The HRC is the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ civils rights campaign with over three million members and supports across the nation. Their mission is to influence culture to accept the LGBTQ+ community in all aspects of life by transforming institutions and systems to have pro-LGBTQ+ policies, practices, and legislature. Their annual CEI shows the current state of LGBTQ+ inclusion in the U.S. workplace through employee experience and company policies, practices, and benefits.
In 2025, 377 Fortune 500 companies bowed to pressure from the HRC and gave special benefits to gay and trans employees. They provided things like gender mutilation surgeries for their workers and dozens of other gay-friendly metrics that HRC included in its annual CEI.
This year, LGBTQ Nation reports that Walmart, Target, Amazon, Verizon, and 242 other Fortune 500 companies refused to participate. That is a 65% drop in participation when compared to the previous year.
Walker Wildmon, vice president of American Family Association (AFA), said that he is seeing a momentum sway from that kind of virtue signaling.
“The cultural trend that we're on currently is rather resistant to the woke indoctrination, if you will, or the woke agenda,” says Wildmon.
He says that gay activist groups keep raising the bar for their supporters, never knowing when to quit making demands.
“It's one thing after another, and it's never enough. I mean, we went from homosexual marriage to transgenderism. There's just always some type of virtue signaling that the Left in our country want out of corporate America,” states Wildmon.
Instead, he says that corporate America just wants to provide goods and services and make money rather than dive into political causes. They realize, to paraphrase Michael Jordan, that conservatives want to buy their goods too.
“Corporate America is moving in the other direction, becoming neutral again on a lot of these hot-button issues, and they really just want to focus on their core business model and serve their customers to the best of their ability,” says Wildmon.
American Family News (AFN) is a division of American Family Association (AFA).
