I hate “Pride Month,” and not for the reasons many would hope to think. I don’t typically care what your sexuality is, so long as it doesn’t involve children or animals. I’m not your keeper just as much as you’re not mine.

But I hate the entire month carved out to celebrate the LGBT cause because I’m consistently inundated with messages, ads, and products that look like a rainbow threw up all over them from corporations talking about how great it is that homosexual people exist and are proud about it. To the idea of free people being free to be whoever they want, I’m all on board. The thing that bothers me is that the corporation celebrating it doesn’t actually believe it.

Let’s set up a hypothetical scenario.

Let’s say that tomorrow that a total social change in the populace is established and the vast majority of the world accepts it and the world’s court of public opinion turns its nose up to homosexuality. The same Macy’s that was decorating its windows with rainbow flag designs and selling “Pride Month” merch will suddenly act like there is no such thing as an LGBT community. The businesses who were changing their social media avatars to have rainbow overlays wouldn’t have a trace of pro-LGBT sentiment in any of its pages.

This would happen because the corporation is concerned with one thing, and one thing only.

Money is the name of the game, and the more of it that they can get, the more the corporations will act in whatever manner is necessary to get it. This means that all the window dressing and pride t-shirts are really just a pandering tool as a way to squeeze more money from people. This would be all well and good, and I celebrate that kind of capitalism by itself.

However, corporations do more than just sell themed merch directed toward the LGBT community. They moralize.

Pantene did it with transgenderism.

Closeup did it with homosexual couples.

During 2013’s Supreme Court battle over gay marriage, almost every corporation and their dog were sporting the equal sign in support of the homosexual marriage. Again, I don’t care if gay people want to have a ceremony and call themselves married, but now we’re talking about corporations telling us about what is right and wrong.

Again, they’re not doing this because they care, they’re doing this because it’s a trend that will make them money. If it stopped making them money, they’d stop doing it. Which makes this hollow. They just want your money, and more importantly, they want you to be okay with spending money there even when it’s not Pride Month. If you’re celebrating a corporation for being “pro-LGBT,” then their plan is working. You’re sending people to spend more money at their locations with your praise.

But there’s a malicious element to it that I feel needs to be highlighted.

Christians had to accept a long time ago with the celebration of Christmas that most corporations don’t care about them either. It’s undeniable that the entire holiday revolves around the birth of Jesus Christ. He is the literal reason for the season. Yet, most corporations won’t acknowledge that the guy is even a factor.

Why?

Because corporations found out that the promotion of Christ has negative ramifications. The media will lambast them as the media does when it comes to anything Christian. They’ll use negative connotations when speaking about them, ask officials from the business loaded questions, take them out of context with every word they say, and turn almost everything they do into a national issue. Activists begin to work overtime to make sure that the corporation is consistently dogged with bad PR, lawsuits, and more.

Proclaiming your Christianity in an official capacity is a huge risk. Sometimes it pays off, as it did for Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A, but sometimes it means your life becomes unbelievably complicated, as it did for Jack Phillips and his Colorado bakery.

It’s dangerous to be associated with Christian causes, or even right-wing causes. Those kinds of stances likely mean a whole host of problems you wouldn’t have to deal with if you had celebrated the approved causes form the get-go. The media approved causes. The activist approved causes. The causes supported by the loudest and well-connected among us.

In short, corporations aren’t just doing this for the money, they’re doing it out of fear. A business would normally have much to gain by keeping quiet and just selling its wares, however, it feels the need to steer clear of one issue and publicly and loudly embrace another. It only does this because it feels that if it doesn’t, that the activists and the media will start asking questions.

And when they start asking their questions, there is no answer that will satisfy them. Once they start asking the questions, you’re already in trouble. Better to capitulate and celebrate now than face the mob and lose money later.