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Originally Posted by Sauron
You seem to have missed this one:
6. Engage in respectful and appropriate marketing to the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community and/or provide support through their corporate foundation or otherwise to GLBT health, educational, political or community organizations or events.
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I haven't, actually. That criterion includes several possible options. Even if we take points from Miscrosoft on the providing corporate funding to GLBT politcal organizations or events criterion because of its withdrawal of support -- which I don't think we can since legislation is not a political organization or event, and support of a bill is not corporate funding -- that still leaves them with a long list of other things they can and do do to fulfill criterion 6.
But lets pretend that that criterion only requires that a company "provide support through their corporate foundation or otherwise to GLBT political organizations or events" and there are no other options offered in criterion 6. It seems to me that as long as Microsoft funded gay rights advocacy organizations, they could withdraw from 100 bills and they'd still be amply fulfilling the requirement.
Finally, even if for the sake of argument I grant that the wording of that criterion is actually relevant to Microsoft's chickening out of supporting the bill, that would still not totally invalidate the rest of the criteria and suddenly make MS an gay unfriendly corporation even though it offers partnership bennies, explicit non-discrimination policies, gay employee resource groups, diversity training, respectful and appropriate marketing, corporate funding to health, educational, community orgs or events, and refrains from donating to Focus on the Family.
IOW, I don't know what possible standard could render a company gay unfriendly simply because of one withdrawal from support of a bill. There are way too many other criteria MS still fulfills.