Commentary
One of the funniest and most original Monty Python skits finds a man paying a receptionist to have an argument with one of her fellow office workers, who does this for a living. But he enters the wrong door. “This is abuse,” he is told by another employee whose job it is to insult paying clients.
One couldn’t be blamed for wondering if abusing your own customers is no longer in the realm of chic absurdist BBC comedy but forms part of the business plan of the Minneapolis-based Target retail corporation. It was in 1996—not exactly the Middle Ages—when a Democratic president of the United States named Bill Clinton signed the quite popular Defense of Marriage Act. The law prevented states from being forced “to give effect to any public act, record, or judicial proceeding of any other state, territory, possession, or tribe respecting a relationship between persons of the same sex that is treated as a marriage” under other states’ laws. And it declared that “the word ‘marriage’ means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word ‘spouse’ refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.”
This is how matrimony has been viewed for the thousands of years of civilization, not only in the West but spanning the continents of the globe. If it’s your view, however, you won’t feel very comfortable at Target. In fact, browsing at Target you won’t have to look very far to find every color of the spectrum shouting “pride” at you with the none-too-subtle message that you’re a bigot and a fossil from another age that ought to be discarded to the ash heap.
Target’s website contains 50 pages of material promoting the opposite viewpoint, including an apparently pornographic novel described as “a hot boss/CEO/assistant gay romance set in England (UK) with a side of humour, steamy sex, and a cute kid thrown in.”
What ever happened to companies refraining from involving themselves in divisive political or cultural issues, in fear of their offended clientele taking their business elsewhere? In fact, that wasn’t as much the case as we might believe. There are many insignificant instances, like Coca Cola making the most expensive TV commercial to date in 1971, spending $250,000 assembling hundreds of hippies from around the world to an Italian hilltop to sing “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” in hopes it would end the Vietnam War and war in general. In 2018, Communist China mimicked the ad for the fifth anniversary of the launch of the “Belt and Road Initiative,” with which Beijing projects its economic influence into the Third World; the hilltop song was altered to “I’d like to build the world a road.”
And then there is Henry Ford II, in 1947, using the massive Ford fortune to establish the Ford Foundation, the largest foundation in the world, which among many other things “began supporting the Ms. Foundation in 1979 in order to advance women’s rights in reproductive health” and as far back as 1952 was “paving the way for the establishment of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS),” one of the most potent progressive influences on children and adults alike.
In Target’s case, it is prominently displaying same-sex celebratory wares ranging from clothing to pet products to rainbow baking utensils to even a kiddie swimsuit designed to be “Thoughtfully fit on multiple body types and gender expressions.” But it has withdrawn or downplayed some offerings in the wake of “threats impacting our team members’ sense of safety and well-being while at work,” whatever exactly that means.
If physical “threats” mean things like online videos of rainbow cardboard displays being trampled, they can hardly be taken seriously as any danger of physical violence against Target employees. Does political expression under the First Amendment now exclude visual expressions of outrage?
One element of what is going on here is glaringly obvious. Big businesses want to be the Scrooge of Christmas morning, not Scrooge as “the man he was” before the ghosts visited. If I’m a progressive, they extrapolate, maybe you won’t think I’m really out for as much of your money as I can convince you to part with. It’s so much easier for businesses to play that game than make the moral case for capitalism and welcome the challenges of their competitors in the marketplace.
What a disgraceful betrayal of the principles underlying the free market—the instrument of their success—especially since nearly all of the progressives they’re tripping over each other to ally themselves with are enemies of the free market, who will gladly tax and regulate any and all of the businesses who do their bidding into bankruptcy when the time suits them.
The motivations of such firms have been described with great insight by a number of observers. Ian Chipman, for example, writing on the Stanford Gradual School of Business website a few years ago, noted that “companies might not have a choice. Activists know that applying pressure to take a stand one way or another on an issue is a great way to attract attention. So even if companies are uncomfortable with politics, they’re targets and they’re going to get pushed into some tight spots.” He added: “On the margins, national retailers seem to have decided that the progressive pressures are the safer option. This reflects generally in the population that the progressives have won the cultural war.”
In 2020, Edelman, the veteran business-branding public relations firm, found that 74 percent of the public “believe CEOs should take the lead on change rather than wait for the government to impose it.” Paired with big business’s embrace of wokeness is the dangerous “stakeholderism” movement, brought to great attention by the Business Roundtable’s 2019 announcement, endorsed by 181 CEOs, that companies should be run not being accountable to the shareholders who own them but “for the benefit of all stakeholders—customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and shareholders.” Late that same year, the World Economic Forum issued a manifesto demanding the end of “shareholder capitalism” to be replaced by“stakeholder capitalism.”
Samuel Gregg of the American Institute for Economic Research warns that this will “allow executives of publicly traded companies to insulate themselves from accountability to investors and shareholders,” “marginalize attention to profit-making in many business leaders’ decision-making, thoroughly muddle lines of accountability within companies, and undermine a basic foundation of competitive market economies by prioritizing virtue-signaling over the workings of price signals.” Gregg suggests that this “is precisely what that large segment of the political left that has never reconciled itself to free markets actually wants.”
To those who embrace traditional family values, symbols and slogans that extol same-sex relationships, as well as the mutilation of children in defiance of their parents, plus opposition to the integrity of the institution of marriage, are an affront and an intimidation. Consider the double standard: the firms who do all they can to promote this agenda do not take an “if you don’t like it, shop elsewhere” attitude when it comes to the Confederate Battle Flag, despite the fact that most Americans who wear or fly that symbol clearly do not do so out of racist sentiment. No one should be promoting or selling the swastika, and yet most of its use before the Nazis appropriated it was as a symbol wishing prosperity by a multitude of cultures around the world. And even today among Hindus and Buddhists in much of Asia, and for Navajos in America, the symbol is revered.
Target can’t blame conservative activists like Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA for organizing “decent, ordinary Americans who do not believe in radical ideas in either direction to just say ‘I will not allow my kid to be corrupted by this trans agenda’” and set out to bankrupt the retailer. Especially since that agenda is now wielding Solomon’s sword upon the genitals of their own children, in defiance of their wishes.
If businesses are not convinced that they will lose lots of money for their woke-based selectivity and double standards, they will never stop abusing the eyes of their customers. Customers who do not subscribe to turning morality upside down, that is.
