By Alexandra DeSanctis
Monday, April 04, 2022
Disney’s leadership is engaged in a quest to oppose
a Florida law that prohibits teachers from discussing sexual
orientation and gender identity with children in kindergarten through third
grade. The only problem: The law is already in place, and it isn’t going
anywhere. So what’s Disney supposed to do?
Part of the company’s vociferous yet fruitless opposition
stems from the fact that it missed the window for action, not having
lobbied against the bill until just before Ron DeSantis was preparing to
sign it. Progressive Disney employees — surely a tiny minority — are displeased
about this and are taking out their ire not on Disney’s home state but on their
own employer, which failed to bully the state enough to prevent the law from
taking effect.
What’s so interesting about this latest culture-war
skirmish is that Disney’s foray into progressivism conflicts with the company’s
profit motive in a way we haven’t yet seen. It’s the first major example of
corporate virtue-signaling crashing and burning. In nearly every previous
iteration, companies have wielded their influence without incurring any
significant loss either to public image or profit.
Major companies have been wielding financial and cultural
influence against state laws that don’t comport with a left-wing social agenda
for quite some time, and thus far, it has usually worked out in favor of the
company.
In 2015, Apple, PayPal, Yelp, Eli Lilly, the NCAA, and
the NBA opposed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which would’ve protected
the right of business owners to operate in accord with their religious values —
such as, for example, declining to celebrate a same-sex wedding. Governor Mike
Pence was quick to back down in his support for the bill after companies began
to issue their implicit threats.
Then it was a so-called bathroom bill in North Carolina,
which allowed businesses to create sex-specific restrooms or gender-neutral
restrooms rather than permitting biological males into female-only spaces and
vice versa. PayPal canceled plans to open a global operations center in North
Carolina. The NBA pulled its All-Star Game out of the state in response to the
law’s enactment and returned only after the law had been repealed. The NCAA did
the same, issuing a temporary ban on hosting championship events in North
Carolina until the law was gone.
In 2019, the outrage du jour was heartbeat bills, which
protect unborn children from abortion after a fetal heartbeat can be detected.
Dozens of major companies signed a public statement calling pro-life laws “bad
for business.” In response to Georgia’s heartbeat law, major film companies
including Netflix, WarnerMedia, and Disney announced that they’d cease doing
business in the state if the law ever took effect. Thanks to Roe v.
Wade, the law was blocked in court immediately, so these companies never
had to make good on their threats.
Last summer, Major League Baseball moved its All-Star
Game from Atlanta in opposition to a proposed voting-reform bill. Notably, the
MLB moved the game to Colorado, which has voting laws at least as
stringent as those proposed in Georgia. Empty virtue-signaling at its
finest. Then, last fall, dozens of major companies took out a full-page New
York Times ad attacking Texas for its Heartbeat Act. Ride-share
companies Lyft and Uber pledged to pay the legal fees of any drivers prosecuted
under the law, and Lyft pledged $1 million to Planned Parenthood.
These examples underscore two major themes: First, when
companies threatened to pull out of a state, it often had the intended effect
of stymying a policy that woke corporations disliked. Second, in states where
companies would face a major loss if they left, they never threatened to do so,
or they didn’t follow through on their threat. No major company, for instance,
threatened to remove its headquarters from Texas in response to the heartbeat
bill; in fact, the largest corporations based in the state said nary a word
about it.
And then there’s Disney, which has spent the better part
of the last two weeks engaged in a futile campaign to bully Ron DeSantis into
opposing an eminently reasonable ban on teaching young children sexual content
in the classroom. When DeSantis proved immune to social pressure, the tactic
changed: Now, Disney executives are promising to inject sexualized content into
their programming, depicting “transgender and gender-nonconforming” characters,
as well as “queer leads.” The company apparently intends to erase references to
“ladies and gentlemen” and “boys and girls” at Disney parks and resorts.
All this in response to a bill whose text is popular among
American parents. For all its virtue-signaling, no one at Disney has mustered a
coherent explanation of what exactly is so “harmful” and “immoral” about the
bill, nor what is so essential about introducing children under the age of
eight to controversial sexual topics. The best they’ve managed is to contend
that the bill “erases” gender-nonconforming children, a ludicrous assertion
palatable only to those already onboard the radical gender-ideology bandwagon.
If Disney were serious about opposing the law, it would
have to leave Florida entirely, an unbelievably costly option. But the
company’s executives have opened their mouths, and they can’t close them without
making themselves out to be a bunch of liars. So now they must pacify angry
employees by stuffing sexualized content into children’s programming, surely
not a popular move even among parents who might generally sympathize with the
left on some matters of sex and gender.
Unlike past virtue-signaling corporations, which have
managed to exert social control without harming themselves, Disney has backed
itself into a “solution” that requires it to operate contrary to its own
business model, which is to create entertainment that everyone can
enjoy — and enjoy without fearing that their kids are being ideologically
indoctrinated. It’s safe to say that virtually no one in America wants their
young children watching sexualized movies, let alone ones that introduce their
children to controversial topics such as gender identity, same-sex
relationships, and queerness.
Disney, in other words, is running up against the fact —
yes, the fact — that people who think Florida is “erasing
trans lives” are a powerful, loud, infinitesimal group of
Americans — and Disney exists to please everyone, not to cater to minuscule
cliques.
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