Disney executives are getting dragged deeper into a battle with Florida lawmakers over a controversial education law that the corporation has now committed itself to help defeat.
Disney’s entry into the public debate over a law described by critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill has drawn high levels of scrutiny to its internal decision-making — and placed the company at the center of a fight it may be ill-prepared to wage.
Executives at the entertainment company made headlines once again this week thanks to leaked portions of an all-hands meeting in which they stood by a commitment to identity politics.
DISNEY EXECUTIVE WITH ‘TWO QUEER CHILDREN’ WANTS MORE GAY LEADS
Karey Burke, the company’s general entertainment president, tearfully spoke about her experience as the mother of “one transgender child and one pansexual child” and lamented the lack of gay and transgender leading characters in Disney content.
The company’s head of diversity and inclusion also said Disney parks were working to phase out the use of “ladies and gentleman” and “girls and boys” in greetings to guests, replacing them with gender-neutral welcomes.
Disney’s embrace of a liberal agenda on gender and sexual identity politics comes as it fights Florida’s new law banning the instruction of such topics to children in kindergarten through third grade. Proponents of the law argue it shields the youngest students from charged topics that could be inappropriate.
But critics have equated the law to a draconian ban on free expression in schools despite the new rule applying only to the earliest grades.
Disney has this week made itself the face of leftist opposition to the law.
In a widely circulated statement, Disney said the Florida law “should never have passed and should never have been signed into law.”
Disney CEO Bob Chapek’s decision to come out against the legislation followed backlash within the company over its initial silence on the issue.
Employees staged a walkout last week as Disney continued to stay on the sidelines in a public discussion that was becoming increasingly heated.
Geoffrey Kabaservice, vice president of political studies at the Niskanen Center, said pressure from within Disney likely forced it into the fray.
“I think probably, in this case, Disney, like a lot of corporations, finds itself caught in a crossfire between a Republican Party that is mostly working class at this point — and most working-class Floridians seem to have no problem with this bill — versus Disney’s Imagineers and other highly educated employees, who tend to vote Democratic and think this bill is an outrage,” Kabaservice told the Washington Examiner.
Polls indeed show the policy enjoys support among Republicans — and even, according to at least one survey, among registered Democrats — despite the fierce backlash dominating the conversation around the law.
After demurring initially, Disney put down an ambitious marker in the fight: The company said this week that it now aims to defeat the law.
“Our goal as a company is for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down in the courts, and we remain committed to supporting the national and state organizations working to achieve that,” the company said.
Kabaservice added, “I think what, realistically, Disney’s strategy is is they’re going to wait and see how the courts rule on this when it comes up … because there’s enormous amounts of ambiguity in this law.”
While employees applauded Disney’s pivot to activism, critics accused the international corporation of hypocrisy.
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office slammed Disney for filming one of its recent feature films, a live-action remake of Mulan, in an area of China where the country’s Communist leaders have waged genocide on their people and thanking the Chinese Communist Party in the movie’s credits while protesting the education bill.
According to the Human Rights Campaign, a left-leaning nonprofit group that advocates gay and transgender rights, nearly 8% of the U.S. adult population identifies as gay, bisexual, or transgender.
But Disney’s decision to commit to incorporating more identity politics into its content, much of which is produced for children and young adults, could risk alienating a large share of the population that remains uncomfortable with immersing children in controversial, sexually charged topics.
Disney’s feud with Florida’s Republican lawmakers echoes several previous dust-ups between well-known brands and GOP state leaders over laws opposed by the activist Left.
In Georgia, Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, and the MLB all waded into the culture war fray last year when the state’s lawmakers passed voting reforms described by Democrats as an affront to democracy.
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Delta and Coca-Cola both released statements condemning the law that arguably drew as much backlash as it did praise. The MLB went a step further by pulling the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta.
Vocal activists had pressured companies headquartered in Georgia to push back against the law, but once the game was moved and statements issued, an equally loud faction of voices on the Right slammed the companies for speaking out against the law.
MLB leaders, for example, were ultimately ridiculed on the Right for moving the game to Denver in what it said was solidarity with the black community — and in the process denying a majority-black city millions of dollars in revenue and shifting that cash infusion to a majority-white city.
“I think corporations’ ultimate goal is mass amnesia where these things are concerned,” Kabaservice said. “They want to get past it, and then they want everyone to forget about it, and then they want to sell their wares to people of all political persuasions.”
