What this backlash highlights is the impossibility of expecting all corporate actors to function at all times as vehicles of political expression. A citizen's power as a consumer to express disapproval of overt political action is a useful feature of a free state; recent examples include the boycott, by opponents of Proposition 8, of businesses whose owners had made donations in support of the initiative, or that of the Dixie Chicks by former fans disgusted by Natalie Maines's comments about President Bush. In such cases the relevant commercial interest had chosen to enter the world of political discourse, and politically expressive consumer choices functioned as collective responses to those actions. But for a company that has not otherwise chosen to enter the realm of politics to be punished for the incidental political effects of a neutral business decision, such as the decision to settle a lawsuit, necessitates that productivity and innovation be permanently limited by the scope of compromise between competing ideological agendas. [emphasis added]Brave New World.
At first I thought we were looking at simple extortion by tort law, but this is worse. This means we'll soon be hearing about lawsuits against multiple sclerosis researchers, demanding that since the disease affects mainly older white men that equal research must fight say, sickle cell anemia.