Florida Sues Target Over Selling Pride Merch

The state’s budget for suing “leftist” corporations is ballooning.

Anti-trans activists have encountered a problem: the Constitution. Be it by sweeping executive order or local-level legal gymnastics, much of the Trumpian policy agenda has been sidelined due to the pesky checks and balances of the judicial branch.

In Montana, for example, a state judge struck down a trans-exclusionary bill defining biological sex. The New Jersey judiciary overhauled school districts’ attempts to forcibly out trans students. And last week, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction on Trump’s executive order prohibiting gender-affirming care for patients under 19.

Thanks to the First Amendment, outright bans on LGBTQ content — particularly in the private sector — can be difficult to enact. Now, Florida’s Office of the Attorney General has resorted to using corporate accountability laws to attack LGBTQ Pride.

State AG James Uthmeier has singled out Target, the national retail brand, saying it violated the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 by “failing to disclose known risks of customer backlash” to its “radical and extreme 2023 Pride Campaign.” The incendiary merchandise includes a mug labelled “gender fluid” and a shirt with a rainbow brain reading, “Sorry, can’t think straight.” Uthmeier took to social media to denounce “Target’s efforts to sexualize children.”

“The campaign provoked immense consumer backlash and boycotts that caused Target’s sales to fall for the first time in six years and wiped out over $25 billion in Target’s market capitalization,” the state’s complaint reads. Target had been selling Pride merch at least a decade before the right-wing boycotts occurred.

On the other hand, some of the Target boycotts are due to its withdrawal of DEI and LGBT-friendly initiatives — at the behest of conservative lawmakers in states like Florida. It is unclear how much Target’s recent financial troubles can be attributed to political boycotts as opposed to the broader economic turmoil seen across the United States.

The Florida government recently announced that it would dump another $20 million in taxpayer dollars into the fight against the “leftist ideology” supposedly peddled by corporations including Target. Governor Ron DeSantis also announced measures aiming to make it easier for the state to sue major corporations — generating a chilling effect on corporate speech.

A Florida official said the state did not have a “short list” of companies it was planning on suing, but that Florida would get more “aggressive” in exploring litigation, according to Politico. Their reporting found that the lawsuits “would not be aimed at recovering damages for the pension plan but rather to get companies to assess how they are governed.”

This follows a ruling by a federal judge last year, which overturned parts of the state’s “Stop WOKE Act” restricting corporate sensitivity trainings relating to race and sex.

The Target lawsuit is part of a broader nationwide political strategy punishing corporations for anything “diversity, equity and inclusion”-related. Missouri sued Starbucks over its diversity programs. Meanwhile, attorneys general across the country have zeroed in on Costco for its DEI initiatives.

Trump’s acting chair of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Andrea Lucas, has characterized DEI as “anti-American” and vowed to uphold “the biological and binary reality of sex.”

However, the chief architect of this wave of corporate speech upheaval seems to be America First Legal, which is representing the state of Florida alongside Uthmeier’s office in the lawsuit against Target. It was founded by Trump acolyte Stephen Miller as “the long-awaited answer to the ACLU.”

By 2024, three years after its launch, the New York Times reported it had filed more than a hundred lawsuits, EEOC complaints, amicus briefs and other legal claims, while employing fewer than 10 full-time lawyers. (According to The Times, the ACLU had over 500 full-time lawyers at this point.)

Target did not immediately respond to a request for comment.