‘Salon’: Bill Gates and Liberal Causes

Bill gates is a “closet liberal,” says Salon magazine, which drew that conclusion after analyzing charitable and political contributions by the Microsoft founder. In a January 29 article, Andrew Leonard, a contributing writer to the on-line magazine, noted that Mr. Gates supported numerous family-planning groups through his philanthropy and had made political contributions to gun-safety groups and organizations opposing tax cuts in Washington State.

“Gates’s more grandiose gestures — $20-million for a computer center here, $12-million for a biotechnology center there, and a whopping $200-million for wiring up rural libraries to the Internet — get the headlines,” writes Mr. Leonard. “But his smaller philanthropic statements give us the few clues we have to what Gates, the man — as opposed to Gates, the software-marketing machine — really cares about. And we ought to pay attention to what the richest man in the world thinks is socially important — especially if he lives up to his own oft-made promise to give away nearly all of his wealth before he dies.”

While Mr. Gates has been criticized for using his gifts — such as the $200-million Internet donation — to provide a way to help Microsoft, “it is much more difficult to discern strategic Microsoft advantage in his support for handgun safety,” Mr. Leonard writes. “And his cold-cash concern for family planning could even be construed as asking for trouble. The groups that the Gates Foundation is giving money to have close ideological and organizational ties with pro-choice bastions like Planned Parenthood. Religious-right zealots are already beginning to pay attention. Who needs that kind of controversy today?”

The article can be found by searching Salon’s archives at http://www.salonmagazine.com on the World-Wide Web.