Actions speak louder than PR agents and using your good works as a hammer to prevent equal opportunity legislation tells me you don’t actually care about helping people, you care about the cred helping people gives you to push your less universally approved agenda.
I am so goddamned sick and tired of being told by homophobes that I am simply “misunderstanding” their position. No, I understand their position perfectly damn well and that’s the problem. If they don’t want to be “misunderstood” then they can stop professing a bigoted and discriminatory position and they can stop trying to get bigoted and discriminatory legislation passed.
I don’t know about where you live, but where I am there is no shortage of organizations who only help those people, without a parallel purpose of pitching Pie In The Sky When You Die. (Which is itself enough of a reason for me to walk past the bucket and contribute elsewhere, without considering any of their additional shortcomings.)
I became disillusioned by the SA many years ago. There was a well-dressed man ringing the bell outside a shopping center. A man went up to him and had a $20 bill in his hand. He went to put it in the bucket and the bell ringer took it from the man instead. He held it in his hand until the fellow went into the store and then put the money in his own pocket…kind of put the kibosh on donating to the SA after that…and I was 10 at the time…
The Christmas “adoption” program we participate in every year is through the Salvation Army. I pick a kid off their master list, we buy them toys and clothes off their wish list, and Salvation Army delivers them. No money involved.
Sadly, I do not have one I can hand you. I helped with the financials at a particular church who serviced kettles and saw how the money went. Any money from the kettles was put into the ‘good works’ section. The only donations that could be used for the church or for paying the higher-ups were the donations made by members of the church. There was usually a deficit for church side (normally made up at the end of the year by the pastors or wealthy members of the congregation).
Other churches in other countries might have different practices.
In that case, you might be careful not to make blanket statements about how things work for the SA.
I wonder if the volunteer was paranoid about a $20 bill being visible in the clear “kettle” and the possibilty of being robbed? So he put it in his pocket out of sight then added it to the take at the end of his shift?
(That’s my “everybody has good in them” self theorizing there.)
I think calling it militarism is just a little bit of an exaggeration, they’re about as militaristic as the Boy Scouts, and less militaristic then reenactors.
Because of this thread I asked some locally and they said that they paid for their own uniforms and musical instruments.
Soylent,
The kettle was dark red, one of the metal ones. (This was 1980, and in Hillsdale, Bergen County, New Jersey, near a Shop Rite supermarket. Very nice area…very low crime…)
Ohhh. Thanks for clarifying. But please don’t let one possibly sketchy volunteer cloud your judgement of an entire organization. The Sally Ann really does good works. When someone downtown here blew up their building for insurance, leaving 45 people homeless a couple of weeks before Christmas, the Salvation Army in my city immediately stepped up to help those affected. (Yes, the owner of a restaurant purposely caused an explosion knowing that people lived in the apartments upstairs and attached buildings. I can’t make this shit up.)
I like to think of the Salvation Army church and the Salvation Army charity as separate entities. I attended the church & Sunday School as a child and it was full of stuck-up bitches and very clique-y. (Just my experience in the city I lived in at the time.) HOWEVER, in the city I live in now, there is a church uptown and the charity/soup kitchen/shelter downtown. I’ve never attended the church but I know the charity downtown works closely with the people who need them and truly does help.
Yeah, I can’t read too much into that. Maybe he was worried about the wind blowing it out of the kettle.
Do all of you who are still giving to them because they help people missing this part? No LGBT employees I can deal with. Not giving to LGBT people? That I cannot. When you are so bigoted that you’re okay with a group of people you don’t like possibly dying because you refuse to help, there’s no way I will do anything with you.
And there sure as hell are other free services, even in my tiny town. I honestly find it hard to believe that no others exist in these big cities most of y’all live in.
Heck, you know what would be preferable? Giving money directly to the homeless. Even if they spend it on booze, at least you aren’t actively working against them.
When SA took their soup kitchens hostage in NYC in 2004, to protest having to follow the same civil rights standards as the rest of the city for their employees, they lost any goodwill I may have had for them. Using the people you’re claiming to exist to help as pawns to push your own agenda is vile, and deserves to be remembered.
I am no apologist for the Salvation Army but in the interests of accuracy, that was refuted in another post in this very thread, in which DrDeth linked to an article in which a PR manager for the SA says that they don’t discriminate in whom they help.
Mine was a similar battle in SF.
There are PLENTY of charities out there to choose from. I don’t need to give to the SA.
Being lazy myself, we donate to the UUSC because they have a similar Christmas time giving effort - dump your spare change into a box at home between Thanksgiving and Christmas, bring in the box during Christmas service.
And of course we should believe that, because their PR person says it?
I’d rather believe a friend who once made use of their services. He is openly gay (wears buttons, has a HRC sticker on his wheelchair), and he said that while they did not openly refuse to serve him, their contempt was so obvious, and they made it so uncomfortable for him that he quit going there.
It’s easy to state in your official rules that you serve everybody, but in actual practice make sure that ‘those kind’ aren’t welcome here.
“To remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all” (Eli Wiesel)
To give money to homophobic institutions is to support homophobia. Being too lazy to give to another charity is remaining silent and indifferent.
Thanks for pointing out the article, I will also kindly inform them of why every time I don’t donate.
Elie Wiesel, of course, was writing about the Holocaust. So of course “to be silent and indifferent” in the case of the SA is less of a sin than not to help anyone at all. Lesser of two evils, and all.
Blech. I don’t donate for many reasons, but the most of which is that they’re freaking annoying. And LOUD. And I hate them all.