Good grades for destructive behavior

For more than two decades, some of the most consequential battles over the American family has not been fought in Congress or the courts. They have been fought inside human resources departments, insurance plan menus, and corporate giving budgets. Most of us never knew. We were busy doing our jobs and going home to our families.

The forces working to redefine the family understood something many of us have been slow to grasp: Whoever controls the institutions controls the culture. Corporations shape where we work, the words we are permitted to say, the insurance plans that determine what our doctors can offer, the organizations our purchases quietly fund. A well-placed policy buried in an employee handbook can accomplish more than years of public debate. And they built the infrastructure to make it happen.

The centerpiece of that infrastructure has been the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index.

Not familiar? I don’t blame you. The HRC is the largest LGBTQ advocacy organization in the country. Since 2002, its CEI has scored companies on a 100-point scale and published the results. High scores earn praise. Low scores invite boycotts. Companies that refuse to participate get scored anyway. In 2025, 765 companies earned a perfect 100. In 2026, even after the HRC quietly lowered its standards, that number fell to 534.

What most people do not realize is what earning that score has required.

Them Before Us has just published a report documenting exactly what the CEI demands and what it costs children. Of the CEI’s 100 available points, 70 directly reward practices that harm children.

The largest category, “Equitable Benefits,” accounts for 50 of those points. Twenty-five go to companies that cover transgender health benefits, including transition surgeries, with no specified age restriction. Ten reward “family formation benefits” that subsidize surrogacy and donor conception, arrangements that by design separate a child from one or both biological parents. (Eighty-five percent of donor-conceived individuals report that learning of their conception changed their sense of identity. Nearly half say seeing friends with their biological parents makes them sad.) Ten more points go to domestic partner benefits incentivizing cohabitation over marriage, and five to an LGBTQ benefits guide that includes HRC resources on “supporting transgender children.”

The remaining 20 points go to “corporate social responsibility.” In practice, this means funneling profits to organizations like the Trevor Project, which received $29 million from corporate partners in 2023. When an undercover caller posed as a 15-year-old girl with gender confusion, a Trevor Project counselor encouraged her to leave home and move in with an adult male coach. More than 150 companies fund this organization.

And if a company dares to publicly support legislation protecting children? The CEI docks 25 points for any “public anti-LGBTQ+ blemish.” The system does not merely incentivize compliance. It enforces silence.

This was never about persuasion. No one asked families whether they wanted their daily cup of coffee funding surrogacy. No one asked parents whether their children’s insurance should cover irreversible surgeries. No one asked employees whether their charitable dollars should flow to organizations encouraging teenagers to leave home. The CEI bypassed all of it.

But there is reason for hope.

Over the past two years, a record number of corporations have walked away. Tractor Supply led in June 2024. Walmart followed in November, then went further, updating its benefits to exclude transgender procedures for minors. John Deere, Toyota, and McDonald’s joined them. By 2026, Fortune 500 participation had collapsed more than 60 percent. The compliance apparatus that once seemed invincible is fracturing.

The overreach of recent years deserves some credit. Americans watched corporations lecture them about pronouns and pride parades while inflation ate their paychecks and families struggled to make ends meet. They watched insurance companies raise premiums to quietly add coverage for unthinkable things like pediatric gender procedures and IVF benefits for single men. And they said enough.

But walking away from a scorecard is not the same as protecting children. Many companies that dropped the CEI still maintain the policies that earned them points. Does your company fund the Trevor Project? Does your insurance cover transition procedures for minors? Does your employer subsidize surrogacy that denies children their mothers and fathers? If the answers are unsatisfactory, take your business elsewhere and say why.

The full report is available at thembeforeus.com. Read it. Share it. And the next time a company boasts about its “Equality 100” score, understand what it costs. Children’s hearts, their parents, their voices. A perfect score requires harming children.

It is time to stop chasing points and start protecting families.