(Headline USA) Facing increased accountability from pro-values consumers over the pernicious influence of the controversial Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) movement in both the workplace and the marketplace, major corporations have begun bailing on a radical LGBT activist group’s longstanding demands.
The Human Rights Campaign initially focused its report card, the Corporate Equality Index, on ensuring that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender 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 had expanded.
But the organization, which has grown increasingly political and demanding in recent years with its activism, has itself fallen under scandal, including allegations that its former leader helped then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo smear female sexual harassment victims—thus undermining its own purported commitment to workplace protections and equality.
The negative attention led the HRC in September 2021 to fire its president, Alphonso David—who had been Cuomo’s former deputy secretary for civil rights. However, with the woke spirit of the George Floyd riots still in full swing, many companies continued to associate with the group and its embattled leader.
Then, in April 2023, after Bud Light began a promotion with transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney, many conservative customers, feeling betrayed by the affront to traditional values and repulsed by the direction of the St. Louis-based beer brand, finally drew the line, costing the company billions of dollars and dropping it substantially in the market.
Since then, HRC’s scorecard has become a helpful tool for conservative activists seeking to identify brands that clash with their values as part of a broader pushback against overly aggressive diversity initiatives.
Critics lament the rollback, saying it further traumatizes their already fragile sense of self-worth by putting everyone on an equal playing field without special treatment.
“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,” bemoaned David Paisley, senior research director at Community Marketing & Insights, which helps companies market to LGBT consumers. “… It feels like you’re you’re letting the bullies win.”
A GROWING LIST OF DEMANDS
With its initial demands for gay rights having been fulfilled in Supreme Court cases like 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges, the Human Rights Campaign was forced to seek out new objectives to justify its ongoing existence and continue paying the salaries of its employees.
Fortunately, the era of corporate virtue-signaling via cultural trends like the ESG movement—which was backed by three of the largest investment funds in the nation, if not the world—made it easy to move the goalposts, with few questioning the motives of the influential activist group.
However, attempts to push too far in the other direction—with LGBT culture appearing to overtake the heteronormative majority, spurring outrage over a systemic embrace of sexual deviancy à la Sodom and Gomorrah—eventually led greater scrutiny to befall the organizations that were directing the radical agenda.
In 2004, the index placed more emphasis on providing comprehensive benefits to domestic partners and improving health care coverage for transgender workers.
Later it added categories that gave employers points for promoting equality in the broader LGBT community.
In 2019, it specified that supplier diversity programs, which encourage companies to work with minority-owned or veteran-owned businesses, must include LGBT suppliers.
By 2022, the index said employers should offer same-sex spouses and domestic partners the same benefits as other couples for in-vitro fertilization and adoption, and that employers must create gender-transition guidelines, among other changes.
The index also prompted many companies to create employee resource groups, which are voluntary, employee-led diversity and inclusion groups for people with shared backgrounds or identities, said Fabrice Houdart, a consultant on LGBT issues.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH
Under pressure from consumers and activist–watchdogs like social-media influencer Robby Starbuck, several formerly woke corporations have recently announced they will no longer participate in the Corporate Equality Index.
- Ford Motor Co. CEO Jim Farley told employees that the company stopped participating in external culture surveys, citing the wide range of beliefs held by employees and customers and the evolving legal environment. He said Ford does not use hiring quotas or tie compensation to diversity goals.
- Harley Davidson posted a statement on X about withdrawing from the index, adding that the company does not have hiring quotas or supplier diversity spending goals, and that employee resource groups would focus exclusively on professional development, networking and mentoring.
- When Lowe’s announced its departure from the index, the company said it was combining resource groups into one umbrella organization. It also planned to stop sponsoring and participating in some festivals and parades to ensure that company policies are lawful and aligned with its commitment to include everyone.
- Brown–Forman, the company that makes Jack Daniel’s whiskey, and beer and beverage maker Molson Coors, highlighted no longer taking part in HRC’s corporate survey in their announcements about scaling back their DEI programs.
Moreover, emboldened by a Supreme Court decision last year that declared race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions unconstitutional, conservative legal groups have won lawsuits making similar arguments about corporations.
They’re now targeting workplace initiatives such as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and widening their objections to include programs focused on gender identity and sexual orientation.
“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,” said Dan Lennington, deputy counsel for the Equality Under the Law Project at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty which has represented dozens of clients in challenges to DEI programs.
Dozens of legal cases have been filed against employers for DEI initiatives, including complaints that target hiring practices, employee resource groups or mentorship programs that plaintiffs say prioritize people of certain races or sexual identities while excluding others.
Most American companies launched a review of their DEI programs last summer in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard, said Jason Schwartz, co-chair of the labor and employment practice group at Gibson Dunn, a law firm that has helped more than 50 major corporations audit their DEI programs.
“The opponents to these efforts are winning the war of words, and they’ve got a lot of momentum in the courtroom, so I do think it’s a serious threat that needs to be responded to in a thoughtful way,” Schwartz said.
THE BULLIED BECOME THE BULLIES
Whether thoughtful or not, the Human Rights Campaign has no intention of letting this challenge to its corporate influence go unanswered.
Companies built DEI anti-harassment programs in part to mitigate potential legal risks that come with a toxic workplace, and “abandoning these programs in fact opens them up to risk down the road if employees feel discrimination or harassment,” said HRC Vice President Eric Bloem.
Likewise, while the concerns over conservative boycotts may have led them to abandon the index, Bloem theatened that those who did so could, in turn, be punished by gay activists.
In a survey conducted in August, 80% of LGBT customers said they would boycott companies that were rolling back inclusion initiatives, and more than half said they would take concerns to social media or share negative reviews online, according to the Human Rights Campaign Foundation.
“I think they will lose, in the end, LGBT talent and LGBT consumers,” Houdart said. “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.”
Lennington, however, reiterated that it wasn’t everyday Americans going about their business, trying to lead normal lives and earn a reasonable living who should be considered “bullies” in this scenario.
“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,” he noted.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
