Steve jobs is gay

That sounds dangerously close to liberalism and tolerance.

So I send this warning to Russia’s hard-liners: don’t mess with Apple. I love my iPhone. The video below was Apple’s addition to the project which cumulatively generated thousands of contributions from celebrities, corporations, and individuals across the globe.

The video below features a number of nameless Apple employees, but does include a prominent appearance by Randy Ubilos, Apple’s head of video applications who often takes the state to introduce the latest version of iMovie or Final Cut Pro. 

Of course, Apple is hardly alone in its support of gay rights.

Under the Tim Cook regime, it’s unlikely that all Grindr downloads will be replaced with a new “No Homo” app.

Let us instead recall just how much Apple and Putin’s Russia have in common. About a month later, however, Apple removed the app.

Notably, this wasn’t the first time Apple removed an app for its stance on homosexuality. Most people don’t know what Adobe Flash is, but it certainly sounds gay.

Apple’s iTunes and iBooks have also repeatedly courted controversy for banning comics with explicit sexual imagery, particularly gay imagery.

So, all prejudice to contrary, Apple’s most famous product is definitely not gay; it isn’t even a bIphone.

Previous versions only had heterosexual couples.

What’s more, the Human Rights Campaign Buyer’s Guide in 2012 gave Apple a perfect score with respect to its treatment of LGBT employees and overall workplace equality. There are plenty of reasons to think that Apple and Putinism are a (straight!) marriage made in heaven.

First, let us talk about their most famous leaders: Steve Jobs and Vladimir Putin.

And again, Apple isn’t alone here – a number of other prominent tech companies also received a perfect score, including AT&T, CISCO, Dell, Microsoft, Google, and Nokia.

Apple won’t compromise on equal health benefits

In the early 90’s, Apple was set to build a huge $80 million office complex in Round Rock, Texas.

There’s an app for that.

After gay Apple CEO Tim Cook shocked the tech world by announcing something everyone already knew (i.e., that he’s a gay Apple CEO),  a St. Petersburg monument to Apple founder Steve Jobs was hastily taken down. Where Putinists praise Russia’s “spiritual underpinnings” while decrying attempts to import foreign “cultural values,” Apple is famous for treating its technological ecosystem as a walled garden:  only Apple decides what apps can run on its precious operating system, and only Apple can be trusted to protect its followers from infection by foreign viruses.

Russia bans gay propaganda.

After a couple of bizarre weeks where I attended meetings all day filled with amazing people and amazing technology, knowing that at any minute I would have to leave, HR informed me that they’d talked the insurance company into providing special coverage. Apple shocked the tech world early on by preventing a foreign company from corrupting the iPhone’s (moral) code when it refused to allow Adobe Flash.

Especially when compared with an old-fashioned BlackBerry. Russian lawmakers should turn their attention to the real danger: Android.

Instead of mounting a rear-guard defense against foreign product invasion, Android is promiscuous: it takes all comers. Well, only one of them, but I leave it to my readers to guess which one.

Second, Apple and Putinism share a profoundly insular ideology.

Every night, I used to place my iPod and my Treo next to each other, hoping they might mate in captivity. I spent years waiting for Apple to make something like it. This follows on the heels of a declaration by the country’s most famous homophobe, legislator Vitaly Milonov,  that Cook should be banned from Russia, because, among other things, “sodomites" spread Ebola.

If it weren’t clear enough before, this latest expression of anti-gay hysteria demonstrates how far the attempts to whip up a moral panic have drifted from considerations of what actual LGBT community members are doing with their members.