United Airlines CEO Josh Kirby recently brought new meaning to the famous slogan “Fly the Friendly Skies.” A viral revelation that he not only participated in multiple drag performances throughout his career at U.S. Airways and American Airlines but has incorporated the adult entertainment into the United company culture overshadowed his response to the grounding of Boeing’s 737s.
Though the public increasingly supports the claim that what people do in their free time doesn’t matter, when displays of sexual proclivities overtake a public company’s workplace through diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, shareholders and the flying public should be alarmed.
So, what is driving companies to sponsor events, parades, and promotional content featuring flagrant exhibitionism or to water down their performance metrics on “product safety, employee safety, and quality” with “diversity, equality, and inclusion” when considering executive compensation as Boeing did?
It may be simply boards and executives capitulating to the divisive policies pushed by activist stakeholder groups such as the Human Rights Campaign. The HRC’s annual “Corporate Equality Index” assigns companies a score based on the degree to which they promote the HRC’s divisive sexual-political agenda.
This year, earning a “perfect” 100 on the index requires, among other things, recruiting employees based on their sexual identity, discriminating against vendors based on their sex and gender policies, providing gender transition guidelines to employees and forcing them to undergo multiple ideological trainings, providing medical benefits covering gender transition-related treatment for employees and their children (excluding detransitions), pledging philanthropic support to sex-focused organizations and events, and supporting controversial sex and gender legislation and initiatives.
Companies that fail to achieve a score of 100 risk accusations of not being “inclusive,” despite the index’s demands exceeding typical liberal virtue-signaling and pushing concrete changes to business strategy and operations that may be bad for shareholders, employees, customers, or, in the case of United and Boeing, potentially public safety.
Unsurprisingly, both Boeing and United Airlines received a 100 on the 2023-2024 index, while United funds HRC as a “National Corporate Partner” at the “Gold” level.
Indeed, to the extent corporations receive a glowing review on the Corporate Equality Index, shareholders have good reason to suspect they are headed in the wrong direction. We all witnessed in real-time the near-complete destruction of the Bud Light brand last year. As the company veered toward the Corporate Equality Index demands in its marketing campaigns, its customer base and stock price collapsed.
Fortunately, more and more companies are either rejecting or failing to keep up with the controversial requirements. Nearly 300 companies lost their formerly perfect scores, and more than 700 companies (more than half of its participants) saw their scores drop in the most recent ratings.
Of the 378 Fortune 500 companies participating in this year’s Corporate Equality Index, only 173 received perfect scores, compared to 258 last year.
Among those that formerly had perfect scores and no longer do are Anheuser Busch, Target, American Express, Hyundai, LinkedIn, Netflix, and Sony. X, formerly known as Twitter, went from a perfect 100 score to minus-25 simply from a change of leadership and a commitment to protect free speech and avoid corporate radicalism.
Netflix, which has been in hot water with HRC for its airing of a Dave Chapelle comedy special, dropped a whopping 45 points. Additionally, companies such as Delta, Atlassian, AFLAC, Tesla, Sony, ABB, Duke Energy, Qualcomm, and others — despite having lobbied for the “Equality Act” — lost at least 30 points.
Even an openly activist company such as LinkedIn lost 30 points because it failed to do every single action the HRC demanded of it.
These score drops are encouraging for shareholders, employees, and customers. As is the fact that several companies that voluntarily participated in the 2022 CEI survey did not do so in 2023, including the gaming giant Activision Blizzard and the Huntsman Corporation, one of the world’s largest chemical companies. All corporations should just say no in 2024.
Time will tell whether the declining scores reflect the fact that HRC raises the bar every year and has made increasingly controversial demands or these corporations’ wholesale rejection of divisive politics.
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The question remains: How much more public backlash and ridicule must America’s most prominent companies endure before their leadership realizes they cannot fulfill their duty to their shareholders while allowing the demands of the Corporate Equality Index to dictate their operations, messaging, policy engagement, and charitable giving?
America’s public corporations must not remain beholden to any activist stakeholder organization. Instead, it’s time for businesses to get back to business.
Paul Fitzpatrick is president of the 1792 Exchange, an organization dedicated to advancing freedom by protecting small businesses and nonprofit groups and moving corporations back toward neutral.