McClatchy Washington BureauNovember 12, 2014
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| COURTESY OF MARRIOTT INTERNATIONAL, INCA poster for Marriott Float at the N.Y.C.'s gay pride parade, June 29, 2014. |
WASHINGTON — In the beginning, it was about money as much as rights.
Long before America started rapidly changing its mind about gays, corporate America set the stage. From companies such as Marriott, founded by socially conservative Mormons, to technology giants led by libertarian-minded gurus, business started thinking in the last decade that it was in its best interest to treat gays the same as straights.
That approach is now taking hold more broadly, as a majority of Americans support same-sex marriage for the first time, forcing politicians to jump on the bandwagon and likely changing the country’s politics. While this social change is driven by many factors – a new generation that’s decidedly more open, an older generation adjusting to gays in their families and lives, courts opening the doors – it first took hold at work.
Marriott International, for example... .....decided to start providing health benefits for partners of gay and lesbian employees.
“Bill Marriott got it immediately,” said Apoorva Gandhi, Marriott’s vice president of multicultural affairs. “He thought of it as a business judgment and a fairness judgment.”
“It was really about attracting talent,” said Bob Witeck, a marketing expert who’s worked with the executives at American Airlines, Marriott and other big-name companies to provide same-sex benefits and ban discrimination based on sexual orientation.
By easing into it, Marriott avoided the backlash that the Walt Disney Co. suffered in 1997 when it offered same-sex benefits and allowed Gay Days at theme parks.
Read the full story here
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This is the second story in an occasional series on the changes in American attitudes about gays and gay marriage. Read Part I here
Cathy Woolard discusses Atlanta, city politics and being gay
Woolard, an executive vice president of the non-profit CARE and Atlanta’s first openly gay city council president, from 2001 to 2004, talks about how corporate policy and laws have changed the American cultural landscape since 2000.
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