We were stunned that a supposedly first world democracy would operate that way.
Perhaps we tech leaders in the United States need to think about the fact that in opposing such measures, we're standing against our fellow First World democracies and standing with the authoritarian bogeyman of China's one-party state.
Just as Exxon jousts with Greenpeace and SeaWorld with PETA, first world democracies must wise up and loosen up in the face of smaller but savvier social warriors.
In the US, the most violent first-world democracy, it fell from 10 per 100,000 in 1991 to 5.5 in 2000 and then to four in 2014.
Even in the US, the archetypal first-world democracy, lawmakers in Arizona have just passed a bill allowing businesses to refuse – on religious grounds – to serve homosexuals.
The U.S. is the only first-world democracy that still practices capital punishment, a distinction noted in the ANA's analysis.
A vast majority of third-world democracies today are former British colonies.
(What happens when the league imposes sanctions on, say, Syria, and only Israel, of all the countries in the region, gets to vote?) And finally, most third-world democracies are profoundly reluctant to meddle in neighbors' affairs, as the tepid response of President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa to Mugabe's depredations has made all too plain.
"M.I.A., third world democracy/I got more records than the K.G.B.," she asserts in the Clash-sampling "Paper Planes," and on "20 Dollar," about the cheap availability of guns in Africa, she boasts, "I put people on the map that never seen a map".
