I think you're shifting your goalposts, as the saying goes. Goodwill is most definitely a charity. "Charity" is not limited to food and shelter. You should know better than to try and imply otherwise, since you can expect to always be called out on this board for even the slightest errors in your logic.
Not at all. My goal in posting here was to prove that the Salvation Army is doing more good then bad and deserves some merit. My main points thus far have been:
-It is a large, national organization. It does a great deal of service to people who need it. It is so extensive that it has pretty much no equal(I will answer your dispute to that later)
-It is one of the few Christian groups that does not try to push its agenda through the legislative process or exert its power to shape politics.
-It spends its money where it says it does.
I'll take a moment and answer Zeality's post before I go on to the next part.
They are self-described evangelicals. They're a Christian mission. All the aid they distribute is tied with messages of Christ. That's proselytizing. They also operate multiple youth groups and, like Scientology, take advantage of providing charity in disaster relief to spread their message.
They proselytize. Whoopdy-effing-doo! But no, you're right. How dare those Christians try to increase their numbers by recruiting new members! How dare those Christians try to give meaning to those who have suffered a catastrophe! And how dare those Christians, who honestly believe that the only path to Salvation is through Christ try to save people's souls! Those damn Christians don't care about anybody, do they?
I know what your main argument here is: Religion is evil, so any act to expand it is condemnable. But I like how famed atheist Penn Gillett, you may remember him from when he did Bullshit on Mother Theresa, put it. He said something to the effect of, how much do you have to hate someone to not try to proselytize?
Now, onto that "gem" you found:
The Salvation Army's position is that because it is a church, Section VII of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964 explicitly guarantees its right to discriminate on the basis of its religious beliefs in its hiring. To reinforce its position, it threatened to close all soup kitchens in New York City when the city government proposed legislation that would require all organizations doing business with it to provide equal benefits to unmarried domestic partners.
How Christlike of them. "GOING TO GIVE BENEFITS TO THEM GODDAMN GAYS?? WELL YOUR HOMELESS CAN STARVE!!!!! PRAISE THE LORD!!!!"
Follow through on your research. The footnote for that statement leads to
this article. It is an article published in a gay newsletter called Chicago Pride. The source reproduced the article from a website called 365gay, which has a definite anti-Christian bias . The encyclopedia entry itself is weasel-worded to hell and back.
If the anti-gay stance is this pervasive, then yes, it is disturbing. However, there are same-sex benefits in New York City, and there are still Salvation Army workers there, and that, not what the head honcho believes, is what matters.
Goodwill is only not completely secular inasmuch as its origins are not secular. Today, it is run secularly. There is no religious aspect to it, or at least none that I was aware of.
If the Department of Health and Human Services is a charity, then so is Wal-Mart, and Wal-Mart does it better. Wal-Mart employs almost as many people as the entire federal government, only a fraction of which belongs to the DHHS. It makes sure it has low prices, just like Goodwill, and just like anything that's regulated. Finally, Wal-Mart donates a ton of money into local communities. What makes this better than the DHHS is that it donates it directly, thus cutting out the middleman and need for a bureaucracy, all of which costs more money.
Or does the fact that Wal-Mart is a for-profit enterprise prevent it from being a charity? If so, then Goodwill is tossed out too.
Your insistence that charity must be voluntary is not unprecedented, but it is difficult to justify such a narrow requirement. Charity has, historically, been an obligatory activity--ethically if not legally.
Ethically, morally, yes. Legally, hell no.
I disagree. I think that the voluntary aspect is what distinguishes a charity from anything else. Forcing people to give up money for a charitable cause is not charity; it's socialism. I'm not debating whether what the DHHS does is good or bad(I don't think many people would disagree on that), I'm simply saying that it's not a charity.
But let's say that you're completely right, J, and that I lose the bet I never made. I know that when I give my money to the Salvation Army, it's going to end up with someone who needs it. That is what makes them worth it, and that is commendable.
