It is the Oliver Hardy “Now look what you made me do!” defense.
(Now I’m really, really, curious what exactly is in these mandatory DEI pledges that’s so horrible.)
He probably blames himself for shoving his pride flag down everyone’s throat.
Of course I blame the people that did it. My point is that when you push people hard, you get a backlash. The people doing the backlashing may be wrong for doing it, but it’s a natural effect.
As a practical matter, trying to build ‘inclusivity’ by mocking and declaring half the country to be evil or stupid rarely works. But when left-wing activists hijack social justice causes, that’s exactly what they do. They don’t want the problem actually solved, because grievance and DEI are now multi-billion dollar industries that bring a lot of power to the left.
In 2018 the United Ccnservative Party wanted to take part in the Pride parade. They were refused by the organizers. The police wanted to take part. They were refused.
You’d have thought that conservatives participating in Pride would be a big win! Especially if what you care about is support for gay people across society.
The people in charge of that parade do not want conservatives participating, because it hurts the political narrative that conservatives are anti-gay. They want the divisiveness to continue at the expense of gay and trans people, because that’s how they maintain power.
The Log Cabin Republicans (a gay Republican group) has also had trouble trying to participate in Pride. Gay and Trans rights have been co-opted into the greater progressive project, and people from the right are not welcome. This is counterproducrive behaviour unless your goal is really to expand political power and not actually to solve any problems for gay or trans people.
The people I feel sorry for are the ordinary gay and trans people just trying to live their lives and don’t want to be political but who will get caught in the backlash anyway.
Why were you pushing those people by having a pride flag in your window for years?
Your own link runs counter to your assertion. But if Teh Gay was a private club, only available to the lefties, the right should then be celebrating Bud Light for allowing them in, they are not and thus also runs counter to your assertion.
It says right in your link why they were refused. They had no record whatsoever of supporting the cause, and there was damn good reason to believe that all they wanted to do was fuck with the event.
Is this the best you could come up with?
The article does not provide the examples but,
“It’s very concerning that the UCP would even apply to march in a Pride parade given the comments from Jason Kenney {a UCP leadership hopeful at the time} about gay-straight alliances, outing LGBT youth in schools without their consent and even, most recently, the policy resolutions that have been presented for this weekend’s inaugural policy convention, many of which are extremely homophobic and transphobic.”
There is no shortage of pictures of Log Cabin Republicans marching in Pride parades on the interwebs.
The two links you cited that applied to the United States had to do with the field of academia, and that’s not my field, so I can’t really offer an opinion on what’s going on there. I do work in HR for a private company, and while I can confirm that DEI has been on everyone’s radar for the last 4-5 years, I’ve never heard anyone advocating having employees sign DEI commitment paperwork of any kind. Is this a hot new trend in the US outside of academia? Or are some people jumping at shadows for fear of being engulfed in a tsunami of wokeness?
And I’d ask again, what exactly is in these mandatory DEI pledges that’s so horrible?
Here’s University of Oregon’s statement. No mandatory signing AFAICT:
DEI LEADERSHIP TEAM PURPOSE
Our purpose is to facilitate liberation for individuals, organizations and communities from systems, policies and mindsets that limit and obscure. We seek to catalyze innovation, balance and a commitment to equity through scholarship, teaching, creative activity and engagement. In service to the academic mission and justice, we acknowledge and seek to repair institutional and systemic wrongs.
I agree with this, I think gays have been accepted for a long time for the most part, even trans to a slightly lesser extent. But the rainbow is associated with the woke movement which the right is absolutely against.
I’m actually going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that yes, they do want the problem solved. I cannot imagine dedicating your career to diversity and inclusion and secretly hoping you are not sucessful in making the world a better place because your career is so damn lucrative.
That sounds like a former friend that wouldn’t go to a doctor because “They don’t want to cure you because then they would lose you as a customer.” 
I’m wondering the same thing.
My employer has jumped into the DEI bandwagon, but i haven’t been asked to sign anything except statements that i haven’t accepted or offered bribes, and that i will be careful to protect my employer’s intellectual property.
That is, they make me sign all sorts of stuff. But nothing about DEI.
Not all of them. Younger people are far more accepting of diversity than older generations, and this is true regardless of political party. But it is also true there is some backlash and diversity fatigue. Programs to address diversity issues in business and academic environments are not always successful for many reasons.
I think it’s better to think of DEI efforts as a ongoing process. You might solve one problem or another at a company, but if they’re serious about DEI it’s something they’re going to have to stay on top of. But, yeah, if professionals who make their living off DEI could wave a magic wand and solve all our issues I’m sure they would.
Let me tell you about some of the nefarious woke DEI initiatives we have going on at my company. Many of our employees were concerned about the opacity of our promotion process, so we made it more transparent. Some of our employees were a bit concerned about racism and favoritism, so we made it so hiring managers don’t know the identity of internal candidates until interviews are scheduled. These changes haven’t been implemented long enough to know if it’s doing anything to help with employee engagement, but we’ll see in a year or two.
Most workplace DEI efforts are fairly innocuous. Nobody’s coming in telling us we’re all racist, sexist, and should feel bad about ourselves.
From a legal perspective, some DEI stuff I’ve seen is presented to employees to explain the employer’s duty to comply with non-discrimination laws, and by extension, the duty on employees not to discriminate, either within the workplace or in providing services to the public.
It’s just like other workplace training. Employees might have to sign a form at the end of the training, just like they might have to sign a form after cyber-security training, or workplace safety training. It’s not indoctrination or re-education camp. It’s the employer protecting itself from legal liability.
