Jim Geraghty notes that many corporations which tout their gay rights sympathies here in America nevertheless find it inconvenient, or risky, to do so elsewhere.
Geraghty writes:
You will be amazed at how many big U.S. and multinational corporations who are enthusiastically celebrating “Pride Month” have significant operations in countries that criminalize homosexuality. It’s not just China and Saudi Arabia, and it’s not just manufacturing in countries such as Pakistan or Indonesia.Apparently, some corporations' principles stop at the waters' edge. Anheuser-Busch, Geraghty tells us, "operates breweries, factories, and distribution networks in a country, Uganda, that criminalizes homosexuality."
No, you’re going to be flabbergasted by which particularly controversial company at this moment has operations running in . . . Uganda, which just enacted what are probably the most anti-gay criminal laws on the planet. Corporate America gets to market to LGBT consumers stateside, and then turn around and make a bundle in some of the most anti-gay countries in the world, and apparently everyone is just fine with this systemic hypocrisy.
With so many problems, you might wonder who would want to do business in a place like Uganda. The answer turns out to be quite a few multinationals: Coca-Cola, Unilever, Diageo, Citibank, Hilton and Sheraton hotel chains and . . . Anheuser-Busch InBev.
He continues:
For several years now, sharp-eyed observers have noticed that many multinational corporations add rainbows to their logos in the West, but keep them unchanged in the Middle East, where governments and the populaces are much less supportive of gay rights.Indeed, one might think that were profit incentives high enough, many of these corporations would happily endorse laws in the U.S. mandating prison sentences for homosexual behavior. Their only principle, it seems, is profit.
In Saudi Arabia, gay men get executed after their confessions are extracted during torture. The list of U.S. companies doing business in Saudi Arabia is like the Fortune 100.
Gays in China are subject to “censorship, surveillance and intimidation, at times even detention by police.” Just about every major multinational corporation operates in China and never speaks out against the policies of the Chinese government.
You know who’s got four “sourcing centers” located in China? Target. You know, the big box-store company that signed up a design company with a line of Satanist-inspired merchandise to help create the store’s 2023 “PRIDE” collection.
You know where else Target has a sourcing center? Karachi, Pakistan, where “same-sex sexual activity is prohibited under the Penal Code 1860, which criminalizes acts of ‘carnal knowledge against the order of nature’. This provision carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.”
Target also operates a sourcing center in Jakarta, Indonesia, where gay men get publicly flogged for violating Sharia law.
Big multinational corporations love standing up for gay rights, as long as it means more people buying their stuff. They are not interested in standing up for gay rights if it might cost them something.
Big American companies will throw their weight around in opposition to all kinds of state laws, from restrictions on explicit materials in school libraries to limitations on hormone treatments, but then turn around and avert their eyes from governments that literally execute people for being gay.
Disney objects to Florida’s new Parental Rights in Education law. The company also has no problem staging “Disney on Ice” in Saudi Arabia.
Not that long ago, a Saudi court sentenced a man to 450 lashes for “setting up a Twitter account to promote and practice homosexuality.”
What this demonstrates is that vast swaths of corporate America have no fundamental, principled objection to violent anti-gay views, as long as the profits are high enough.
But setting corporate hypocrisy about "Pride Month" aside, it's not at all clear why one's sexual proclivities should be a matter of pride in the first place. If one's sexual orientation is determined for us at conception and not freely chosen then why should it be any more a matter to be proud of than the size of our ears or the shape of our skull?
We might be happy or satisfied that we are the way we are, but expressing pride in something we really had nothing to do with and can't really help, if, in fact, we can't, seems narcissistic and not a little preposterous.
C.S.Lewis talks about pride in a chapter of his classic work, Mere Christianity. Lewis writes that of all sins pride is actually the worst:
According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is pride....Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.... Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man....Power is what Pride really enjoys....Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.Lewis was certainly correct in his assessment of pride, and perhaps especially when he notes that pride is really about power. In our day the power that's being sought by those who promote pride in their sexual inclinations is both political and social.
Political power is necessary to normalize whatever sexual desires people have by codifying them into law.
Social power is necessary as a means to intimidate anyone who may have reservations about the effects of the LBGTQIA+ agenda on the health of society into silence and conformity. People must be made to affirm the normalcy and "goodness" of the sexual agenda, whether they really think it to be good or not, and they must be punished, perhaps by losing their livelihoods, if they openly dissent.
The LGBTQIA+ Pride agenda is achieved, in other words, by turning us all into the sort of hypocrites which inhabit many of our corporate boardrooms.
