Another timed-release economic development screwup

     All of these companies have operations in South Carolina.
     All of these companies have something else in common:

One by one, national corporations like Microsoft, Starbucks, Boeing and Google are wading into the once-risky business of taking a position supporting gay marriage in states across the country.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the lawsuit challenging the Defense of Marriage Act, which a federal appeals court called unconstitutional on Thursday. Forty-eight companies, including Nike, Time Warner Cable, Aetna, Exelon Corp., and Xerox had signed a brief arguing that the law negatively affected their businesses.

But the real test will come in November, when voters in four states — Maryland, Minnesota, Maine and Washington — will head to the polls. To date, gay marriage advocates have yet to win a statewide ballot initiative but hope corporate support and money will help turn the tide.

Last year, 25 executives including the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Viacom and Alcoa lobbied New York legislators to approve same-sex marriage.

In January, Microsoft, Boeing, Vulcan and RealNetworks were among those who voiced their support for a bill approving gay marriage in Washington state.

The corporate activism is a change from as little as five years ago, when major companies shied away from same-sex marriage issues in order to avoid a backlash. Social conservative groups like the American Family Association systematically targeted companies like Home Depot and Ford for their support of gay rights organizations.

“Earlier on there was more risk than reward,” said Bob Witeck, a consultant who works with corporations on gay, lesbian and transgender policies. “Now there’s far more talk about the reward and less about the risk.”

The 48 businesses and nearly two dozen other employer organizations that signed on to a federal court brief opposing DOMA represent a “sea change” in the views of the business community, said Beth Boland, an attorney who worked on the brief.

In the brief, the companies say DOMA, which defines marriage as the legal union of one man and one woman, is expensive to comply with and forces businesses to treat legally married couples of the same sex differently from couples of different sexes.

“I see a seismic shift in the business community in the last five to 10 years,” Boland said. “I can’t even begin to state how different these issues are perceived within the business community.

“I think there is a symbolic factor of showing that a growing number of vocal members of the business community want to come forward and indicate that as a matter of their own internal employee policy they see this differentiation as negatively affecting their business,” she added.

     As this trend accelerates- and it will- it will make South Carolina a harder sell to big corporate "gets" like the glory catches BMW and Boeing the state touts as proof it's not a corporate backwater with no knowledge economy and a poorly educated workforce employers can exploit with the enthusiastic support of the legislature. And it will put off even further the day when any of these corporations being any creative operations to the Palmetto State. As is, South Carolinians bolt together airplanes and automobiles, grind coffee beans and ship books, for the BMWs, Boeings, Googles and Starbucks of the new economy. The planes get designed, and the Starbucks stores are created and products developed in Seattle. The cars get designed in Germany. The smart peopel who create Google's online services, and tweak the algorithms that increasingly make the search world run are in Silicon Valley.
     All places where notions of tolerance and equality are, well, a little more advanced.