Corporations: You'll Never Appease Anti-LGBTQ Boycotters. They Want to Be Angry | Opinion

Every year, Target releases their Pride Month collection, featuring select merchandise celebrating LGBTQ culture that has become a big hit in the queer community over the past decade. Frequently quirky and/or amusing, the products cause no more offense than the occasional atrocious pun. But last week, Target released a statement announcing they would remove several items from their Pride collection due to "safety concerns" for in-store employees after backlash—often violent in nature—from anti-LGBTQ extremists.

If you're a corporate marketing officer concerned over what's happening with Target, let me make something abundantly clear: You will never appease anti-LGBTQ extremists. But moreover, there's a colder truth at play here: They don't want to be appeased, they want to be angry.

In their statement, Target wrote: "Since introducing this year's collection, we've experienced threats impacting our team members' sense of safety and well-being while at work. Given these volatile circumstances, we are making adjustments to our plans, including removing items that have been at the center of the most significant confrontational behavior."

In case you're wondering, the items in question are harmless but have become the center of the perpetual anti-LGBTQ conservative outrage machine that has plagued our national discourse at a fever pitch over the past few years. Folks may think this is about a few clothing items, but it's not. I promise it's not. These are the same people who were livid that Pink Floyd used a rainbow in their 50th anniversary logo for "The Dark Side of the Moon" —for the unfamiliar, that iconic album cover depicts light being shone through a glass prism and dispersed into the color spectrum, also known as a rainbow. The album cover long predates the use of the rainbow as a symbol of LGBTQ pride.

These are not reasonable people.

When the Bud Light controversy erupted, the CEO of Anheuser-Busch made the unwise choice to cave entirely. He essentially apologized for the company recognizing that trans people exist and suspended the marketing executives behind the harmless Dylan Mulvaney campaign.

It didn't work. They're still boycotting Bud Light even after the CEO's painful public groveling to anti-LGBTQ consumers.

Corporations need to understand something about these people: their objective is not really to gain any ground but to find an outlet for their rage at the world changing around them. They are starving for outrage and will feast on any scrap. They would rather be perpetually angry than be mollified. They are furious that anyone would ask them to learn about others because it de-centers their experience as the unassailable, unaccountable default. And deep down, they know LGBTQ people are never going away. The closet has been permanently opened.

These people long for an America that always catered to those who look and act like them—that is: white, heterosexual, traditional families. They use religion as a shield for their bigotry. They don't really care about what Christ taught; he's just a convenient vehicle.

But that America is long gone, and it's never coming back. We are witnessing the very long and painful last gasp of that world. And boy, are they furious. Enraged. They've had to keep quiet about it for so long, but in the past several years, the quiet part became very loud.

If they can't get that world back, what's the next best thing? Finding community in outrage. These people go out of their way to be angry. They'll share rightwing clickbait articles they know to be false because it gives them permission to be spitting-hot mad. They'll look for any and every opportunity to fume over the most anodyne things if there's even a hint that it falls outside their extremely narrow worldview.

They are angry, and beneath that, they are very, very scared. They will claim they're not scared. But they're terrified. None of this works without fear. Fear of what? Uncertainty over their place in a changing society that increasingly doesn't defer to them.

For rightwing grifters, Christmas is every day right now. All they have to do is feed these people things to get irate over and rake in the cash. Click and subscribe. Buy their book. Buy their scam "wellness" product. "Give me your money, and I will give you a reason to be angry." It's a paid service. It's a drug.

Target thinks this is going away, and it's not. Target could pull all their Pride merchandise and sever every relationship they have with the LGBTQ community, but anything short of a corporate statement of "Yeah, we hate LGBTQ people, too" will not end this.

Companies need to understand that they cannot mollify bigots whose primary desire is to be angry. They've already lost them. They're gone. If companies cave to these bigots, they're sacrificing the loyalty of other consumers for a sad, small group that will never like them.

On the other hand, if Target and other companies refuse to play this childish game with enraged bigots, they will solidify their loyalty with reasonable adults and their families.

We can never give in to these people's bottomless pit of outrage.

Charlotte Clymer is a writer, LGBTQ activist, military veteran, and former press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign. She writes Charlotte's Web Thoughts, a popular Substack newsletter on politics, religion, and culture. She is based in Washington, D.C.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

Editor's Note: This piece is adapted from an article that first appeared on the writer's blog.