Target: A backlash over gay pride displays
“Companies have been embracing” Gay Pride Month “for years,” said Emily Stewart in Vox. But this June, businesses that pay tribute to the LGBTQ community should brace for a backlash. With “anti-trans sentiment” and conservative anger over “woke” marketing at a boiling point, Target has become the latest corporation to find itself caught up in the culture wars. The retailer’s Pride displays— rainbow-striped shirts, clothes reading “Not a Phase” and “Super Queer,” children’s books about transgender issues and gender fluidity—infuriated some customers, who screamed at and threatened employees and attacked displays of Pride-themed merchandise. In response, Target moved Pride displays to the backs of some stores and removed some of the products for sale. Corporate America’s embrace of “rainbow capitalism” isn’t going away, but boycotts may make some companies “a little queasy.”
Target claimed it moved Pride displays because of “threats,” said Zachary Faria in the Washington Examiner, as if “only hateful violent bigots would oppose Pride displays.” But “normal people” nationwide are fed up with corporate pandering to left-wing activism and the trans movement, which explains why the Target boycott caused the company to lose more than $9 billion in market value. After Bud Light chose to feature trans social-media personality Dylan Mulvaney in an online marketing campaign, sales dropped by nearly 25 percent, and the beer’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch, saw its market value plummet $19 billion. Corporations may want to seem “inclusive and edgy” to win over urban progressives, said Jonathan Turley in The Hill, but too much agenda-driven “proselytizing” and “virtue signaling” is a big turnoff to a lot of Americans.
Corporations have only one real agenda—to make money, said Greg Sargent in The Washington
Post. They’re making “self-interested decisions” in response to consumer preferences and social change, as they always have. Many corporations reluctantly backed the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the gay rights movement in subsequent decades for the same reason they back Pride Month or Black Lives Matter today: to reach new customers and to show existing customers they have “a moral conscience.” These are “profitoriented decisions.” The boycotts of Target and Bud Light may inflict pain in the short term, but over time, “no amount of bullying and threats” can stop society from changing and evolving.