Monthly Archives: June 2005

1. We’ll send a free book to the first person who gets a business with at least 10 employees to license the fair employment mark. 2. We’ll send a free book to the person who gets the largest number of employees covered by the license in the next month. 3. We’ll send a free book to anyone who gets a business with more than 100 employees to license the mark…. Continue reading →

Lots of the comments to Jennifer’s posts worried that managing information meant (a) lying or (b) burdening individuals’ rights of association. But here’s an informational proposal for dealing with the Boy Scouts’ discrimination that promotes both honesty and informed association…. Continue reading →

I really enjoyed reading the comments on my post from yesterday, and the many responses those comments engendered. Several people have already said much of what I would say to explain our references to privilege and the role it plays in mobilizing heterosexual allies. One point I should be up front about: Straightforward is unabashedly written for an audience that is already on board with the idea of equality for gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. The book does not attempt to marshal arguments against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. We’re assuming that our readers already agree with us… Continue reading →

The Fair Employment licenses and the Creative Comment licenses face similar kinds of resistence. We often hear people say that no employer in its right mind would volunteer for legal liability. But this sounds a lot like people who say that noone in their right mind would ever throw away potential copyright revenues. But it turns out that there are lots of parallel reasons why adopting these licenses make plenty of sense…. Continue reading →

Let me take a stab at mapping out what Ian and I are going to try to accomplish over the next week. As Larry mentioned, we’ve just published Straightforward – which makes the argument that mobilizing heterosexual support is crucial to making progress on securing equal rights for gay, lesbian, and bisexual citizens. The book is packed with advice about what people can do – on personal and public levels. But what we really want to stress here over the next week are a series of informational innovations that can promote equality in the military, in the boy scouts (and… Continue reading →

A little-known piece of intellectual property, the certification mark, provides a viable mechanism for employers to commit not to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. With just a few clicks of the mouse, at www.fairemploymentmark.org any employer in the country can license the “Fair Employment Mark.” It is an innocuous symbol, an “FE” inside a circle: There are lots of parallels to the Creative Commons. Both are reinventions of traditional intellectual property licenses to make the world a better place. Employers that are committed to the idea of employment equality for gay and lesbian workers don’t have to wait… Continue reading →