This article was originally published by the WND News Center
(WND News Center) — The transformation of once-wholesome American corporations like Disney and Walmart into fulcrums of LGBT power, advancing a wildly destructive sex-and-gender revolution, is not just a tragic story of American moral decline, but also one that offers vital and little-known lessons on the strategies and tactics of the Sexual Left.
How did it happen? How did the self-styled “queer” (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) movement gain such a powerful foothold in corporate boardrooms and, specifically, human resources departments? Surely, a host of factors contributed to the present crisis — the nation’s growing secularization and abandonment of biblical ethos, the increasingly slavish devotion of corporate media to all thing LGBTQ, the “coming out” of millions of Americans (decades ago mostly as gay or lesbian, but today as “non-binary,” “genderqueer,” etc.) and the emotional manipulation of loved ones that comes with it — to name a few.
But another vital but largely invisible factor deserves attention: the cunning strategies and organizational efforts of “gay” and trans activists laboring inside and outside corporations to push major companies to serve the LGBT agenda. Homosexual and trans activists at the biggest “queer” organization in America — the Human Rights Campaign, or HRC — have perfected a corporate shakedown strategy that would make Rev. Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition green with envy. They worked the system with greater savvy and commitment than their faith-based foes, and won, partly because so many conservatives rolled over rather than risk being called “bigots,” “homophobes,” and now, “transphobes.”
Of course, it helps having the media completely in your corner. And yet, putting politics aside, every “queer” victory, whether in a legislative chamber, courtroom or Fortune 500 corporate office, is a Pyrrhic victory, defying God’s truth and eroding America’s Judeo-Christian-based morality, undermining the integrity of her institutions, and ultimately contributing to the mass corruption and seduction of her children — one LGBT “equality” concession at a time.
One of the most ingenious and effective pressure campaigns ever run by the Left is the HRC’s “Corporate Equality Index,” which for two decades has been instrumental in driving hundreds of American corporations into supporting LGBT activists’ ever-evolving goals. When you read that a giant corporation has given a huge grant to a gay and trans organization, or sponsored a libidinous “pride” parade, or floated an obnoxious, gender-bending TV ad, it may be in part because that company gets points in the Corporate Equality Index, or CEI, for doing so. (You can look up any corporation’s LGBTQ rating HERE; here is the detailed page for Walmart, which scored a “perfect” 100 percent CEI rating for 2022, and Home Depot, which scored a 90 percent rating.)
A promotional video from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation for its “Transgender Toolkit for Employers” — part of the CEI — speaks to the revolutionary nature of the organization’s work, which is all about radically changing social norms. The video features a man, Jacob, dressed in female attire with a girlish hair style, wearing red lipstick and nail polish and large earrings. Identified as an “executive assistant” in New York, Jacob speaks about so-called “trans-inclusive” policies:
You should be able to come to work and wear one thing one day that’s sort of read as one gender, and then come to work the next day and wear something else that’s perhaps read as a different gender,” he says. “I should be able to just come to work one day in pants, and come to work another day in a skirt, and that shouldn’t be seen as inconsistent. That should be seen as me just bringing my full self to the job. … Transgender and gender non-conforming people are now a fundamental part of the fabric of the world around us.
Sexual immorality marketed as ‘equality’
But first, a little about the Human Rights Campaign, HRCF’s sister organization, which might more accurately be labeled (from a biblical perspective) the “Human Wrongs Campaign.” HRC is the leading and best-funded homosexual-trans-bisexual-“queer” lobby group in the United States and, indeed, the world. Launched in 1980, it became the main professional Washington, D.C. lobbying arm of the Gay Revolution, growing steadily to the point where it reported total revenues exceeding $46 million in 2021.
HRC’s spokesmen claimed to respect religious rights and cloaked themselves in a veneer of moderation to build support in the media and power within liberal coalitions inside the Beltway. Ultimately, HRC became one of the most influential Democrat special-interest groups, so much so that every Democrat president and major Democratic presidential candidate since Bill Clinton has ventured to the swank, annual HRC fundraising dinners to show support for “gay” and then transgender “rights.” HRC is now one of the most powerful PACs in D.C., with virtually all its campaign donations going to Democrats.
More than any other group, HRC “branded” the homosexual agenda, choosing an equal sign as its logo as it promoted innocuous-sounding euphemisms like “equality,” “love conquers hate,” and “love is love” to mobilize sentiment for its revolutionary crusade redefining civil rights and human morality. But behind the clever marketing, HRC was in solidarity with other “gay” militants, applying the same radical egalitarian model equating homosexual relationships to the traditional marital bond between husband and wife. Treating “gay” and now “trans” people differently amounts to “hate” and “bigotry,” according to their formula. And HRC staffers have not shied away from using false narratives to build “gay” power and defame Christians, their main enemy.
Today, HRC’s radicalism is out in the open as it has stepped up its efforts to indoctrinate very young children, all the while claiming it is actually conservatives who are “launching a culture war against our kids.” As the Washington Stand recently reported, “HRC has campaigned for public schools to indoctrinate children as young as kindergarten to affirm same-sex attraction, bisexuality, transgender pronouns, and gender fluidity.”
A one-sided ‘scorecard’
In 2002, HRC launched the “Corporate Equality Index” through its research arm, Human Rights Campaign Foundation. CEI is a self-serving, one-sided corporate “scorecard” that scores companies from zero to 100 based on their subservience to LGBT activist agenda goals, and then ratchets up its criteria every two years to require stepped-up corporate pandering to merit a continued “perfect” score. Companies obsessed with “DEI” (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) compliance are able to boast of their perfect score under the HRC’s skewed ranking system, but then in subsequent years are continually pressured and manipulated into “upping” their embrace of ever-more-radical goals because, if they fail to do so, they will lose their 100 CEI score.
The anti-conservative CEI scorecard makes no pretense of objectivity in its quest for “queer equality in the workplace,” as one HRC web posting describes it. The CEI even contains a punishment provision that essentially blocks compliant corporations from supporting Christian and pro-family groups opposed to the LGBTQ agenda: Any company found “guilty” of an anti-LGBTQ “blemish” will have 25 points deducted from its score.
The goal and manipulative genius of the CEI is to first push corporations to a 100-percent, “perfect” score, for which they are put on HRCF’s list of the “Best Places to Work for LGBTQ Equality.” Then the corporation is effectively locked into the system with its ever-escalating demands perpetually; if it refuses, it risks being cast as a backslider that is less than fully LGBT “affirming.”
The following are among the corporations receiving perfect scores in the 2022 Corporate Equality Index (this is only a partial list; look up the CEI rating of any major corporation HERE):
- Anheuser-Busch Companies Inc
- BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee
- CarMax Inc.
- Chobani
- Clorox Co.
- Coca-Cola Co.
- Comcast NBCUniversal
- Del Monte Foods, Inc.
- Equitable
- Farmers Insurance Group
- Federal Reserve Banks (Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Kansas City, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, San Francisco and St. Louis)
- Fidelity National Information Services Inc.
- Franklin Templeton Investments
- GameStop Corp.
- General Mills Inc.
- GlaxoSmithKline LLC
- GODADDY Inc.
- Google Inc.
- H&R Block Inc.
- Hallmark Cards Inc.
- Hannaford Supermarkets
- Hanover Insurance Group Inc.
- Hershey Co.
- Hertz Global Holdings Inc.
- HILTON
- Hyatt Hotels Corp.
- IKEA Holding US Inc.
- Iron Mountain Inc.
- Johnson & Johnson
- Kellogg Co.
- Kohl’s Corp.
- Kroger Co.
- Land O’Lakes Inc.
- Liberty Mutual Group
- Lowe’s Companies Inc.
- Marriott International Inc.
- Mars Inc.
- Mattel Inc.
- McDonald’s Corp.
- Microsoft Corp.
- NASDAQ Inc.
- Nationwide
- Nestlé USA Inc.
- Office Depot Inc.
- Papa John’s International Inc.
- PepsiCo Inc.
- Procter & Gamble Co.
- RingCentral Inc.
- S.C. Johnson & Son Inc.
- Scotts Miracle-Gro Company
- Shell Oil Co.
- Sherwin-Williams Co.
- Sirius XM Radio Inc.
- Sony Corporation of America
- State Farm Group
- Target Corp.
- Tesla Inc.
- T-Mobile USA Inc.
- Twitter Inc.
- United Parcel Service Inc. (UPS)
- Verizon Communications Inc.
- Walgreen Co.
- Walmart Inc.
- Walt Disney Co.
- Wendy’s Co.
- Yelp Inc.
- Zillow Group
The 2023 CEI Criteria — the most radical to date
Jumping ahead to the newest array of Corporate Equality Index demands for 2023, the CEI has upped the ante in several areas, including demanding “equality” (read: radical egalitarianism) in LGBT “family formation.” HRC is now demanding “equivalency in same- and different-sex domestic partner family formation benefits regardless of sex” (worth 10 points on the new scorecard). As the CEI report explains, under this more stringent formula, “the areas that will be assessed for equality include”:
- “Adoption;
- Cryopreservation (egg freezing for non-medical reasons);
- Infertility treatment coverage (outside of in-vitro fertilization);
- Fertility/in-vitro fertilization coverage; and
- Surrogacy benefits.”
This new set of radical demands takes “equality” to whole new levels. By treating adoption benefits for homosexual couples the same as for normal couples, CEI-compliant corporations will effectively provide financial incentives for the creation of same-sex households in which innocent children are left motherless or fatherless by design.
Straight couples receive infertility treatments because they cannot conceive children through natural, normally procreative sexual relations. In contrast, homosexual couples are by definition barren. No two people of the same sex can ever conceive children by themselves without resorting to heterosexual reproduction in some form.
It is unlikely the average American consumer would want his or her dollars to be spent subsidizing corporate policies designed to create homes that intentionally deny children a mom or a dad — and households in which sexual immorality and/or gender confusion is modeled to the impressionable kids as normal and good.
Reprinted with permission from the WND News Center.