Oh, isn’t this nice of the company: “Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is helping employees who are uncomfortable with Indiana’s controversial religious freedom law to transfer out of the state.” Salesforce, in case you were wondering, is a company that does ‘customer relationship management’ for companies, as can be seen here…
…Wait. That can’t be right. Saudi Arabia? They sell services in Saudi Arabia? They execute gay people in Saudi Arabia! Well, that says ‘partner,’ so maybe Salesforce has an out there…
…erm. Turns out that NSI is Salesforce’s gateway to the Gulf area – including Saudi Arabia, which is by the way a place where they execute gay people. But seriously, is Salesforce actually selling services in Saudi Arabia?
Guess they are! Which is odd, because SAUDI ARABIA EXECUTES GAY PEOPLE.
Look, if you don’t want to do business in Indiana, Arkansas, or any of the other 20 states that have RFRA laws, fine. It’s a free country. But if you’re going to brag about how you’re happy to pull people out of flyover country because you don’t like a state’s particular attitude about the morality of forcing people to bake a cake for a wedding, at least mention how you plan to help out those of your employees who are living somewhere where being caught being gay leads you to the whipping post or the scaffold. …Oh, wait, silly me. That’s why Salesforce has the consulting firms and affiliates and partnerships: plausible deniability. That way the Saudis can keep executing all the gay people that they like, and Marc Benioff can keep cashing those sweet, sweet petro-dollar backed checks.
And Benioff can keep sneering! Mustn’t forget the sneering. That’s probably the best part for him, really.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
PS: Speaking as somebody who supports same-sex marriage: I think that it is frankly not moral to support a group like Salesforce. And it’s not because they do business in Saudi Arabia: it’s because they have carefully calibrated their moral outrage to the point where it never interferes with their bottom line. Salesforce avoiding Indiana is a gesture: avoiding Saudi Arabia would be an economic hardship. And we can’t have that, can we?