Bill Maher wondered whether the backlash over Bud Light’s decision to partner with transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney is rooted in the fact that Americans are angry because “they’ve had an agenda shoved down their throat.”
“Do they have a point?” Maher asked guests Piers Morgan and Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) during Friday’s episode of HBO’s “Real Time.”
“Why the overreaction to this?” Maher said. His comments were reported by Deadline.
The “Real Time” host lamented that “in trans issues, there seems no room for debate.”
“You have to accept everything they say or you’re a bigot,” Maher said.
Morgan said that Mulvaney’s partnership with Nike, which included her sporting a bra on social media, was more problematic than the Bud Light ad campaign.
“A lot of women got offended by the way Dylan Mulvaney goes about selling himself on TikTok,” Morgan told Maher and Porter.
Morgan noted that women in sports are having to compete with transgender athletes who have a biological advantage stemming from the fact that they were born males.
“It’s not just as simple as saying, ‘I am woman’,” Morgan said.
“It is more complicated.”
He added: “A lot of woman are saying, ‘What is actually happening to us in this process?’”
Porter said that the backlash to Mulvaney is due to “male insecurity” and that Mulvaney is raising issues important to trans rights “while the right is waging these cultural wars.”
Morgan replied by wondering whether trans rights “erode or destroy the rights of women to equality, too.”
“We should be able to have a civil discussion about these things,” Porter said.
As to whether transgender woman should be allowed to compete in women’s sports, the Democratic lawmaker said: “I believe that it should be up to sporting bodies.”
Anheuser-Busch’s top executive on Friday offered an apology that critics said was flat as the beer giant reels from the backlash over its sponsorship deal with Mulvaney.
“We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people,” Anheuser-Busch InBev CEO Brendan Whitworth said in press release titled “Our Responsibility To America.”
“We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer.”
Whitworth finally broke his silence over the brewing controversy but made no mention of the sponsorship deal with Mulvaney — which has led to calls for a boycott of the nation’s largest beer company.
He also didn’t address reports that senior executives were kept in the dark about the Mulvaney rollout.
The $132 billion beer company has seen its market value plummet by some $5 billion since the campaign was launched April 1.
Busch distributors around the country have been feeling the fallout, with many bars in conservative states from Tennessee to Wyoming refusing to stock Bud Light.
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