Walmart: An Unlikely (and Powerful) LGBTQ Ally
By Michael Lovito, January 10, 2023
March 29, 2021, was a dark day for the LGBTQ community in Arkansas. Less than a year after Bostock v. Clayton County, in which the Supreme Court ruled that workplace discrimination protections applied to people on the basis of their sexual orientation and gender identity, the Arkansas General Assembly passed the Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act, a law that would legally prevent people under the age of 18 from obtaining gender-affirming medical care and ban insurance from covering gender transition procedures.
In their fight against the bill, the trans community found two unlikely allies. The first was Asa Hutchinson, Arkansas’ otherwise conservative Republican governor, who vetoed the SAFE Act, describing it as “vast government overreach” (the State Assembly would later override Hutchinson’s veto). The other – much to the surprise of conservatives and right wing media – was the Walton family, the immensely wealthy and politically powerfully heirs of the Walmart fortune. Six months after the passage of the SAFE Act, Alice L. Walton, the daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton, and Tom and Olivia Walton, her nephew and his wife, launched the Arkansas LGBTQ+ Advancement Fund, a $1 million fund that distributes grants to organizations that provide LGBTQ Arkansans with health, legal, and education services.
A Stunning Transformation
That one of the country’s wealthiest families, let alone one that operates a business that’s become synonymous with Middle America, took such a public stand on a touchy subject like trans rights is noteworthy in and of itself. But the Waltons’ recent contributions to Arkansas-based LGBTQ organizations is just the latest chapter in the family’s transformation from establishment Republican donors to socially progressive champions, a transformation that has stoked a frustrated reaction from the right.
Walmart and the Walton Family fund charitable efforts through two distinct entities. The Walmart Foundation, which was founded in 1982, is controlled by Walmart Inc., and distributes 90% of its funds based on the recommendations of individual store managers. The Walton Family Foundation, which was started by Walmart founders Sam and Helen Walton in 1987, operates independently from Walmart and is managed directly by members of the Walton family. As such, its donations tend to reflect the pet causes and interest of individual family members.
For most of the charity’s early history, the Walton Family Foundation focused on funding charter schools. According to the Walton Family Foundation’s website, charter schools and other education initiatives still receive nearly a third of the charity’s grant money. But since Sam’s passing in 1992, his heirs have expanded the foundation’s scope, particularly when it comes to climate change. In 2020 alone, the Walton Family Foundation granted over $13 million to the Environmental Defense Fund, a business-friendly environmental advocacy organization, and over $5 million to the New Venture Fund for both environmental and education projects.
A Complicated Relationship
Walmart’s relationship with the LGBT community has always been complicated, and, until the last half-decade, was defined by a series of stops and starts. Walmart’s earliest gestures came in 2003, when it adopted a sexual orientation non-discrimination policy and launched “an internal resource group for LGBT associates.” In 2006, it joined the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, only to withdraw two years alter after being boycotted by the American Family Association, a Christian fundamentalist group.
The relationship became even more fraught in 2008 when Mike Duke, Walmart’s then-CEO, signed a petition in support of an Arkansas ballot initiative that would prevent gay couples from adopting children, a campaign that also received a $75,000 donation from board chair (and Sam’s son) Jim Walton. After a raft of protests and lawsuits, Walmart began to adopt a much more progressive stance in the early 2010s, adding transgender employees to its non-discrimination policy, offering health insurance benefits to its employees’ same-sex domestic partners, and publicly opposing an Arkansas bill that would allow businesses to refuse to serve LGBTQ customers. Last year, the company received a perfect 100% rating in the Human Rights Campaign’s corporate quality index to go along with its number one spot on the Fortune 500, receiving praise for its worker protections and inclusive benefits.
While both Walmart and the Waltons have made small donations to LGBTQ organizations in recent years, the launch of the Arkansas LGBTQ+ Fund is a major escalation of their support, committing $1 million to more than 21 organizations as of February of 2022. Beneficiaries include The Transition Closet, which provides transgender individuals with gender-affirming clothing, Lucie’s Place, which provides housing support to LGBQT youth, and Central Arkansas Pride, which hosts an LGBTQ film festival.
Neither the Walton Family Foundation, the Arkansas Community Foundation (which oversees the Arkansas LGBTQ+ Advancement Fund), nor any of the grant recipients responded to The Righting’s request for comment, with the exception of NWA Arkansas Equality, which said they do not comment on donors or donations.
Reaction From the Right
It would be understandable, perhaps even advisable, to be skeptical of Walmart’s newfound progressivism (“Philanthropy obscures the often unseemly process by which the money was made – and for Wal-Mart that’s at least part of the point.,” Liza Featherstone wrote in a 2005 article in “The Nation” that scrutinized the company’s charitable giving). But the shift in Walmart seems to mirror a shift in the Walton family as well, whose members have also drifted left in their political donations. In 2012, Alice Walton, the daughter of Sam Walton and the second richest woman in the world, donated $200,000 to Restore Our Future, a Mitt Romney super PAC. Four years later, in 2016, she donated over $300,00 to the Hillary Victory fund.
While she still contributes to Arkansas Republicans like Congressman Steve Womack and Senator John Boozman, in 2022 she also donated to Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, as well as Unite the Country, a pro-Biden PAC. In 2022, she donated $25,000 to the WelcomePAC, which works to influence independent and Republican voters to cast ballots for Democrats. Her daughter-in-law, Olivia Walton, donated directly to Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and John Hickenlooper’s presidential campaigns, as well as to Beto O’Rourke’s 2022 Texas gubernatorial campaign.
This shift to the left by a company associated with small town America has caught the attention of a handful of conservative media outlets, who have taken aim at both Walmart and the Waltons’ donations as well as their business practices. In August 2020 the Capital Research Center, a conservative think tank that investigates corporate donations, declared the Walmart Foundation a “Microcosm of Woke Capital,” and criticized both their donations to groups like the National Immigration Forum and the National Urban League, as well as a statement by Walmart CEO Doug McMillon regarding social justice after the George Floyd protests. In August 2021, anti-critical race theory activist Christopher F. Rufo published a feverish critique of Walmart’s diversity training program, which they developed with the Racial Equity Institute, in City Journal.
“American executives, among the most successful people on the planet, can collect accolades and social status by promoting fashionable left-wing ideologies,” Rufo wrote. “Meantime, their hourly workers, making between $25,000 and $30,000 yearly, are asked to undergo dishonest and humiliation rituals to confront their ‘white privilege’ and ‘white supremacy thinking. McMillon gets the social justice credit; his workers pay the price.”
In October 2022, when The Walton Family Foundation signed an amicus brief opposing the SAFE Act, right wing media took notice of the Arkansas LGBTQ+ Advancement Fund, via a short piece about the brief written by Gillian Richards for The Daily Signal, a conservative news site published by The Heritage Foundation. Richards followed up her report on the brief a week later with a longer piece about the Arkansas LGBTQ+ Advancement Fund’s donations to NWA Equality Pride and The Equality Crew, focusing primarily on events that both organizations hosted for children and teens. The article, which included unsupported claims about young people on the autism spectrum, was also posted on The Heritage Foundation’s main website, and inspired aggregated articles published by Christian Broadcast News and The Blaze. Richards did not respond to The Righting’s request for comment.
Despite the right’s attempts to paint the Waltons’ progressive donations as scandal, it seems to have had little effect. Walmart remains the largest retailer in the United States and the SAFE Act, at least for the time being, has been temporarily blocked by a U.S. District judge.
Michael Lovito is a Brooklyn-based reporter and critic whose work has appeared in Salon, Brooklyn Magazine, Pavement Pieces, and The District. He also serves as editor-in-chief of the politics and pop culture website The Postrider. @MLovito
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The Waltons’ recent contributions to Arkansas-based LGBTQ organizations is just the latest chapter in the family’s transformation from establishment Republican donors to socially progressive champions, a transformation that has stoked a frustrated reaction from the right. (Image: Pixabay)
