On Thursday, Caterpillar announced it would pull support from the Boy Scouts thanks in part to the Scouts’ decision to allow openly homosexual scouts but not scoutmasters. Spokeswoman Rachel Potts said that the Caterpillar Foundation thinks that the policy is discriminatory, but refused to say that the policy was the whole reason for support being pulled.
The Obama administration used Caterpillar as a centerpiece of its push for the stimulus package in 2009; in February 2009, President Obama said that the company would begin rehiring employees if the stimulus passed. Instead, the company posted a massive quarterly net loss.
In May 2011, CFO Edward Rapp said that Caterpillar had navigated financial difficulties by modeling itself after the Boy Scouts.
Caterpillar is hardly the first company to cut its support for the Boy Scouts over their policy on homosexuality. The United Parcel Service and Intel, among many others, have done so as well; both did so before the Boy Scouts’ decision to allow gay scouts, and there is no indication that they will restore their support.
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).
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