Disney shareholders have voted overwhelmingly to continue the company’s participation in the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Corporate Equality Index, which measures businesses’ support for LGBTQ+ causes and on which Disney has consistently received perfect scores.
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Holders of only 1 percent of shares voted in favor of a right-wing group’s proposal that Disney pull out of the index, according to multiple media outlets, meaning that 99 percent supported participation. The vote was taken Thursday. Disney has a perfect score of 100 on this year’s index, which it has since 2007.
The National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project submitted the proposal. The Free Enterprise Project is “the original and premier opponent of the woke takeover of American corporate life,” says a press release from the center.
“Though HRC — which Disney has a paid partnership with — claims the CEI is just a ‘benchmarking tool on corporate policies … pertinent to LGBT employees,’ in reality, it functions like a social credit score for corporations,” the organization said in its statement supporting the resolution. “The threat of a bad score is wielded against corporations to force them to do the political bidding of HRC and others (like GLSEN, the Trevor Project and GLAAD, which Disney also has paid partnerships with) that seek to sow gender confusion in children, encourage irreversible surgical procedures on confused teens, effectively eliminate girls’ and women’s sports and bathrooms and roll back longstanding religious liberties. Receiving a perfect score on the CEI can only mean that Disney espouses and funds those divisive positions. Because, as clearly outlined in the CEI criteria, not advancing those efforts prevents companies from receiving a perfect score, as Disney continuously has.”
“Pushing on children the belief that they can be born in the wrong body, and that such beliefs should be affirmed by minors taking puberty blockers or even undergoing experimental surgeries, sometimes behind the backs of their parents, is bad for business, and you can help Disney get out of that business by voting in favor of our proposal,” the statement continued.
By the way, gender-affirming surgeries are not “experimental,” but they are also almost never performed on minors, and other gender-affirming procedures are not administered behind parents’ backs. And transgender people make up a tiny minority of the U.S. population and of participants in girls’ and women’s sports, which are still going strong. Nor are women’s restrooms or religious liberties threatened.
Disney’s board recommended voting against the proposal, saying, “Given the Company’s existing practices to assess participation in transparency efforts and the Board’s oversight of ESG [environmental, social and governance] reporting, workforce equity matters and human rights policies, we do not believe this proposal would provide additional value to shareholders.”
The HRC Foundation — the educational arm of HRC — praised the vote’s outcome. “This vote gives us a clear statement of values from Disney’s shareholders,” said a statement from Eric Bloem, the foundation’s vice president of corporate citizenship. “They know what we know — that despite all the noise, commitments to inclusion pay figurative dividends and help their literal bottom line. And they’re not alone. Shareholders at companies as diverse as Costco, Apple, John Deere, and others in the past months have resoundingly rejected efforts to roll-back DEI. We know that 93 percent of LGBTQ+ workers believe that scoring 100 on the Corporate Equality Index communicates support of the LGBTQ+ community — those are current and future employees and customers. Disney shareholders recognize this.”
The HRC Foundation noted that overwhelming majorities of corporate executives support diversity and inclusion initiatives and believe they enhance financial performance. Such initiatives also help them attract employees, according to surveys.
Disney has long been a target of the far right because of its support for the LGBTQ+ community. As far back as 1997, the Southern Baptist Convention, a conservative Christian denomination, called for a boycott of the company. Right-wingers objected to a brief scene with gay characters in 2017’s live-action version of Beauty and the Beast. In 2019, One Million Moms urged a boycott of the filmToy Story 4 because it depicted two women dropping off and picking up a child at school.
In 2022 and 2023, Disney opposed the so-called parental rights or “don’t say gay” bill in Florida, where it is the largest employer, and received some backlash from conservative activists and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. The company also received some criticism from LGBTQ+ employees and activists, however, who found its opposition too weak or belated. The bill became law but has now been gutted by a court.
