Gregory T. Angelo, a former ‘Log Cabin Republican’ president, says he regrets being at least partly responsible for turning corporations woke. Angelo, for the Wall Street Journal, now insists,”[t]he politicization everything is too high a price for the gay-rights advances of the 2010s.”
“What business did airlines and hotel chains have in weighing in on gay rights legislation? None. In fact, doing so could even be bad business… [but a]voiding the public flogging the company would take if it failed to support the bill was worth the cost of losing an edge in hiring. Months later, ENDA passed the Senate with the votes of 14 Republicans,” Angelo wrote.
The Log Cabin Republicans are are a pro-LGBT+ lobby group inside the Republican Party tent, from where Angelo claims to have helped win support for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (2013), which made it illegal to discriminate against a job applicant for their race, sex, sexual orientation, color or religion. Angelo says he joined forces “with a lobbyist for one of America’s largest hotel chains,” to pressurize the Republican Party on the matter.
Now, Angelo says he’s turned a corner:
The trend I helped begin, I now realize, was a disaster. In the past three years, major U.S. corporations have weighed in on everything from abortion and Black Lives Matter to election laws—even as the American public overwhelmingly wishes they wouldn’t. A 2021 report by the Brunswick Group found that 63% of corporate executives felt “unequivocally” that companies should speak out on social issues, while only 36% of Americans agree. A recent Journal poll found that 63% of respondents wished that companies wouldn’t take public stands on political and social issues.
– Gregory T. Angelo, Wall St. Journal, 4/12/23
Angelo has since become President of the New Tolerance Campaign, which rallies Americans to combat woke mob bullying and challenge establishment enablers of “Cancel Culture.” He says of the transformation:
“My own efforts are no longer spent in boardrooms with executives and lobbyists. Instead, I have been rallying grass-roots activists so we can take on corporations’ double standards and push them back to neutrality.
“We’re putting companies such as Walmart and American Express on defense for subjecting employees to propaganda and discrimination. We’re supporting student organizations that would otherwise be deplatformed at schools such as Emory University, and we’re playing a role in Facebook’s rule-making process.
“Holding corrupt institutions accountable is penance for my part in getting America into this mess. These days, I’m committed to getting us out of it.”
