Shop (for equality) til you drop

[Guest post from the Napa Valley Unity League!]

Just in time for holiday shopping, the new 2009 Human Rights Campaign Buying Guide has been released. The guide provides interested consumers with lists of companies, products and services that support lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality.

Here's the link: http://www.hrc.org/buyersguide2009/

A perfect score is 100 (the details of how the score is calculated are in the report.)

Some (this is just a VERY small sample) of the companies operating in the Napa Valley that earned 100 points are:

• Target, Game Stop
• Bank of America and Wells Fargo
• Starbucks, Anheuser-Busch, Diageo (owner of Beaulieu and Sterling Vineyards), Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Coors
• BP, Chevron and Shell
• Allstate Insurance and Kaiser-Permanente
• Alaska, Continental, US Airways and American Airlines
• Hyatt, Marriott and Starwood Hotels
• Apple, AT&T, Dell, eBay, Google, Microsoft, Motorola and Yahoo!
• UPS

Check out the link for a complete list. It makes for very interesting reading!

A note, too, that the HRC Buying Guide for Equality has a limitation: it is based on company HR official policies and does not take into account incidents of actual treatment of employees or how their policies are implemented (if evenly or at all) or how their equal treatment of LGBT consumers. While limited, it seems it is the best and most compiled list there is. Go with what we have, I guess.