CV NEWS FEED // Breaking longstanding partnerships, Anheuser-Busch is not sponsoring the St. Louis PrideFest or the San Francisco “Pride” festival this year, a change that comes amid shifting political and societal climates that have increasingly steered away corporations’ support of the LGBT agenda.
The brewing company, which was founded and is headquartered in St. Louis, had sponsored the city’s “PrideFest” for the past 30 years.
Pride St. Louis President Marty Zuniga told KSDK 5, NBC’s St. Louis affiliate, that the nonprofit organization learned several weeks ago of Anheuser-Busch’s decline to sponsor and tried to find a solution.
“It was just interesting that the longest partner of ours for 30 years that they’ve been at the table with us and a true ally just decided to walk away after basically just saying that they just don’t see the value in it anymore,” Zuniga said in the March 25 article.
KSDK 5 reported that Zuniga said the brewer is not the only company making this move — the number of sponsorships of the pro-LGBT festival are historically low this year.
Busch has also withdrawn its sponsorship of the “Pride” festival in San Francisco, according to a March 17 report from SF Gate. Several other companies did the same, and all of them “cited a lack of funds,” SF Gate reports. None mentioned the current political climate in announcements about ceasing sponsorships, but San Francisco Pride Director Suzanne Ford posited that politics had an effect on the decisions.
Ford also told SF Gate that it was “very abnormal” for this many companies to drop the sponsorships so abruptly, especially without having a series of conversations with the organization.
“I just interpreted that companies are making decisions that at this time it’s not good to be sponsoring Pride,” Ford told SF Gate. “I think in this political environment that they thought that was a risky decision.”
Ford said San Francisco Pride’s budget for the weekend-long “Pride” event is $3.2 million, and the companies that withdrew sponsorships meant a loss of $300,000 total in funding.
Within recent months, a number of corporations have ended or significantly curtailed their “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” programs, in response to customer backlash and boycotts — or even just fear of one. The reporting efforts of conservative journalist Robby Starbuck played a large role in spearheading these changes. The corporations include Tractor Supply, Jack Daniels, Ford, McDonald’s, Nissan, Harley-Davidson, and, most recently, AT&T.
Notably, in 2023, the sales of the brewing company Bud Light were rocked by massive boycotts over its partnership with a “transgender” TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney, a man who claims he is a “girl.” The boycott eventually led to Bud Light losing its 20-year streak as the top-selling beer in the U.S. beer market; Modelo took the lead in June 2023.
In the political realm, President Donald Trump signed an executive order the day after his inauguration prohibiting DEI programs in the federal government. Several days later, he signed an executive order ending federal funding of so-called “transgender” surgeries that have permanently harmed a number of children..
On Feb. 5, he signed an executive order banning men from women’s sports, which has been a critical issue in recent years as many sports and school programs allowed “transgender” athletes to compete against women and girls.
CatholicVote previously reported that a poll the Harvard Center for American Political Studies conducted between Feb. 19 and 20 found that a majority of Americans were supportive both of Trump’s move to ban men from women’s sports and of his declaration that “there are only two genders male and female in all government forms and programs.”
The post Anheuser-Busch declines to sponsor St. Louis PrideFest, breaks 30-year partnership appeared first on CatholicVote org.