Warren Buffett's Berkshire-Hathaway ranked worst large Omaha firm for gay employees, job applicants; rating: 0% — most other top Omaha firms also flunked

Related: Why did HRC score Berkshire-Hathaway so low?
 

Left to right: Peter Kiewit Sons and Berkshire-Hathaway (both headquarters are in the same building),
Union Pacific and Mutual of Omaha (decked out for an over-the-top promotion of a 2008
U.S. Olympic swim trial that Mutual sponsored; the 2012 hype was even more outlandish.)

The well-known Omaha corporations whose headquarters are pictured above, all flunked the 2013 Corporate Equality Index ratings released by Human Rights Campaign (HRC),  the country's preeminent gay rights organiza­tion. That study evaluated how America's leading corporations treat their gay employees and job applicants. You can read the whole thing here, with an explanation of HRC's methodology.

ConAgra: almost as good to gay employees as Berkshire is bad

     Notably absent from HRC's rankings was Omaha's huge brokerage firm, TD Ameritrade, whose founder Joe Ricketts, and son, Peter, have a nasty habit of bankrolling antigay GOP politicians like U.S. Senator Deb Fischer and state senator Beau McCoy.
     Here are the rankings for several internationally-renowned companies based in Omaha:

ConAgra: 95
Kutak Rock LLP: 90 (law firm)
Mutual of Omaha: 60
Union Pacific: 55
Peter Kiewit Sons: 15 (construction)
Berkshire-Hathaway: 0

     AKSARBENT is less than surprised at the abysmal rating of gigantic Berkshire Hathaway, whose founder, Warren Buffett, finds the prospect of even joking about being gay offensive.
     GEICO, a Berkshire company, once engaged as a commercial spokesman Charlie Daniels, the only singer we can think of to chart a top 10 record in the United States referring to gay people as "fags" and then to have released a followup which heaped even more of his redneck abuse at the same targets. (Good choice, GEICO, especially when Progressive has run at least one television ad with two males obviously intended to be perceived as a gay couple.)



     The Daniels records in question were his 1973 smash "Uneasy Rider" (skip to 3:17 here) and the sequel, "Uneasy Rider '88," which contained the following lyrics:

But this funny looking feller kept coming on
And he was making me mad with some of the things he said
Then he put his hand on my knee
I said if you don't get your paw off me
I'm gonna locate your nose around
The other side of your head

     AKSARBENT has a hard time picturing, even back in 1988, the scenario of Charlie Daniels being hit on by dudes as anything other than a fantasy of poetic license.
     In April [of 2010], GEICO fired gay gay supportive voice-over actor Lance Baxter, aka D.C. Douglas, best known for his "save up to 15%" tags on GEICO commercials, after a voicemail he left for Dick Armey's astroturf group FreedomWorks was widely circulated in the right-wing blogosphere. (Rule #1: If your voice is on commercials heard by millions of people, use email, not voicemail, when you're pissed off.)
     Baxter was incensed by what he considered to be rampant racism and homophobia among Tea Party members. Baxter's home phone number was subsequently posted on Andrew Breitbart's Big Government website.