in the United States. Some take issue with the Global Fund's policies, which include buying clean needles for drug users, and many are furious that just 6 percent of its program dollars goes to faith-based groups.
"There's cancer in the fund," said Peter L. Brandt, senior director of government and public policy at the Christian group Focus on the Family. "It does such an unbelievable job in discriminating against faith-based organizations."
Fund officials, worried about the religious right's influence in Congress, are pledging to try to give more money to religious charities. The executive director of the fund, Richard G.A. Feachem , yesterday told 2,000 people at an AIDS conference organized by the influential Saddleback Church in Lake Forest that the battle against the virus "will only succeed if the great faiths of the world become totally mobilized."
Feachem, in an interview, said the fund "wants to see many more programs" run by faith groups, though most funding decisions are made by local boards.
Feachem's visit to the church-organized conference occurred as the Senate is considering a proposal to more than double the Bush administration's $300 million budget request for the fund, to $700 million next year; the House wants to spend $445 million. This year, Congress sent $545 million to the fund, $245 million more than Bush requested.
Nonetheless, Brandt said he wants the government to eliminate all spending on the Global Fund's HIV programs because it is not providing sufficient money to faith groups and has given little support to abstinence messages. Brandt said the government could continue to support the fund's tuberculosis and malaria programs.
Some other Christian activists, such as Raymond Ruddy , president of the Gerard Health Foundation in South Natick, which gives about $2 million annually to anti abortion and abstinence programs worldwide, want all US money cut from the fund.
"I see a direct correlation of dollars given to the Global Fund and dollars taken away from" the Bush administration's AIDS efforts, Ruddy said. "The Global Fund is systematically excluding faith-based groups from getting money, and that's not right."
The Bush administration, for its part, has taken something of a middle ground, favoring spending of no more than $300 million on the fund this year.
"The Global Fund has to work; it has to be an integral part of the global response to AIDS," Ambassador Mark R. Dybul , US global AIDS coordinator, said in an interview in his Washington office. But Dybul said he wants the majority of government funds directed to the president's program because he believes it is "right now our most rapid response" to the AIDS pandemic.
Christian health associations deliver at least 40 percent of healthcare in several African countries, including Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Liberia, and Kenya, according to UN figures. In the past year, the US program spent 24 percent of its funds on faith-based groups.
Christoph Benn , director of external relations for the Global Fund, said 6 percent of the fund's principal recipients are religious groups, but money also flows to faith-based subcontractors, although the organization does not track the spending.
He said its system makes it difficult to earmark contracts to faith-based groups. Country oversight boards, consisting largely of government officials and community activists, put together proposals and a Geneva-based technical advisory panel selects recipients only among submitted plans. Faith-based groups hold 4 percent of seats on the country boards, according to fund documents.
Benn objected to several other allegations US Christians made , saying that many programs support abstinence-only messages for young people and also emphasize marital fidelity.
Some US Christian leaders support the fund. Rick Warren , head of Saddleback Church and author of the bestseller "The Purpose Driven Life ," gave Feachem, the Global Fund's director, a bear hug yesterday and pledged that he would work with the fund.
The battle over the fund, though, only is expected to intensify in the weeks leading up to the vote by Congress, expected early next year.
Shepherd Smith , who was instrumental in persuading Congress to set aside 33 percent of US AIDS prevention funds to support abstinence messages, said he and Ruddy tried a year ago to persuade the fund's board to increase spending on faith-based groups. "We were just blown off," he said.
Some Christians' objections also are personal. A letter written earlier this year to members of Congress and signed by Ruddy and Focus on the Family decried the election of Asia Russell , a longtime AIDS activist, to the fund's board.
"She served as spokeswoman for the group who tried to strip naked at the [2004 Republican National] Convention as a protest against Bush administration policies," the letter said, adding, "The fact that the fund would elect a woman with zero qualifications to its board sends a clear message that this is not a serious healthcare organization but, rather, a group dedicated to pursuing a social agenda opposed to US policy."
Bernard Rivers , editor of the Global Fund Observer , an independent newsletter that reports on the fund, defended Russell's election, calling her "phenomenally talented and hard - working."
Russell said in an interview that "my qualifications are not the issue. The issue is the extreme, radical religious right attacking the Global Fund and its supporters because the fund is driven by what countries actually want and doesn't fund unscientifically and technically unsound approaches." She was referring to abstinence-only programs.
John Donnelly can be reached at donnelly@globe.com.
By John Donnelly - Boston GlobeFriday, December 01, 2006 - Web Link
December 1, 2006
LAKE FOREST, Calif. -- Some leading Christian conservatives, angry over the Global Fund to Fight AIDS's promotion of condoms and its perceived lack of support for faith-based programs, are pushing Congress to cut US support for the AIDS initiative, which was initiated by President Bush in a Rose Garden ceremony five years ago with a $200 million commitment.
The fund -- whose full name is the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria -- has become one of the pillars of the international effort to fight infectious diseases, growing into a $6.6 billion organization that supports programs in 136 countries.
It is a primary vehicle for the AIDS-fighting efforts of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The only larger HIV and AIDS program in the world is the president's $15 billion, five-year plan.
But the Global Fund, which works closely with foreign governments, is not nearly as popular among conservative Christians in the United States. Some take issue with the Global Fund's policies, which include buying clean needles for drug users, and many are furious that just 6 percent of its program dollars goes to faith-based groups.
"There's cancer in the fund," said Peter L. Brandt, senior director of government and public policy at the Christian group Focus on the Family. "It does such an unbelievable job in discriminating against faith-based organizations."
Fund officials, worried about the religious right's influence in Congress, are pledging to try to give more money to religious charities. The executive director of the fund, Richard G.A. Feachem , yesterday told 2,000 people at an AIDS conference organized by the influential Saddleback Church in Lake Forest that the battle against the virus "will only succeed if the great faiths of the world become totally mobilized."
Feachem, in an interview, said the fund "wants to see many more programs" run by faith groups, though most funding decisions are made by local boards.
Feachem's visit to the church-organized conference occurred as the Senate is considering a proposal to more than double the Bush administration's $300 million budget request for the fund, to $700 million next year; the House wants to spend $445 million. This year, Congress sent $545 million to the fund, $245 million more than Bush requested.
Nonetheless, Brandt said he wants the government to eliminate all spending on the Global Fund's HIV programs because it is not providing sufficient money to faith groups and has given little support to abstinence messages. Brandt said the government could continue to support the fund's tuberculosis and malaria programs.
Some other Christian activists, such as Raymond Ruddy , president of the Gerard Health Foundation in South Natick, which gives about $2 million annually to anti abortion and abstinence programs worldwide, want all US money cut from the fund.
"I see a direct correlation of dollars given to the Global Fund and dollars taken away from" the Bush administration's AIDS efforts, Ruddy said. "The Global Fund is systematically excluding faith-based groups from getting money, and that's not right."
The Bush administration, for its part, has taken something of a middle ground, favoring spending of no more than $300 million on the fund this year.
"The Global Fund has to work; it has to be an integral part of the global response to AIDS," Ambassador Mark R. Dybul , US global AIDS coordinator, said in an interview in his Washington office. But Dybul said he wants the majority of government funds directed to the president's program because he believes it is "right now our most rapid response" to the AIDS pandemic.
Christian health associations deliver at least 40 percent of healthcare in several African countries, including Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Liberia, and Kenya, according to UN figures. In the past year, the US program spent 24 percent of its funds on faith-based groups.
Christoph Benn , director of external relations for the Global Fund, said 6 percent of the fund's principal recipients are religious groups, but money also flows to faith-based subcontractors, although the organization does not track the spending.
He said its system makes it difficult to earmark contracts to faith-based groups. Country oversight boards, consisting largely of government officials and community activists, put together proposals and a Geneva-based technical advisory panel selects recipients only among submitted plans. Faith-based groups hold 4 percent of seats on the country boards, according to fund documents.
Benn objected to several other allegations US Christians made , saying that many programs support abstinence-only messages for young people and also emphasize marital fidelity.
Some US Christian leaders support the fund. Rick Warren , head of Saddleback Church and author of the bestseller "The Purpose Driven Life ," gave Feachem, the Global Fund's director, a bear hug yesterday and pledged that he would work with the fund.
The battle over the fund, though, only is expected to intensify in the weeks leading up to the vote by Congress, expected early next year.
Shepherd Smith , who was instrumental in persuading Congress to set aside 33 percent of US AIDS prevention funds to support abstinence messages, said he and Ruddy tried a year ago to persuade the fund's board to increase spending on faith-based groups. "We were just blown off," he said.
Some Christians' objections also are personal. A letter written earlier this year to members of Congress and signed by Ruddy and Focus on the Family decried the election of Asia Russell , a longtime AIDS activist, to the fund's board.
"She served as spokeswoman for the group who tried to strip naked at the [2004 Republican National] Convention as a protest against Bush administration policies," the letter said, adding, "The fact that the fund would elect a woman with zero qualifications to its board sends a clear message that this is not a serious healthcare organization but, rather, a group dedicated to pursuing a social agenda opposed to US policy."
Bernard Rivers , editor of the Global Fund Observer , an independent newsletter that reports on the fund, defended Russell's election, calling her "phenomenally talented and hard - working."
Russell said in an interview that "my qualifications are not the issue. The issue is the extreme, radical religious right attacking the Global Fund and its supporters because the fund is driven by what countries actually want and doesn't fund unscientifically and technically unsound approaches." She was referring to abstinence-only programs.
John Donnelly can be reached at donnelly@globe.com.
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