The religious right is now angry with Corporate America, which may cause problems with their alliance with Republicans. The Republican Party is a fully owned subsidiary of Corporate America, and while they will often give lip service to the goals of the religious right, and they have been throwing them more bones than usual under Bush, ultimately serving Corporate America is the GOP’s prime directive.
Americans for Truth, an organization which, if nothing else, proves Orwell was right about language, is protesting a report from the more honestly named Human Rights Campaign. The HTC’s report begins:
The Human Rights Campaign today released a report showing that a record number of the largest U.S. companies are increasingly competing to expand benefits and protections for their gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender employees and consumers. This year’s report, the Human Rights Campaign’s fifth annual Corporate Equality Index, showed an unprecedented 138 major U.S. companies earned the top rating of 100 percent. That number is up from 101 in 2005, and has grown tenfold in four years.
To the religious extremists in Americans for Truth, this is bad. They argue, “The battle to restore corporate neutrality on the homosexual issue will be a long and tough one, but it must be fought.” To them, tolerance and treating everyone equal regardless of sexual orientation is not “neutrality.” Again, Orwell is proven to be right. When Americans for Truth advocate neutrality, they are really advocating discrimination.
(Hat tip to Ed Brayton.)
George Bush is NOT a true American.
Bush is, in fact, attempting to destroy the US and its constitution. The reasons for this are twofold – 1) Revenge – the Bush family (both Presidents and all the related criminal brothers and cousins) are seeking revenge against America for their Grandfather’s conviction for treason during WWII; and 2) Greed – Bush is always ready to commit treason, to betray the National Security Interest and the United States if it means a quick buck for him and his buddies.
I’ve often wondered when the love-in between the Religious Right and the corporations would end. Corporations exist to make profits for their shareholders and aren’t guardians of morality. Most of them don’t have any particular animus as organizations towards gays, lesbians and transgendered individuals if they’re willing to purchase products and services! The Religious Right, on the other hand, is interested in promoting its set of values, cost be damned. Each group has been using the other to increase its clout, but their underlying goals are so different that it’s amazing their alliance lasted this long!
Hi all!
haven’t posted for a while here.
The biggest reason corporate world began acknowledging GLBT rights and therefore offering domestic partnership benefits beginning in the mid 80s was there increasing awareness that many of there key employees were GLBT. And yes they also realized that the GLBT market was quite sizable.
Welcome back Marcus–and welcome to jim and phranqlin as well.
Yes, there certainly is a difference in goals between the religious right and corporations. Besides this issue, I’ve also noted this on stem cells. I’ve had posts (I’m not sure if here, or if at the a previous blog) in which business saw this as contrary to their goals. They objected both in terms of the bio tech industry, and seeing problems with having schools which do not teach modern science if they want to hire trained scientists in the future.
I remembering hearing back in about 1993 or so (sorry can’t I can’t substantiate it)that at THAT point upward of 85% of the Fortune 500 were offering domestic partnership benefits and so of course had strong non discriminatory policies for the GBL community, trans-genders were phased in in the late 90’s and are rapidly advancing now. A trans-gender friend of mine had a personal meeting w/ Kennedy about 2 months ago resulting in him (Kennedy) pulling the Hate Crimes bill out of the stream to the floor and rewriting it to include Trans-gender protections. It’s quite exciting news. Kennedy as it turns out was clueless about trans-gender issues until she spoke to him.
Marcus,
“Kennedy as it turns out was clueless about trans-gender issues until she spoke to him.”
I think that for a large percentage of liberals, this really isn’t about gay issues or transgender issues but about simple decency and human rights. I bet many never even thought about issues such as gay marriage until Republicans made an issue out of banning it. Then liberals saw this as absurd and unfair and opposed Republicans. Similarly transgender issues aren’t immediately thought of, but once brought up most liberals will support the individuals involved against injustice.