Anheuser-Busch has been removed from a list that had placed it among the alphabet mafia’s best places to work as liberals turn on the company for supposedly not taking a strong enough pro-LGBT stance.
The flak from the left comes as many on the right are boycotting Bud Light for its decision to buddy up with transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
That partnership has wreaked havoc on sales of the beer and made the brand a punchline among its former customer base.
The company has taken a series of condescending half-measures to bring back conservative and formerly loyal Bud drinkers.
Nothing thus far has helped it end a nationwide boycott of the company’s vast catalog of beers.
To make matters worse for the embattled brewer formerly celebrated for its hilarious ads, we have a bit of bad news from USA Today.
In a story Thursday headlined “Bud Light maker stripped of LGBTQ+ rating for caving to Dylan Mulvaney backlash,” the outlet reported a prominent LGBT lobbying group told Anheuser-Busch in a letter last week the drag king of beers is in timeout.
“The Human Rights Campaign informed the Bud Light maker that it has suspended its Corporate Equality Index score – a tool that scores companies on their policies for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer employees,” USA Today reported.
The index evaluates the lengths companies are willing to go to placate the rainbow community, but it is more or less an extortion racket.
The report said the LGBT community wasn’t happy about a statement from Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth as he tried to make the Mulvaney controversy go away.
“We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people,” Whitworth said in an April 14 news release. “We are in the business of bringing people together over beer.”
USA Today reported the company was told it has 90 days to respond or the Human Rights Campaign will consider docking its score, which is a perfect 100.
Anheuser-Busch worked awfully hard to achieve that score and wanted to keep it. That was evident when it put the smiling face of Mulvaney on a can of Bud Light to celebrate his “day 365 of womanhood.”
According to USA Today, Anheuser-Busch did not respond directly to the May 9 letter about its index score but did defend itself as an “ally” to its “LGBTQIA+ employees.
The company cited internal “employee resource groups” and said, “Our ERGs are intended to be a safe space for those who identify with a given community and those who wish to be allies.”
There is a lot going on here, but one thing is crystal clear: This saga is laugh-out-loud funny.
Anheuser-Busch says it’s still all-in on the “LGBTQIA+” racket, presumably in order to keep its perfect score with the group known for the ever-increasing number of letters in its name.
First of all, the fact that company executives are fully versed in the nomenclature of the glitter mob tells us who these people are and what they value.
I refuse to look up what “QIA+” means, simply because the first four letters the rainbow mafia uses to promote its agenda are already contradictory.
The L and the G make sense. These letters cover people who identify as lesbian or gay.
But how does the B (bisexual) fit in with the T (transgender) if there are more than two genders?
Also, the customer revolt against Anheuser-Busch has been a long time coming if the company bent the knee to corporate extortion to the length it earned a score of 100 on this silly index.
The “woke” company is now in an unenviable position with two options.
Anheuser-Busch can choose to genuinely apologize to its former customers, fire a ton of people and perhaps earn back some sales and some of its reputation.
The other option is to choose the side of a group that scores companies based on how well they cater to men in dresses — and forsake conservatives forever.
The company almost certainly will go with option B – not to be confused with the other B.
It is important to note that none of this needed to happen. Lots of people enjoy beer, including gay people who either liked Bud Light or didn’t before this historic business blunder.
Bud Light never had to sacrifice its existing customers in order to court potential beer drinkers among the tiny T and QIA+ groups.
The company never had to involve itself in any of this. Bud Light was America’s best-selling beer, and executives were living on Easy Street.
Now the brand is in a position where not only did it anger millions of people who were buying it, but the group it courted has removed it from the extortion list — essentially blackballing it for now among people likely to bring kids to a drag show.
Bud Light has no allies in a culture war it never needed to enter, and now its competitors are thriving.
I only have three letters of my own: L, O and L.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
