Penna Dexter

It’s been three years since Budweiser featured transgender personality Dylan Mulvaney’s face on cans of Bud Light. This was a horrible business decision from which Budweiser is still working to recover. Plus — it began a three-year death spiral for the corporate influence strategy employed by the Human Rights Campaign.

Family Research Council applauds this collapse in its daily news outlet, The Washington Stand. Editor Suzanne Bowdey writes,

America’s largest and loudest LGBT activist group, once feared by corporate boardrooms and executives alike, now finds itself in the uncomfortable and unusual position of intimidating no one.

HRC once claimed tremendous success convincing large companies to sign on to its Corporate Equality Index, which ranks how well companies perform on all kinds of woke concessions. Firms score points for doing things like paying for gender transition procedures for employees and their family members, publicly supporting pro-LGBTQ legislation, training staff in trans ideology, opening restrooms to both sexes, adopting pronoun policies and recruiting based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Achieving a 100% score on the Corporate Equality Index was held out as the gold standard for companies. Hundreds of Fortune 500 firms signed on. A low score or refusal to participate would bring on public criticism by the HRC.

In her piece, Suzanne Bowdey says that, now, a 100% score “is more damaging than desirable.” The 2026 index shows a 65% loss of Fortune 500 participants, “dropping from 377 companies in 2025 to just 131.”

The first company to resign the index was Tractor Supply, followed almost immediately by John Deere and Harley Davidson. Then Lowe’s, then Ford. It’s hard not to wonder why firms with such a salt-of-the earth masculine vibe would have ever signed up.

As Will Held, executive director of Consumers’ Research, told The Washington Stand, “corporations’ job isn’t to tell Americans how to live or what to believe, but to simply serve their needs.”

Amen.