Corporate America’s Mary Poppins Problem

Corporate America is having a serious Mary Poppins problem. I am quite serious. Employees are having the run of the house. Meanwhile, the chieftains who are actually in charge, cower from their corner offices, tolerating insolence everywhere, mismanaging a payroll filled with latchkey laborers.

Threatening and performing walkouts. Signing petitions en masse. Trampling on traditions. Mocking esprit de corps.

Are there any adults minding the store?

Corporations are definitely in need of a strong-willed nanny who knows how to handle an umbrella, can restore discipline to the workforce and won’t lose sight of the bottom line—one tuppence at a time.

Ironically, Mary Poppins’ creator, Disney, is the latest example of children overrunning the classroom. Much of the turmoil involves Florida’s new Parental Rights in Education Law. (The word “gay” goes unmentioned in both its title and text. Progressives abhor Trumpian dog whistles, unless it’s one of their own, like “Don’t Say Gay.”) The measure is fairly innocuous and neutral. It merely prohibits the teaching of gender identity and sexual orientation to school children before 4th grade.

If kindergarteners happen to ask their gay teacher about his wife, it is not illegal for him to respond: “His name is Bruce.”

No matter. A tiny minority of Disney’s easily tricked-out woke workforce believe that this law somehow “endangers” LGBTQ employees companywide. In defiance of Disney’s initial apolitical view of the legislation, employees threatened a walkout. Now the company is a stalwart critic, and is making changes to its theme park to prove it.

Instead of the Kingdom becoming more Magical, it is re-educating its guests with the propaganda of inclusiveness. Gender neutrality is now a ride all its own. “Ladies and Gentlemen” and “Boys and Girls” are no longer scripted warm welcomes. Disney characters are undergoing their own gender reassignments.

As it turns out, Pluto had a preferred set of pronouns all along.

How will Disney shareholders respond to this social action agenda? Alienating customers in order to placate a loud but miniscule subset of “cast members” is not a good business practice.

But nowadays, seemingly nothing is more important than appeasing social justice warriors.

But nowadays, seemingly nothing is more important than appeasing social justice warriors. Newly graduated from college, they brought with them the same petulant tantrums that were routinely tolerated on campus. The intersectional sickness that has been infecting our colleges has escaped like a virus from China and went directly to Wall Street, Main Street, Madison Avenue and both mainstream and social media.

Think I am kidding? Over the past several years, coinciding with the instability caused by COVID-19, and the upheavals of the Black Lives Matter protests where police cars were torched and public statues reduced to rubble, America was jettisoned back to the Stone Age. Soon we will possess all the freedoms of the shrieking Taliban.

Publishers Hachette and Simon & Schuster banned their own books, cancelling contracts with Woody Allen, and Sen. Josh Hawley and conservative firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos, respectively. The New York Times fired the editor of its Op-Ed Page, James Bennett, and reassigned his entire staff, all due to an essay from Sen. Tom Cotton, who suggested that the military be brought in to quell the vandalism and violence emanating from some Black Lives Matter protests. A wide majority of Americans agreed with that view.

ESPN benched one of its star anchors, Sage Steele, who is biracial, because she mocked Barack Obama for identifying as Black even though he was raised by his white mother and grandmother. The same network fired Rachel Nichols because she privately complained that she was losing airtime to a Black female colleague.

Donald Trump, Project Veritas and scores of writers have been censored and permanently banned from Twitter. Facebook silenced Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s pro-life beliefs, and banned a German historian for posting that “Islam is not part of German history.” Cumulus, which owns radio stations, fired an anchor for making a joke about Vice-President Kamala Harris wearing an outfit that made her look like a UPS delivery person.

Major League Baseball yanked its All-Star Game from Atlanta as punishment for changes to Georgia’s election laws, which, by and large, merely reinstated some of the rules that existed before they were changed in response to COVID-19. Delta Airlines, Coca-Cola, Bank of America, and many other corporations doing business in Georgia openly opposed the legislation, too.

Victoria Secret hired a transgender model and CoverGirl placed a male model on its cover. Sports Illustrated featured a woman sporting a burkini in its annual swimsuit issue. Macy’s eliminated the term “mom jeans” from its advertisements, and Netflix retired “chick-flicks”—both seen as sexist. And, of course, Nike developed an entire ad campaign around Colin Kaepernick’s “taking a knee.” He responded by insisting that Nike recall sneakers featuring the American flag.

Film and television companies are having their hands tied by woke consultants who insist that writing staffs be diversified by hiring according to racial and gender representation. Studio chiefs have succumbed, even though they realize that’s not how art is made. Expect our cultural options to soon be depleted by the dull and derivative.

Studio chiefs have succumbed, even though they realize that’s not how art is made.

In nearly all of these cases, corporate action was spurred by self-righteous employees—and the cancel-culture bloodthirstiness of social media woke mobs—demanding that management take more forceful positions consistent with the progressive politics of these times. “Workers Unite!” no longer means improved wages and better working conditions, but rather bullying and belligerent ultimatums in support of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

Ironically, this is all happening as workers at Starbucks and Amazon are unionizing—pursuant to the methods of old-school labor unions. Having a racial, gender and sexual identity agenda doesn’t seem to figure in to these new rallying cries. Let’s see how long that lasts.

In the meantime, we can share a laugh knowing that Disney changed its corporate policies to suit the passions of some guy dressed up as Goofy. And we can despair knowing that not even Mary Poppins is aware of any medicine that will either cure us of this societal ailment, or go down any better with a mere spoonful of sugar.

Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law professor and Distinguished University Professor at Touro University, where he directs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society. He is the legal analyst for CBS News Radio. His most recent book is titled “Saving Free Speech … From Itself.”