The “sins” of the father

This story is both appalling and true. Lilly Diabetes has parted ways with driver Conor Daly after reports surfaced that his father, Derek Daly, a retired Indy 500 and Formula One driver, used the N-word during an interview in the 1980s.

The pharmaceutical company’s partnership with Daly was intended to raise awareness for treatment options and resources for people with diabetes. Daly was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at age 14.

The partnership was a good idea, but not good enough to overcome the fact that, decades ago, the driver’s father, not the driver himself, used the N-word.

The company doesn’t claim that Conor Daly is a racist, that he has ever used inappropriate language, or he is guilty of any offense. Instead, exhibiting the spinelessness and employing the weasel words we have come to expect from corporate America, Lilly stated: “Unfortunately, the comments that surfaced this week by Derek Daly distract from this focus [on living with diabetes], so we have made the decision that Lilly Diabetes will no longer run the No. 6 at Road America this weekend.”

I take “distraction” to mean that Lilly came under pressure to drop Conor Daly because of a word his father, who was new to America at the time, uttered all those years ago. Alternatively, perhaps there was little pressure, and Lilly just wanted to signal its virtue.

This is common in corporate America today. It’s as if companies like Lilly hope that if they embrace uncritically all of the left’s political correctness and identity politics inanities, the left will leave them alone. The left, of course, will do no such thing.

We conservatives should use our considerable economic power to make companies pay a price when they take outrageous actions like Lilly’s and Visa’s.

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