Viewpoint discrimination

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Thursday the 23rd of May, 2024. This is WORLD Radio, and we thank you for listening! Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

First up on The World and Everything in It: Viewpoint discrimination by corporations.

Threats to fundamental freedoms can come from outside government; they also come from the financial and tech sectors. For example, JPMorgan Chase canceled without explanation the account of the National Committee for Religious Freedom. That’s headed up by former U.S. Ambassador Sam Brownback. Chase has also denied payment processing services to conservative groups.

BROWN: One tool that’s helped counter this pernicious discrimination is the Viewpoint Diversity Score Business Index. On Tuesday, Alliance Defending Freedom released its third annual report that measures corporate respect for free speech and religious freedom. Eighty-five publicly traded corporations are assessed across dozens of criteria.

And it’s becoming effective to counter pressure from other groups that push ESG- environmental, social, and governance concerns…and CRT—critical race theory.

REICHARD: So what success has the Viewpoint Diversity Score had? Joining us to talk about it is Jeremy Tedesco, ADF’s Senior Counsel and Senior Vice President for Corporate Engagement

JEREMY TEDESCO: Good morning

REICHARD: Well, I see a lot of familiar company names on the latest Viewpoint Diversity Score Index: Airbnb, Amazon, eBay, Bank of America, DocuSign, Etsy - I mean, I don’t think I could go a single day without using at least a few of these corporations. Describe some of the criteria used to assess them for viewpoint discrimination.

TEDESCO: Yeah, well, the companies we choose our companies in tech and finance, because we're concerned that when these big private corporations that have so much control over essentially gatekeeper business services, they can have as much of a chilling effect on free speech and religious freedom, as if the government is censoring speech or discriminating. And so we want to make sure that these big companies respect our cherished liberties, especially the liberties of free speech and religious freedom.

REICHARD: One of the offending corporations over the past two years of scoring is JP Morgan Chase. What was it doing in particular that raised red flags?

TEDESCO: Well, there's a lot that's problematic at JPMorganChase, they have, I think, a 9% this year, out of 100 on our index, so they have a long way to go. But one of the things that we were really concerned about with Chase—and this is really a global problem is the banking and the financial services sector. JPMorganChase was one of the worst actors in the space. They had terrible policies on the books, and they had actually enforced those policies in ways that we seemed very clearly to be discriminating against religious institutions and conservative ideas. And so they really became a major target of this problem, and also a target for what we hoped would be changes to their policies. And that's actually what they delivered this year.

REICHARD: And what did Chase do?

TEDESCO: Yeah, well, one of the things that we focused on with them was their social risk policy, this was part of their payment processor. We pay essentially said that they would deny services based on their assessment of your social risk, and include terms like hate and intolerance, incredibly vague ideas and terms that historically we know can easily be used to discriminate against people because of their views. Chase had actually used those policies to discriminate against Arkansas Family Council, a pro-family and pro-life and pro-religious liberty group down in the state of Arkansas, because they were “high risk” is what Chase had told them. And so we saw this rise in the banking from Chase, and we saw the policies that were really the root cause of these cancellations, or at least contributed to them. So we wanted Chase to change those policies, eliminate that policy and affirmatively adopt protections for religious and political views in their customer-facing terms of service.

REICHARD: And one person familiar to this podcast actually did something about it. Tell us about that.

TEDESCO: Yeah, David Bahnsen, who I know your listeners know well. He's been a great partner with us on the Viewpoint Diversity Score Index. Last year, actually, he filed a shareholder resolution that appeared on the proxy statement at an annual shareholder meeting for Chase back in May of last year. It was about de-banking. And it focused in part on this social risk policy, and was simply asking Chase to do an assessment of the risk that their policies and practices could lead to politicize the banking. Chase received letters from 15 state attorneys general, about 14 State Treasurers, raising concerns about the same problem. And of course, we were in in talks with them too, about our concerns related to these issues. Chase experienced quite a bit of public heat over there, the banking practices around that meeting last year, and they didn't do anything last year to change their behavior. They simply, you know, said, Look, we don't engage in that kind of discrimination. But when we analyzed spending freedom, went to score them this year on our index in about November of last year, we noted that they had eliminated their social risk policy that had been on the books for as many years as we had been studying them. So that was a significant change. The only intervening factor between them having it and not having it was David Bahnsen's shareholder resolution, and our engagement and some of the state attorneys general and state treasurers raising concerns about de-banking at Chase.

REICHARD: Finally, I want to ask you about the difference between the Viewpoint Diversity Score and the Corporate Equality Index put out by the leftist organization Human Rights Campaign. How would you describe that difference?

TEDESCO: Well, it's really about them being deeply partisan and political. Their index forces companies further and further to to the extremes of the LGBT agenda each year. They move the goalposts every year and demand even more from the companies to get out 100%. The Human Rights Campaign index this year to get 100% on the Equality Index, companies have to cover puberty blockers and gender reassignment surgery for youth, so for minors. And what the the stats tell us when registered voters are asked about that particular piece of the LGBT agenda, they are diametrically opposed to it. Whether you're looking at Republicans, Democrats or Independents, you're you're at 60 or 70% disagreement with providing, for instance, puberty blockers to youth, yet the HRC doesn't care about that. They don't care about the companies. What they want the companies to do is use their brands and their resources to drive a very political agenda that the majority of Americans—vast majority Americans—disagree with. So they're really essentially asking these companies to become the next Bud Light or Target or Disney in the culture wars, when what should be happening is what we're asking them to do: just stay out of those things and provide your services on a viewpoint neutral basis.

REICHARD: Jeremy Tedesco is Senior Counsel and Senior Vice President for Corporate Engagement at Alliance Defending Freedom. Jeremy, thank you so much!

TEDESCO: Thanks for having me on.

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