I will add a short commentary: the way principles work, is you care about them all the time. If you think rape is wrong, then there are not exceptions. If you think hate crimes are wrong, there are not exceptions. There may be times when pursuing the eradication of something odious requires an interaction with people and behaviors with whom we do not agree. Economic intercourse with China was supposed to liberalize it. This might have been a possible outcome, but China spends as much or more suppressing the hundreds of thousands of riots demanding basic rights it sees annually as it does on its military budget. Very little concrete good has come. The power elite, the dictators, the oppressors, the imperialists: they are still in control, and still obscenely wealthy, wealth gotten as a result of their parasitic relationship with the people they “rescused” from Capitalistic oppression. This is not even irony: it is obscenity, and cannot and should not be tolerated through the complicity of elision.
Likewise, companies who care about gay rights should boycott nations like Saudi Arabia which MURDER them, publicly, after a trial, by beheading.
They should boycott Russia, Egypt, and frankly most of the Middle East, and large segments of Africa. They are in a position to raise consciousness about these and other issues. As I have said, I think the issue of the rights of Dalit men and women and children in India should be made a front page issue. It is every bit as awful as what the South Africans did to the blacks in Apartheid.
But these assholes make MONEY in these places. The hypocrisy is indescribable. The incapacity for human decency masked by token, irrelevant, and largely HURTFUL gestures like boycotting North Carolina is absolutely revolting.