LGBTQ, Inc.

American life today is characterized in no small part by nearly ceaseless exposure to LGBTQ propaganda. Everywhere you turn, you’re confronted with “the message,” be it in grade schools, on college campuses, while watching television or movies, or at work. There are no “safe spaces” sheltered from the deluge—not even FEMA’s hurricane recovery efforts have been spared.

How did such a small “community” capture America’s institutions? The answer is complex, but a new database by The Project to Expose Corporate Activism (PECA) shines a light on a significant part of the story.

PECA’s database shows that corporations have become the vanguard of the LGBTQ movement, donating vast sums of money to prop up an equally vast network of activists. The database does not merely rehash well-known examples like Anheuser-Busch’s support for transgender TikTok influencers but rather furnishes evidence of 1,588 companies’ support for more than 2,300 LGBTQ causes. These causes on the whole are quite radical. They range from Camp Brave Trails—a queer summer camp that has children’s drag shows and a “clothing closet for exploring gender expression”—to NGOs like Immigration Equality that facilitate the illegal migration of transgender and HIV+ “asylum seekers.”

Disturbingly, corporations appear to be particularly fixated on LGBTQ youth. The most commonly recurring causes in the database are organizations that spread LGBTQ propaganda in schools and encourage and enable child sex changes. That companies often platform and elevate parents of transgender kids as part of their internal programming only substantiates this observation.

The database also provides a representative sampling of each company’s LGBTQ DEI initiatives, ranging from employee drag shows to discriminatory pro-LGBTQ hiring policies. Some of these initiatives, such as the creation and maintenance of LGBTQ employee resource groups (ERGs), are nearly ubiquitous across the profiled companies. Others, such as one leading childcare provider’s LGBTQ programming for toddlers, are more peculiar. All have concerning implications, not only for “heteronormative” employees who are forced to choose between the Scylla and Charybdis of “allyship” and potential ostracization, but also for the public.

What starts in the boardroom rarely fails to penetrate the political sphere and infect public discourse.

What the database cannot illuminate is equally, if not more, concerning. The topline figure of companies spending $1 billion to advance LGBTQ causes, while impressive, only represents a fraction of the actual amount. Unfortunately for would-be champions of corporate transparency, most of what passes for corporate philanthropy today is hidden from public view.

Corporations routinely skirt outdated transparency and accountability regulations, hiding the full extent of their activism from both the public and their nominal owners, the shareholders. The monetary figures reported in the database are merely the minimum amounts that can be confirmed rather than the total amounts these companies hand out. The numerous question marks sprinkled throughout denote instances where companies trumpeted their activism but failed to disclose the cost.

Corporate activism paradoxically is both brazen and shadowy. Companies proudly virtue signal their support for LGBTQ causes, but refuse to provide the receipts to their shareholders, whose wealth they ostensibly divert to fund these causes, and the public, the target of their machinations. By compiling data on such a large number of companies, the database provides an unprecedented view of the whole. It unveils not only the vastness of the corporate support for the LGBTQ movement but also some of its actuating patterns.

Significantly, nearly all the profiled companies, irrespective of size, have LGBTQ employee resource groups (ERGs). These identity-based affinity groups, we are told, have a variety of purposes, such as furthering employee “inclusion” and leading efforts at market segmentation. But ERGs are necessarily composed of activists who provide disruptive, manipulative, and self-interested employees with an employer-sanctioned means to organize. They also enable outside actors to hijack corporate means for their own ends.

One such actor is the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the largest LGBTQ organization in the country and the power behind the Corporate Equality Index (CEI), a “benchmarking tool on corporate policies, practices and benefits pertinent to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer employees.” To receive a perfect CEI score, companies must have an LGBTQ ERG with executive sponsorship or an LGBTQ-inclusive Diversity Council, among undertaking other actions.

In turn, ERGs often cite their companies’ CEI scores to justify new LGBTQ initiatives and carveouts (as CEI metrics grow each year, there is always more to demand of corporate managers). As if the conflict of interest was not apparent enough, it is often ERG members that direct these initiatives, benefit from them, and report to the HRC for scoring purposes. Though companies likely had good intentions when they first established ERGs, it is clear today that they inadvertently created fifth columns within their organizations.

If companies fail to submit to employee demands, the HRC and its allies gin up public relations crises to browbeat them into line. HRC also adjusts their CEI scores or suspends them from the CEI outright, threatening their standing with institutional lenders and investors. This is not to suggest that all companies are forced into compliance; some engage in LGBTQ activism voluntarily. But the synergy between ERGs and LGBTQ organizations like the HRC is largely responsible for the near universality of LGBTQ activism across companies.

It is not enough for those who seek a return to earlier, less controversial modes of corporate philanthropy to demand that companies disassociate from the HRC and the CEI. External activists are only part of the problem—the HRC is but one activist organization among many. Reformers must also demand that companies abolish identity-based ERGs and other internal groups committed to political activism. This is no doubt a major task: in addition to external actors like the HRC, the possibility of vexatious employee tantrums and spurious civil rights suits incentivizes the maintenance of such groups. However, this is necessary if companies are to be freed from the clutches of those who endeavor to steer corporate philanthropy toward their friends and away from the common good.

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