George involved in dispute with Apple over iPhone app

Politics professor Robert George is involved in a dispute with Apple that could result in legal action. Two weeks ago, George coauthored a letter to Apple chief executive Steve Jobs asking him to reinstate the Manhattan Declaration iPhone application, which the company removed following criticism that the app was anti-gay.

The Manhattan Declaration, which George helped draft last year, invokes Christian principles and maintains that marriage should be a union between a man and a woman. The app, which brings users to the Manhattan Declaration website and invites them to sign the declaration, was taken down by Apple on Nov. 29 in response to an online petition that criticized it as anti-gay. That petition was sponsored by change.org and received about 8,000 signatures within roughly a week, before Apple removed the app.

The app, which was released in October, originally received a 4+ rating from Apple, indicating that it contained no objectionable material.

“We removed the Manhattan Declaration app from the app store because it violates our developer guideline by being offensive to large groups of people,” Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller said.

In the letter, which George wrote with Charles Colson of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview and Timothy George of Beeson Divinity School, they expressed their confusion over how the app was removed and denied that it contained any offensive content.

"As you will immediately see if you read the Manhattan Declaration, it is written in respectful language, and it engages the beliefs of those who differ in an honest, thoughtful and civil manner. It is entirely free of rancor, name-calling or offensive rhetoric,” the letter stated.

George pointed to the need for open, unrestricted dialogue as the central motivation behind his effort to reinstate and raise publicity for the app.

"When reasonable people of goodwill disagree about questions of morality, justice and the common good (or other questions, for that matter), the thing to do is to have a free and robust discussion in which the competing sides make their arguments and engage each other,” George said in an e-mail to The Daily Princetonian.

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"I think it is important for people on both sides to avoid the temptation to try to shut down the other side or impede its access to public forums,” he added.

Along with the letter, George helped create a parallel petition to restore the app. That petition has received more than 45,000 signatures in the past two weeks.

Neither the letter nor the petition has elicited any response from Apple.

George indicated, however, that other recourses are available if their initial efforts are unsuccessful.

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“Lawyers for a very prominent liberal civil liberties advocacy organization, on their own initiative, got in touch with people at the Manhattan Declaration website to say that they believe a lawsuit should be brought against Apple if it does not restore the app,” George said in his e-mail. "I have not spoken with them, so I'm not privy to their legal analysis or to the theory under which they would sue the company. It looks as though a lawsuit is a possibility though.”

Though no other University professors, students or organizations are directly involved with the Manhattan Declaration’s response, Anscombe Society president Shivani Radhakrishnan ’11 expressed the her group’s sympathy for the effort. The student group takes an official stance that marriage is a union between a man and woman.

"It is problematic to conflate opposition to same-sex marriage and anti-gay sentiment," she said in an e-mail. “To suggest that all persons who oppose same-sex marriage endorse homophobia or bigotry seems an extremely strong claim that Apple needs to substantiate before it discontinues particular applications.” Radhakrishnan is also a member of The Daily Princetonian editorial board.