Surprisingly absent from the list.
Posted on 09/13/2008 1:32:06 PM PDT by hardhead
Below is the list, in alphabetical order, of companies scoring a perfect 100 percent on the Human Rights Campaign's 2009 Corporate Equality Index, with policies beneficial toward homosexuals:
3M Co.
AAA Northern California, Nevada and Uta
Abercrombie & Fitch
Accenture Ltd.
Aetna
Agilent Technologies
Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld
Alaska Airlines
Alcatel-Lucent
Allianz Life Insurance Co. of North America
Allstate Corp.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
not surprised to see my company there..wish they would put half the money and effort into customer service that they waste on brain washing their employees.
How about a “Human Rights Campaign” to force fairness in hiring for conservatives at Universities and in the media?
Surprisingly absent from the list.
My employer is on that list. BARF!
I looked at the list this morning and there are 10 that I use/go to on a regular basis and that doesn’t include what I’m invested in.
I wish I could boycott all these businesses but at this point I can’t.
I’ve come to look at companies like these as being in league with Satan.
The punning on this thread is magnificent!
Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. Does the defense department have some rule about contractors?
“Gay marriage would mean forcing businesses to provide benefits to same-sex couples on the same basis as opposite-sex couples. While this may or may not be true (based primarily on state labor laws), the reality is that many businesses already do offer these benefits to gay couples, and for sound business reasons. And experience has shown that when they do, the effect on their costs for offering these benefits is minimal - very rarely does the cost of benefits offered to gay couples cause the business’ benefits costs to rise by more than 1.5%. This trivial cost is usually far more than offset by the fact that the company is seen as being progressive for having offered these benefits - making its stock much more attractive to socially progressive mutual funds and rights-conscious pension funds and individual investors, and thus increasing upwards pressure on its price. This is why so many corporations, including most of the Fortune 500, already offer these benefits without being required to do so - it’s just good business sense.”
http://www.bidstrup.com/marriage.htm
Unilever, Fannie Mae, Yahoo!
Why would these companies want to cater to 2-3% of the population?
3M Co.
AAA Northern California, Nevada and Uta
Abercrombie & Fitch
Accenture Ltd.
Aetna
Agilent Technologies
Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld
Alaska Airlines
Alcatel-Lucent
Allianz Life Insurance Co. of North America
Allstate Corp.
Alston & Bird
American Express
Ameriprise Financial
American Airlines
Anheuser-Busch Companies
Aon Corp.
Apple
Arent Fox LLP
Arnold & Porter
AT&T
Bain & Co.
Baker & Daniels LLP
Bank of America
Bank of New York Mellon Corp.
Barnes & Noble
BASF
Bausch & Lomb
Best Buy
Bingham McCutchen
BMC Software
Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals
Boeing
Borders
Boston Consulting Group
BP America
Bright Horizons Family Solutions
Brinker International
Bristol-Myers Squibb Co
Brown Rudnick
Bryan Cave
Campbell Soup Co.
Capital One
Cardinal Health
Cargill
Carlson Companies
Carmax
Charles Schwab
Chevron
ChoicePoint
Chrysler
Chubb
Cisco Systems
Citigroup
Clear Channel Communications
Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton
Clifford Chance US LLP
Clorox
CNA Insurance
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola Enterprises Inc.
Constellation Energy Group Inc.
Continental Airlines
Coors
Corning
Covington & Burling LLP
Cox Enterprises
Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP
Credit Suisse
Cummins
Debevoise & Plimpton LLP
Dell
Deloitte & Touche
Deutsche Bank
Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP
Diageo North America
Dickstein Shapiro
DLA Piper
Dorsey & Whitney
Dow Chemical
DuPont
Eastman Kodak
eBay Inc.
Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge LLP
Electronic Arts
Eli Lilly & Co.
Ernst & Young
Estee Lauder
Esurance
Faegre & Benson
Fannie Mae
Foley & Lardner
Foley Hoag
Ford
Freescale Semiconductor
Fried, Frank, Haris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP
GameStop
Gap
Genentech
General Motors
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP
GlaxoSmithKline
Hyatt
Goldman Sachs
Harrah’s
Hartford Financial Services
Harvard Pilgrim Health Care
Haynes and Boone LLP
Heller Ehrman
Herman Miller
Hewitt Associates
Hewlett-Packard
Hoffman-La Roche Inc.
Holland & Knight
Honeywell International
Hospira
Howrey LLP
HSBC USA
Husch Blackwell Sanders LLP
IndyMac Bancorp
ING North America Insurance
Intel
IBM
Intuit
J.C. Penney
J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.
Jenner & Block
Johnson & Johnson
Kaiser Permanente
KeyCorp
Kimberly Clark Corp.
Kimpton Hotel & Restaurant Group
Kirkland & Ellis
KPMG
Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel
Latham & Watkins
Lehman Brothers
Levi Strauss
Lexmark International
Littler Mendelson PC
Liz Claiborne
Lockheed Martin Corp.
Macy
Manatt, Phelps & Phillips LLP
Marriott International
Marsh & McLennan Cos.
Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
MasterCard
McDermott Will & Emery
McKinsey & Co.
Merck & Co.
Merrill Lynch & Co.
MetLife
Microsoft
Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky & Popeo
Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams
Morgan Stanley
Morrison & Foerster
Motorola
National Grid USA
Nationwide
NCR
New York Life Insurance Co.
New York Times
Newell Rubbermaid
Nielsen Co.
Nike
Nixon Peabody
Nordstrom
Northern Trust
Northrop Grumman
Novartis Pharmaceutical Corp.
O’Melveny & Myers
Oracle
Orbitz
Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe
Owens Corning
Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP
Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP
Pepsi Bottling Group Inc.
PepsiCo
Perkins Coie
Pfizer
PG&E
Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman
Powell Goldstein
PricewaterhouseCoopers
Progressive Corp.
Proskauer Rose LLP
Prudential Financial
Raymond James Financial
Raytheon
Recreational Equipment Inc.
Replacements Ltd.
Reynolds American Inc.
Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi LLP
Ropes & Gray LLP
Sabre Holdings
Schering-Plough
Sears
Sedgwick, Detert, Moran & Arnold LLP
Sempra Energy
Seyfarth Shaw LLP
Shell Oil
Sidley Austin
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP
Sodexho
Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal
Southern California Edison
Sprint Nextel
Squire, Sanders & Dempsey LLP
Starbucks
Starcom MediaVest
Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide
State Street Corp.
Subaru of America
Sullivan & Cromwell LLP
Sun Life Financial Inc.
Sun Microsystems
SunTrust Banks
Supervalu
Symantec Corp.
Target
Tech Data
Texas Instruments
Thompson Coburn
Time Warner
TJX Cos.
Toyota Financial Services
Toyota Motor Sales USA
Travelport
Troutman Sanders
U.S. Bancorp
UBS AG
Unilever
United Business Media
United Parcel Service
US Airways Group
Viacom
Vinson & Elkins
Visa
Visteon Corp.
Volkswagen of America
Wachovia Corp.
Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz
Walgreens
Walt Disney
Washington Mutual
Weil, Gotshal and Manges
Wells Fargo & Co.
Whirlpool
White & Case
Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr
Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
Winston & Strawn
Wyndham Worldwide
Xerox
Yahoo!
...another reason for my tagline. Our more influential constituents can have my pro-family vote or their bossy, old hag vote (where homosexual activists get their political power in both parties) but not both. If you want a nation of men, stop pandering to feminism and other anti-family causes.
Homosexuality and promiscuity.
Neither please our Lord.
In Tangle of Young Lips, a Sex Rebellion in Chile
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
Published: September 12, 2008
SANTIAGO, Chile — It is just after 5 p.m. in what was once one of Latin America’s most sexually conservative countries, and the youth of Chile are bumping and grinding to a reggaetón beat. At the Bar Urbano disco, boys and girls ages 14 to 18 are stripping off their shirts, revealing bras, tattoos and nipple rings.
The place is a tangle of lips and tongues and hands, all groping and exploring. About 800 teenagers sway and bounce to lyrics imploring them to “Poncea! Poncea!”: make out with as many people as they can.
And make out they do — with stranger after stranger, vying for the honor of being known as the “ponceo,” the one who pairs up the most.
Chile, long considered to have among the most traditional social mores in South America, is crashing headlong into that reputation with its precocious teenagers. Chile’s youths are living in a period of sexual exploration that, academics and government officials say, is like nothing the country has witnessed before.
“Chile’s youth are clearly having sex earlier and testing the borderlines with their sexual conduct,” said Dr. Ramiro Molina, director of the University of Chile’s Center for Adolescent Reproductive Medicine and Development.
The sexual awakening is happening through a booming industry for 18-and-under parties, an explosion of Internet connectivity and through Web sites like Fotolog, where young people trade suggestive photos of each other and organize weekend parties, some of which have drawn more than 4,500 teenagers. The online networks have emboldened teenagers to express themselves in ways that were never customary in Chile’s conservative society.
“We are not the children of the dictatorship; we are the children of democracy,” said Michele Bravo, 17, at a recent afternoon party. “There is much more of a rebellious spirit among young people today. There is much more freedom to explore everything.”
The parents and grandparents of today’s teenagers fought hard to give them such freedoms and to escape the book-burning times of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. But in a country that legalized divorce only in 2004 and still has a strict ban on abortion, the feverish sexual exploration of the younger generation is posing new challenges for parents and educators. Sex education in public schools is badly lagging, and the pregnancy rate among girls under 15 has been on the rise, according to the Health Ministry.
Indeed, adolescent sexuality has changed throughout Latin America, Dr. Ramiro said, and underlying much of the newfound freedom is an issue that societies the world over are grappling with: the explosion of explicit content and social networks on the Internet.
Chilean society was shaken last year when a video of a 14-year-old girl eagerly performing oral sex on a teenage boy on a Santiago park bench was discovered on a video-hosting Web site. The episode became a national scandal, stirring finger-pointing at the girl’s school, at the Internet provider — at everyone, it seemed, but the boys who captured the event on a cellphone and distributed the video.
Chile’s stable, market-based economy has helped to drive the changes, spurring a boom in consumer spending and credit unprecedented in the country’s history. Chile has become Latin American’s biggest per-capita consumer of digital technology, including cellphones, cable television and Internet broadband accounts, according to a study by the Santiago consulting firm Everis and the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Navarra in Spain.
Chileans are plugged into the Internet at higher rates than other South Americans, and the highest use is among children ages 6 to 17. Therein lies a central factor in the country’s newfound sexual exploration, said Miguel Arias, a psychologist and head of the Santiago consulting firm Divergente.
Fotolog, a photo-sharing network created in the United States, took off in the last two years in this country. Today Chile, which has a population of 16 million, has 4.8 million Fotolog accounts, more than any other country, the company says. Again, children ages 12 to 17 hold more than 60 percent of the accounts.
Party promoters use Fotolog, as well as MSN Messenger, to organize their weekend gatherings, inviting Fotolog stars — the site’s most popular users, based on the number of comments they get — to help publicize the parties and attend as paid V.I.P.’s. Many of the partygoers use their online nicknames exclusively, and some of the wildest events are dominated by teenagers who call themselves the “Pokemones,” with their multiple piercings, angular and pressed hair, and devil-may-care attitude.
Dr. Arias did a study of the Fotolog phenomenon, scrutinizing the kinds of photos teenagers are posting, even the angles and distances of the pictures — all of which are part of an “identifiable” language, he said. “The kids of today are expressing their sexuality in erotic ways for the whole world to see.”
That online world also carries over to Santiago’s parks, plazas and the afternoon parties, where teenagers go to discover the physical side of their digital flirtations. At the Bar Urbano disco on a Friday afternoon, a 17-year-old boy, Claudio, danced with Francisca Durán, also 17, whom he had just met, and soon the two were kissing and rubbing their bodies together. They posed eagerly for photos, sucking each other’s fingers as Claudio put his hands under the girl’s T-shirt. Within minutes they separated and he began playing with the hair of another girl. Soon, they, too, were kissing passionately. Claudio, who declined to give his last name, made out with at least two other girls that night.
“Before, someone would meet and fall in love and start dating seriously here; at a party today, you meet like three people and make out with all three,” said Mario Muñoz, 20, co-owner of Imperio Productions, which organizes some of the larger 18-and-under parties.
“There are very few kids having serious relationships,” he said, an observation shared by some doctors trying to reduce teenage pregnancy here.
On a recent Saturday, about 1,500 teenagers piled into the cavernous Cadillac Club, another downtown disco, for Imperio Productions’ weekly event. The partygoers, many no more than five feet tall, lined up at the bar to buy orange Fanta and Sprite, wearing oversize sunglasses.
Not too long ago, Mr. Muñoz and his brother Daniel were teenagers attending such parties themselves. Now they defend their parties as good, clean fun. Alcohol is not allowed, and cigarettes are not sold, though smoking was widespread among the teenagers at the Cadillac Club. Security guards monitor bathrooms and regularly throw out boys whose groping crosses the line — if the girls complain.
The Muñoz brothers said that party promoters feel pressure to be “hotter” than their competitors.
That includes scantily clad, older male and female dancers; strip shows that hold back just enough to remain legal; and party names intended to titillate, like “What would you do in the dark?” On this night, dancing was interrupted for a “slapping” contest onstage in which a boy, pulled randomly from the crowd, was blindfolded and had his arms held behind his back. A lineup of girls and boys took turns slapping him, with the final blow delivered by a heavyset D.J. that sent the slender boy flying across the stage. As he rubbed his reddened face, the boy got his reward: the chance to make out with the girl of his choice in public to the screams of other teenagers.
“Everything starts with the kiss,” Nicole Valenzuela, 14, said during a break from dancing at the Cadillac Club.
“After the kiss follows making out, and after that, penetration and oral sex,” she added. “That’s what’s going on, sometimes even in public places.”
Her mother, Danitza Geisel, a 34-year-old sex therapist, said in an interview that she did not worry about her daughter’s attending the parties and, expressing a somewhat contrarian view among academics here, she said the current generation of teenagers was no more promiscuous than previous ones. But Ms. Geisel lamented the dearth of sex education in Chile.
The parents of most adolescents today never received formal sex education. Chile’s first public school programs were put in place at the end of the 1960s. But after the 1973 military coup, the Pinochet government ordered sex education materials destroyed, and moral conservatism took hold. It was not until 20 years later, in 1993, that a new sex curriculum was introduced in the schools. Even so, by 2005, 47 percent of students said they were receiving sex education only once or twice a year, if at all. And now educators say they are struggling to keep up with the avalanche of sexual information and images on the Internet.
“Of course we are not happy with that,” said María de la Luz Silva, head of the sexual education unit of the Education Ministry. She said that the explosion of Internet access had created a “tremendous cultural breach” that was straining the limits of educators, but added that the ministry was putting in place a new sex education curriculum this year to better “protect” children.
For now, Chile’s teenagers are making decisions on their own.
“This is about being alive,” Cynthia Arellano, 14, said after the Bar Urbano party. “It is all about dancing, laughing, changing the words of the songs to something dirty.”
And with a slight giggle creeping in, she said, “Well, it’s about making out with other boys.”
Pascale Bonnefoy and Tomás Munita contributed reporting.
My question also: Why? Do they support some other off beat groups such as illegal aliens, albino blacks, Norwegian weight lifters? Or just the kind of sex people like?
“Why would these companies want to cater to 2-3% of the population?”
Because they think that whatever increase in sales they get from those folks will outweigh any they lose.
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