Apple CEO Tim Cook set off an unprecedented backlash against ‘religious freedom’ laws this week, and showed why Republicans can no longer stay silent on civil rights

Business and technology leaders have pushed their way to the forefront of the new US culture wars this week - forcing social conservatives to relent in the battle over so-called religious freedom bills and hitting back against what they consider to be legal discrimination against gay people.

Apple CEO Tim Cook set in motion an unprecedented backlash against Indiana’s Religious Freedom and Restoration Act on Sunday, calling out the “nearly 100 bills” nationwide he said were designed to “rationalize injustice”.

In short order, Indiana governor Mike Pence had been forced to call for a legislative fix to the law to explicitly protect LGBT individuals and Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson had said he would not sign a similar religious freedom bill without similar fixes.

Taken together, leaders from Silicon Valley to Little Rock say, the threat from the tech industry represents a microcosm for how even the most dogmatic Republicans – Pence is seen as a long-shot presidential contender from the far right, and Hutchinson consulted for the National Rifle Association after the Sandy Hook school shooting – no longer have the right to remain silent on “a 21st-century version” of civil rights legislation.

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“A lot of companies are very risk-averse and at the same time want to be on the right side of history,” a tech employee at a major social-media company told the Guardian. “They also generally know the political views of their customers or users, and some of that is maybe due to the increase in available data that didn’t exist a little while ago.”

Gone are the days when companies were ostensibly forced to answer questions at annual shareholder meetings, said the employee, who requested anonymity, citing his company’s political positioning. “Now it’s like having a shareholder meeting every day.”

On Wednesday, nearly 50 executives from Twitter and Airbnb to Yelp, eBay and top Silicon Valley developers signed a statement calling on state and federal leaders to add sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes to their civil rights laws, saying it was “critically important to speak out about proposed bills and existing laws that would put the rights of minorities at risk”.

“Any state that enacts a legislation that does not specifically protect LGBT persons’ housing, public accommodations, or employment does risk any kind of future investment,” said Ryan Metcalf, a spokesman for Affirm, the online payment company that spearheaded the joint statement and is encouraging tech CEOs to evaluate their relationships and investments in states that do not overtly protect LGBT citizens.

The noticeably direct new kind of corporate speak echoed statements from startups to Arkansas-based Walmart, the largest private employer in the US, which on Tuesday issued a statement saying its home state’s controversial new legislation ran against the company’s “core basic belief” of inclusivity.

Walmart backed the renewal of the Voting Rights Act in 2006, but the response has been markedly this week different as business leaders formed their equality coalition in a swarm of statements saturating social media. When the Arkansas bill first passed through the statehouse in February, local companies stayed quiet.

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Just a year ago, when a similar religious freedom bill was under consideration in Arizona, a handful of companies joined LGBT advocates in protest, but the reaction was not nearly as decisive – or as overwhelming a national outcry.

Now, the tech industry is holding its palpable impact on local economies over the heads of local leaders. Business review site Angie’s List joined local boycotts by threatening to shut down an expansion of its Indianapolis headquarters. The leaders of a major data conference scheduled for next month in Indianapolis, in a post on the event’s Facebook page, wasted no time: “This law is having an immediate and definite negative impact on technology in the state of Indiana,” they wrote. “This is a real case that is happening now.”

One state’s national controversy may not be another’s, and a booming job sector may be different than tweeted corporate statements, but at least one new reality was immediately apparent: politicians felt the backlash – and backed down.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Wednesday, Little Rock mayor Mark Stodola said he had told Hutchinson that “anything this divisive – anything that causes so much angst and debate and anguish – is simply not good for this state, is certainly not good for Indiana. I think the governor took a strong look at what Governor Pence was doing and figured out that he didn’t have to go down the same road, frankly.”

“For something like this to come down would absolutely cripple our opportunities,” said Stodola, a Democrat, of the technology industry’s potential economic backlash, “This is a 21st-century version of what we went through in 1957 as it relates to racial integration.”

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All week long, Republican presidential hopefuls have been in their own frenzy to stake out positions largely defending the legislation on grounds of religious liberty. Those who carefully tiptoed the religion-discrimination line in avoiding comment, such as New Jersey governor Chris Christie, did not go unnoticed.

At a fundraiser in the heart of Silicon Valley on Wednesday, Jeb Bush walked back his earlier vociferous support of Pence and the Indiana law. “We shouldn’t discriminate based on sexual orientation,” Bush said to potential donors in Palo Alto, California, according to remarks obtained by the New York Times. “So what the state of Indiana is going to end up doing is probably get to that place.”

Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor seen as a possible challenger to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, drew a slightly more direct line on a visit to New Hampshire: “When you have people like Apple and all other sorts of businesses and leaders stepping up and saying not only is this wrong, not only does this run counter to who we are as Americans, it’s also really bad for business … there’s a reason.”

In walking back the very legislation he had signed, the morning after Cook’s op-ed appeared in the Washington Post and the day his local paper ran a front page editorial emblazoned with the words FIX THIS NOW, the Indiana governor looked exasperated.

Taking an audibly deep breath on a microphone at a nationally televised press conference, Pence asked himself: “Was I expecting this kind of backlash? Heavens no.”