Thanks, WingNutDaily!!

Normally, I'd be ranting and raving about something those lovable little nutcases over at WorldNetDaily had written. Today, however, I'm turning their article listing companies who are 'gay-friendly' into something positive...or trying to, at least.

The 2006 report from the Human Rights Campaign, which
advocates for homosexual issues, was released yesterday and notes that "an
unprecedented" 138 major U.S. corporations earned the top rating of 100 percent,
up from 101 last year.

Wow! So, based on the HRC's 2006 Corporate Equality Index, 138 major corporations received perfect scores for their policies concerning GLBT employees. I realize that the folks over at WND had very different intentions, but their publicizing this list of companies is actually a very helpful thing for the GLBT community. Rather than demonizing these companies, WND has given us a wonderful list showing us exactly who we need to give our business and support. I'll come back to that point later.

When I first read this article, I wondered how significant the HRC's findings were. More specifically, I wanted to examine what portion of corporate America was represented in this index. Looking soley at the Fortune 500 listings (and recognizing that this isn't the only index available), some interesting statistics involving the companies listed appear. First, this 'unprecedented' number of gay-friendly companies would comprise a whopping 13.8% of the entire Fortune 500 index. Interestingly enough, 46 of these companies aren't on the Fortune 500 list, so the actual figure is 9.2%. Keep an eye out, folks...the sky should start falling at any moment!

Before you get discouraged, here's the second thing I noticed. Five of the companies on HRC's list are in the top 10, and a total of 40 are in the top 100. Those two stats are encouraging, as they show that more and more truly 'major' corporations are creating workplace policies that are beneficial to GLBT employees.

Here's where we can try and use this list to our benefit...

I tried to take note of which companies' products I had in the house, and had the idea of listing as many as I could, giving them links and challenging others to do the same. If WND and their various readers plan to launch a boycott, we should counter it with our own advertising campaign. Here's my example:

Sitting here in my Levi's jeans, Nike tennis shoes and freshly
spritzted with my Estee
Lauder perfume, I've pondered whether I need to reorder my prescriptions
(one manufactured by Eli Lilly) from Walgreens. As I'm writing
this (on my Dell computer which has an Intel processor), I'm sipping a Diet Coke and munching on some dry Honey-Nut
Cheerios. I was recently speaking with Wells Fargo (the bank that holds
my mortgage, lol) using my home phone service provided by AT&T, while I
perused HRC's report (which is an Adobe Acrobat file).

Well, you get the idea. It's amazing how many of these companies are regular fixtures in our daily lives, and knowing that they are also advocating equal workplace benefits makes them all the more appealing. So, thumb your noses at all those wingnuts and show them that their hateful rhetoric won't be a discouragement.