PayPal has announced that it will not open a new operations center in Charlotte, North Carolina, because of the state’s new “bathroom law” — a law that sensibly requires people to use public, multi-occupancy bathrooms that correspond with their biological sex. PayPal thinks this is horrible. To put it bluntly, PayPal’s “corporate values” include involuntarily exposing women and girls to male nudity as a condition of going to the bathroom. This used to be called sexual harassment and indecent exposure. Now it’s called social justice.
And of course no story of hipster corporate progressives would be complete without a copious amount of hypocrisy. As Rick Moran details, PayPal is just fine doing business in locations like the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Russia, India, and Malaysia — where draconian laws and punitive cultures mean that gay or transgender people can face prison, violent official persecution, and even execution. But North Carolina is beyond the pale.
Corporations have a right to their values. And I have a right to express contempt for their double standards and empty moral gestures. PayPal isn’t virtuous – it’s just fashionably greedy.