Barilla pasta maker — humbled by gay pressures — gives LGBTs rights

Barilla pasta maker — the Italian company that a year ago said gays could “go eat another brand” if they disagreed with the firm’s traditional family values — has now done a 180 and touts a new gay-friendly culture that even includes a lesbian couple on its website to promote family dinners.

In fact, Barilla’s come so far in embracing gay rights in recent months that the Human Rights Campaign, a prominent group that advances homosexual causes, just gave the firm a perfect score on its annual Corporate Equality Index — a key rater of companies’ internal policies and external outreach on LGBT issues, The Washington Post reported.

“It is very unusual for a business to take on the full spectrum of CEI criteria in one year,” Deena Fidas, director of the workplace program for the Human Rights Campaign, said in The Post. “Some people may certainly speculate about the motivations here, but at the end of the day it’s irrefutable that at Barilla, you have LGBT-inclusive polices and practices … that were not there a year ago.”

In September 2013, Guido Barillo told an Italian radio host: “I would never do [an ad] with a homosexual couple, not for lack of respect, but because we don’t agree with them. Ours is a classic family where the woman plays a fundamental role. If [gays] don’t like it, they can go eat another brand.”

His statement rocked headlines the world over and sent many in the gay rights community to press for boycotts. Mr. Barilla subsequently sent out several apologies, while the company worked to contain the financial fallout.

But that’s all in the past.

Mr. Barilla said in a statement reported by The Post that he was “proud to say that … we have all learned a great deal about the true definition and meaning of family, and over the past year, we have worked hard to reflect that throughout our organization.”

Talita Erickson, the chief diversity officer for Barilla, said the firm’s expanded its health benefits to include transgenders and its anti-discrimination policy to include gays and transgenders, and implemented a diversity training course for all 8,000 employees.

The company’s also given money to an anti-bully group founded by the parents of a gay Rutgers University student who committed suicide and put a lesbian couple on its web site to promote the concept of sit-down family dinners, The Post reported.

On top of that, the company is likely to feature gays in upcoming television commercials.

“My understanding is we’re absolutely open to having the LGBT community represented in our ads in the future,” Ms. Erickson said in The Post. “It’s going to happen gradually.”