This year we’ve seen Anheuser-Busch, Target and other companies sacrifice both their bottom lines and reputations in order to be seen as woke.

Turns out that didn’t quite pan out for them.

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) touts its Corporate Equality Index (CEI)  as “the national benchmarking tool on corporate policies, practices and benefits pertinent to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer employees.” For years we’ve criticized the companies that continue to kiss the HRC ring even as HRC’s polices become ever more illogical, offensive and even predatory.

This year, despite their best efforts to stay atop the rankings, it seems almost 300 companies have seen their CEI scores decline.

Members of our Free Enterprise Project team, who have been vocal opponents of HRC’s corporate manipulation, are responding to this news.

Scott Shepard

Free Enterprise Project Director Scott Shepard:

HRC was once a legitimate civil rights organization that represented the genuine interests of most gay people. Now it has become both a lunatic asylum and an unvarnished cog in the leftwing pressure conglomerate.

Its Corporate “Equality” Index reflects this, being revised every year to make ever-more-radical demands on corporations in defense of positions that harm everyone — including and perhaps especially most gays and lesbians.

Because the CEI requires companies to take — and spend shareholder money to advance — the hard-left position on matters wholly unrelated to their business purposes, a company that scores 100 percent on the CEI has proudly declared its violation of its fiduciary duties.

Any companies that aren’t seeing lower CEI scores are betraying their duty and their shareholders.

 

Ethan Peck

Free Enterprise Project Associate Ethan Peck:

HRC constantly shifting the criteria for its index is part of its modus operandi – it keeps corporations fearful of a bad score, on edge and ready to succumb to new and more radical demands.

It’s right out of the Hamas & PLO playbook: If you give them a finger, they want your hand. So then you give them your arm and they take your head. They view appeasement not as an act of good faith or attempted compromise but as weakness – as an opportunity to exploit and keep exploiting.

That’s why Bud Light couldn’t buy its way to a good score, because HRC does not have an end goal – it is prepared to keep moving the goalposts indefinitely.

 

Stefan Padfield

Free Enterprise Project Deputy Director Stefan Padfield:

Radical leftism is built upon unsustainable lies. We are told that despite all the natural diversity of individuals, we should expect equality of outcomes. We are told that despite their long history of being oppressed, Jews fall on the “oppressor” side of the oppressor-oppressed spectrum and thus may be “decolonized” by any means necessary.

And in the case of HRC, we are told that a man can become a woman simply by identifying as such.

These lies are ultimately unsustainable, but we must confront them nonetheless because of the damage they can cause before they are fully exposed.

And when it comes to corporate executives and directors, we must continue to exert pressure on them to stop placing their personal beliefs and self-interest ahead of their fiduciary duties, including by bending the knee to HRC.