As always, for any slow people out there, we are not encouraging people not to help the needy.  We are encouraging people to give their money to a more worthy organization than this group of prudish fundamentalists.  You already knew that they are quite willing to screw the poor if it involves being nice to gay people in any way, shape or form.  Now we find out that they throw brand new, donated toys in the trash when they conflict with their inane “beliefs”:

The Salvation Army says it refuses to distribute Harry Potter and Twilight toys collected for needy children because they’re incompatible with the charity’s Christian beliefs.

The policy has alarmed a Calgarian who volunteered to sift through a southeast warehouse full of unused, donated items and was alarmed when he was told by Salvation Army officials that the two kinds of toys are “disposed of” and not given to other charities.

“I asked if these toys went to another charitable organizations but was told no, that by passing these toys on to another agency for distribution would be supporting these toys,” said the man, who wouldn’t give his name due to his occupation.

[...]

“I was told to withhold a six-inch Harry Potter figure, but when I picked up a plastic M-16, I was told, ‘That’s for the 10-year-olds,’” he said.

“I was shocked…war-themed toys and toys from TV shows and movies with far more violence than Harry Potter and these were considered appropriate toys?”

The Sally Ann refuses to distribute the Twilight and Harry Potter toys because of their wizardry, vampire and werewolf content, said Capt. Pam Goodyear.

Un-frickin-believable.

PZ Myers adds: “I feel so dumb for having ever given that organization anything. I should have been clued in by the frickin’ name that it was run by a gang of puffed-up sanctimonious looneys.”

It’s sort of like the word “family.”  When an organization uses that word in their name, nine out of ten times it’s a hate group which works only for the health of a certain, narrowly-defined concept of “family,” while actively seeking to hurt other families.

The World Bank won’t decertify antigay parents group PFOX as a beneficiary of employee charity, but the Bank won’t match employee donations to the antifamily organization, either — for now.

Metro Weekly reported last week that the bank — part of a multibillion-dollar international foreign-aid institution that is governed by its 187 member countries, with significant influence from the world’s economic superpowers — had admitted Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays to the bank’s Community Connections Campaign. The Campaign matches employees donations to a list of authorized charities that claim to serve employees’ local communities.

The World Bank Group employs approximately 8,000 workers at its headquarters (pictured) in Washington, D.C. These staffers may choose the CCC as a means for automatic charitable donations from their paychecks. PFOX, however, has no documented ex-gay constituency in the D.C. area and, despite Bank requirements, provides no inclusive charitable services.

The Bank’s legitimization of a group that abuses youth and parents with discredited diagnoses and damaging “treatments” for homosexuality prompted protests and petitions by Truth Wins Out and other ex-gay watchdogs. One anonymous bank LGBT staffer complained:

“If a charitable association supporting female genital mutilation, a pro-life organization or an association claiming it can turn black people white had wiggled its way in the CCC, The Bank’s management would have removed it immediately and issued an apology.”

No such removal is yet forthcoming. Indeed, the Bank has claimed that “diversity” is the reason why an antigay, pro-bully group was added to a charity list that includes the pro-equality parental support group Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG).

While PFLAG is a legitimate support group for parents, with support from the mental-health community, PFOX is anything but.

As Truth Wins Out notes, a former PFOX board member, Richard Cohen (who still serves as a therapy guru to the organization), was intimately involved in efforts to create legislation in Uganda that would punish homosexuality with the death penalty or life imprisonment. Furthermore, the director of PFOX’s Speakers Bureau, Arthur Abba Goldberg, is a convicted felon who was sentenced to a year and a half in prison for bilking poor communities with bond schemes. And PFOX has also had its tactics condemned by the worldwide psychological and medical profession, with leaders from the organization being thrown out of professional groups such as the American Counseling Association for violating ethical protocols.

According to TBD.com writer Amanda Hess, a Community Connections Fund rep wrote to one concerned employee that, despite the Bank’s supposed commitment to a safe workplace, “it does mirror society and so there are staff with many differing viewpoints to accommodate which makes for a delicate balancing act” in the Bank’s charitable policies. Hence, inclusive pro-safety charities are to be balanced by exclusive pro-harassment groups with no demonstrated charitable purpose.

The Bank’s only concession thus far is a newly announced probationary period in which the CCC prrogram’s list of faux charities prove their popularity — not their integrity — with Bank staff. According to an internal memo obtained by Hess:

For this year’s Community Connections Campaign, Bank-matching funds will be provided to those organizations that have, through prior participation, established a track record of support with staff. Organizations that have come on the list this year will not be offered matching funds in this year’s campaign, though the Bank will match any contribution that has been made to this latter group prior to today, November 15 2010. We will review the new organizations after one year, to see if they have the staff and community support to warrant a match in the FY12 campaign.

Since the Bank management in D.C. is violating its own charitable policies and disrespecting respect human rights in its employee-charity campaign, pressure may have to be applied not only to Bank management, but also to key foreign representatives to the bank. Political pressure from Washington-area local political leaders has also proven helpful in the past.

Disclosure: The writer, Mike Airhart, is a former staff assistant of the World Bank Group.

Good morning! I am Father John — standing in for Father Clifford Banes who is in court on unspecified charges today.

Today we are blessed, dear Catholic brothers and sisters, with a reading from the Book of Wikipedia:

The parable of the Good Samaritan is a parable told by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke (10:25-37). In the parable, a Jewish traveler is beaten, robbed, and left half dead along the road. First a priest and then a Levite come by, but both avoid the man. Finally, a Samaritan comes by. Samaritans and Jews generally despised each other, but the Samaritan helps the injured Jew.

Jesus is described as telling the parable in response to a question regarding the identity of the “neighbor” which Leviticus 19:18 says should be loved.

This is the word of the Internet Lord.

(Thanks be to God.)

My dear Catholic brothers and sisters. Clearly Jesus was an idiot. We must take heed of the idiocy of today’s reading, and learn from our brothers in Britain who show us the way to true holiness.

Britain’s charity regulatory commission has ruled that the Catholic Care adoption agency must serve gay couples. The agency had demanded that it be exempt from the nation’s anti-discrimination laws. … “The charity is very disappointed with the outcome, Catholic Care will now consider whether there is any other way in which the charity can continue to support families seeking to adopt children in need,” the group said in a statement.

Dear brothers and sisters, the Romans are at our doorstep — threatening to force us to be like the wicked Samaritan who helps the unholy in times of need. We are being persecuted, my children. Stand alert!

Do you want to be holy like me, the priest of the parable, or do you want to be brought down to the level of a despicable Samaritan?

Let us now rise and sing righteous songs of self-praise. For we are God’s people — and they are not!

The Los Angeles Times web site hosts a database that monitors the money spent by non-profit organizations to raise funds — and how little money was returned to the non-profit by the fund-raisers. (The database is limited to fund-raising reported to the state of California from 1997 to 2006.)

The database reports, for example, that Concerned Women for America‘s education and legal action fund collected $14.7 million in gross revenue via for-profit fund-raisers during the decade.

However, CWFA only received $975,000 from its fund-raisers. It seems that more than a million dollars per year, or 93.4 percent of donations collected by for-profit fund-raisers and reported to California, went to the fundraisers, who were primarily:

• InfoCision Management Corp., an Ohio telemarketing company with conservative-Christian and GOP clients,
• MDS Communications Corporation, an Arizona/California outfit that also serves National Right to Life, FRC, the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. (They also serve the global anti-hunger charity CARE — perhaps some polite letters to CARE are in order.)
• Regency Communications, apparently a now-defunct Texas telemarketer that was tied to Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Alliance and The Rutherford Institute

I understand that for-profit telemarketers don’t just raise funds; they charge fees to non-profits to conduct political advocacy, such as rallying members to call lawmakers about an antigay vote. CWFA donors expect their donations to be spent as described by the telemarketer, but CWFA’s for-profit fund-raisers can spend their majority share of the donated money any way they please. They can redirect non-profits’ fund-raising revenues — via discounts, pro bono work, and fresh donations — into partisan political campaigns. And non-profits can choose to overpay their fund-raising contractors, with the knowledge that the overpayment will benefit allies who use the same contractor.

In fact, there are vague signs of such a redistribution of donor cash at MDS Communications: While CWFA received an average 6.6 percent return from all reported for-profit fund-raisers, its returns from MDS are often negative: CWFA has repeatedly spent more than it received. Meanwhile, Family Research Council has enjoyed a 30.6 percent return on donations and National Right to Life has received returns of up to 50 percent from various MDS campaigns from 1997 to 2006.

In 2007 federal tax filings, CWFA reported $10 million in direct public support. While other organizations conduct their political advocacy in-house to maintain control of their message and conserve cash, CWFA paid its for-profit contractors more than $4 million in 2007 — $2.8 million of which appears have been for-profit political advocacy rather than pure solicitation.

The Los Angeles Times story focuses on excesses of charitable fund-raising, and so it does not report, nor even question, MDS’s fund-raising results for Democratic and GOP committees.

There is a strong and largely unregulated potential for cronyism among religious shell organizations; insiders who double-dip as employees and as contractors; fund-raisers; partisan political interests; and unrelated political causes (such as free trade) that would offend many donors to religious-right shell organizations.

Concerned Women for America isn’t alone in preying upon donors’ patriotism and concern for children while handing donations to cronies, according to the Times:

Among The Times’ findings:

• More than 100 charities raised $1 million or more from commercial appeals but netted less than 25 cents per dollar. Fundraisers got the rest.
• In 430 campaigns, charities got nothing: All $44 million donated went to fundraisers. In 337 of those cases, charities actually lost money, paying fees to fundraisers that exceeded the amount raised.
• In hundreds of other campaigns, charities apparently entered into contracts that limited their share of donations to 20% or less, no matter how successful the campaign.
• Groups with strong emotional or patriotic appeal — those supporting animals, children, veterans and public safety workers, for instance — often fared worst. Missing-children charities received less than 15% of more than $28 million raised on their behalf.

What additional restrictions, if any, are needed to prevent religious non-profit organizations from hiring fund-raisers that may siphon off donations for partisan political uses, out of sight of the donors?

And what more must be done to prevent religious organizations from abusing their tax-exempt status?

Focus on the Family has joined with TiVo to turn Father’s Day 2008 into a back-door political attack against gay fathers.

The TiVo “SuperDad” campaign invites people to nominate fathers as SuperDads; Focus’ involvement ensures that gay fathers and their families will be excluded. TiVo’s ties to Focus on the Family are no accident, according to a TiVo representative who spoke with Joe.My.God Average Gay Joe. The Family Equality Council is organizing a letter-writing campaign to TiVo in support of gay fathers.

In addition to discriminating against gay fathers and their offspring, Focus and its local branches and antifamily allies in California plan this year to divert $30 million dollars from more charitable endeavors into their petty war against marriage.

Joe Brummer points out that the $30 million spent by antifamily religious-right groups to institutionalize discrimination against monogamous gay couples should instead be spent to prevent malaria in Africa, buy cell phones for soldiers in Iraq to talk with their families, sponsor a million children in Africa for a month, or send 1,000 youths to college for a year.