Apple CEO's double standards on Religious Freedom Restoration Act

Sunday night on the website of the Washington Post, the CEO of America’s largest company by market capitalization dropped an editorial bomb smearing the state of Indiana. Tim Cook, who is openly homosexual, labeled Indiana’s new Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) as dangerous. This represents a fitting ending to the fever pitch that had been building all weekend. It seems that opposition to Indiana’s passage of a law that has existed at the state and federal levels for as many as 22 years without incident knows no bounds of demagoguery. When Democrats were enacting the legislation, nary a peep was heard. An identical law was passed by Illinois in the late 1990s, helped by an affirmative vote from then-state senator Barack Obama. The federal law passed in 1993 breezed through unanimously in the House and 97-3 in the Senate. It was introduced by Chuck Schumer, the next Senate minority leader, and signed by Democrat Bill Clinton. The bill saw much pomp and circumstance in a public ceremony, where it was eloquently defended by Clinton and Vice President Al Gore. That stands in marked contrast to the scaremongering of Mr. Cook when it was passed by a Republican legislature and signed into law by conservative (socially conservative, even worse!) governor Mike Pence.

Al Gore is now on the board of directors at Apple. Cook’s writing on this issue is to the left of an unusually political, and progressive, board. It is certainly on the extreme fringe of the company’s shareholders’ views, a diverse group of individuals as well as hedge funds and pension funds representing almost all industries and occupations. It stands in stark contrast to the actions that Mr. Cook has overseen at Apple. Apple builds most of its products overseas, in China specifically. The country is an environmental and human rights disaster. Much like the Soviet Union’s Gulag Archipelago, China has a loose network of shadowy installations that house great horrors. The Laogai system subjects to torture Christians and advocates of freedom and the innate, inalienable rights of man (the very principles that steered the founding of our nation). Men are grabbed in the dead of night and carried away to have their testicles crushed, physical emasculation before the State (coerced subjugation to other men and relinquishment of the lowest expression of innate dignity), mixed with other punishments of equal magnitude. Constant surveillance hounds the affected families, and harassment follows wives and children at all turns until they beg for asylum elsewhere. This is where Mr. Cook manufactures his products to utilize cheap labor and maintain profit margins exceeding 40% on Apple’s most important product, the iPhone. Human rights champion, indeed. Apple sells its products all over the world, deriving a growing portion of its revenues from China. On the last conference call, Mr. Cook boasted about how fast expansion is happening. A store a week, approximately, going to over 40 within the year. When has Mr. Cook said anything about the evils of the Chinese system? How well does one reckon that homosexuals are treated in that country? Apple is expanding across the Middle East, with retail stores in Saudi Arabia. Apple is happy to sell to those who mandate that women shroud themselves in hijabs and do not permit them to appear in public without their husbands or allow them drive a car. Homosexuals are subjected to death by beheading, stoning, being tossed off buildings across the region where Apple products are found to the delight of Mr. Cook. Like most who share the progressive ideology, he seems to lose his passion for the protection of so-called protected classes like homosexuals for the right price under authoritarian ideological governance.