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As conservative pushback against rainbow-themed corporate credit scoring continued chalking wins, outraged activists seethed over “letting the bullies win.”
Proving to be an inflection point, Bud Light’s boondoggle with Dylan Mulvaney proved to American consumers that they could make their voices heard in the culture war. Now, after a slew of companies had felt similar pressure over buying in on alphabet adherence, the Associated Press detailed the mission creep of the Human Rights Campaign and activist anger about not following through.
Highlighting the HRC’s Corporate Equality Index that companies such as Lowes, Ford, and Stanley Black and Decker were abandoning, the AP contended the “report card” initially focused on “ensuring that gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer employees did not face discrimination in hiring and on the job. Just 13 companies received a perfect score in 2002. By last year, 545 businesses did even though the requirements have expanded.”
Their take on some of the discriminatory practices that had been exposed at companies pushing “DEI-based training programs” and supporting “divisive events” suggested conservatives were “now targeting workplace initiatives such as diversity programs and hiring practices that prioritize historically marginalized groups, and widening their objections to include programs focused on gender identity and sexual orientation.”
Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty’s Dan Lennington, who is the deputy counsel for the Equality Under the Law Project that represented clients challenging DEI and the sort argued, “We don’t believe that people should be identified as groups and that you should right past wrongs by advantaging one group and disadvantaging another group.”
However, the AP spotlighted a victimhood narrative featuring a take from Community Marketing & Insights Senior Research Director David Paisley who said, “Almost all LGBT community members have been bullied when they were young, and the concept of being bullied is something that hits us really hard…It feels like you’re letting the bullies win.”
Meanwhile, those lamenting the “bullies” determined that they would continue to issue report cards for companies whether they liked it or not. The HRC made clear that they would continue to rank Fortune 500 companies and those that had publicly withdrawn would have 25 points deducted from their scores.
According to the report, in order for those more than 500 businesses to get perfect scores, requirements had shifted from things like better healthcare coverage for domestic partners in 2004 to demanding IVF and adoption benefits along with “gender-transition guidelines” by 2022.
A statement from HRC Vice President Eric Bloem cautioned that “abandoning these programs in fact opens them up to risk down the road if employees feel discrimination or harassment.”
Speaking from the other side of the argument, Lennington asserted, “We have no problem with nondiscrimination, but we’re worried about these policies going too far and harming innocent third parties who have either religious objections or they’re being excluded because they’re not LGBTQ or a certain race.”
Still, the AP went on to present findings of a Gallup poll from March 2024 that determined 1 in 13 adults identified somewhere within the alphabet soup and cited LGBTQ+ consultant Fabrice Houdart who said “I think they will lose, in the end, LGBT talent and LGBT consumers. And the parents of trans kids, which are an increasing population in the United States, they’re probably going to remember that those were companies who went out of their way to side with the bullies.”
Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn’t researching current events and their impacts, you’ll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.
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