November 22, 2003

A most strange and bizarre week it was…

This week, I received, daily, an unsolicited piece of email, spam that is, from Habitat for Humanity. Now lest you protest that my wife and I are donors to that organization and that they got our name there, know this – we are donors, but never in our lives have we given them our email addresses. Furthermore the email came in headlined from something called "The Platinum List." I get literally dozens of different pitches from this Platinum List daily – They are spam specialists. But I am not here to complain about spam in general.

Begging in the country has been raised to a profession, and I, personally, am appalled by it. I am not talking about your garden-variety beggar here, you know the one that panhandles on the street corner, although you would be amazed how much money those individuals can accumulate. Rather I am talking about the "non-profits" of this amazingly generous country of ours.

Traditionally, non-profits are charitable organizations, which raise money from a group of people and use it to do good things for other people who might not otherwise be able to get those good things, say feed the starving in sub-Saharan Africa. "Non-Profit" is simply a tax status that means such organizations do not exist to produce a profit for stockholders and are therefore not subject to corporate income tax. Makes sense when you consider that churches and World Vision are the traditional types of non-profits.

I got my first clue that something might be amiss 10 or 12 twelve years ago when I ran into a woman that did essentially the same thing I did for a living, but did it with a non-profit. She got large grants from institutions that were interested in seeing small businesses thrive in Southern California (the utility companies primarily) and then went about like some sort of Robin Hoodress getting permits for all these companies too stupid to know the difference, and too cheap to pay the cost. I argued with her for hours about this approach. I personally knew her to be spending all that grant money on all sorts of things other than permitting small businesses, but then that was all "overhead" to run the operation.

This picture only worsened post-9/11. Remember the Red Cross scandal where they were spending all those millions somewhere other than New York? Just recently, and group that I previously thought very well of, "Feed the Children" conducted a fund raising campaign to respond to the California wildfires. Feed the Children is one of those "adopt-a-third-world-child-long-distant" groups; what the hell are they doing responding to the California wildfires? In this day and age the answer is they were taking advantage of a fund-raising opportunity, who knows if they will actually spend the money that way?

I think what really bothers me is that traditional non-profits were faith-based groups. As such, most of them relied on the Lord. Of course, their income came from donors, but it was in response to the good works of the group and the fact that the donors shared the burden for whatever that the organization did. That there would be secular non-profits was inevitable in our society. That some of the secular non-profits would corrupt was similarly inevitable. But the faith-based groups are falling in lockstep behind the secular ones. Seeing the money the secular groups are able to tap, the faith-based groups are forming huge organizations devoted to raising the money instead of doing the work. Often now, the non-profits are just money funnels, paying small and individual "contractors" to do the actual work. All the while the executives of the non-profit have huge offices and live in Beverly Hills.

If only the Apostle Paul had known about non-profits – Where would we be today?

I am getting exceptionally tired of commenting on the normalization of homosexuality in our society. Even more, I am really tired of parsing my language to avoid offending anyone on the subject. They offend me with their behavior; therefore, I shall use the language of my choosing, not theirs.

I have written and thought about this so much that I am not certain I have anything new. But to reiterate, homosexual practice is a sin. It is abomination in the eyes of God. God does not simply say that "it is better," as in the case of divorce. There is no narrowly defined specificity as in the roles forbidden women in the church. Homosexual behavior is anathema, it is wrong. If we honor it in any way as a society, we take yet another step away from God. I HATE IT! -- For all you PC assholes out there, I do not hate homosexuals, I hate homosexuality, there is a difference and the sooner you figure it out, the sooner things will get better.

Never have I had such a "twilight zone" feeling about our society as I had this week -- when on a day that our staunchest ally was brutally attacked -- when our President was visiting that ally -- and our media was wall-to-wall on the non-arrest of a perverted, racially and sexually ambiguous, caricature of a man.

Even more than the queer thing above, I think this fact points out that we have completely lost our sense of what is important and what is not. Don’t get me wrong, the freak’s crimes are most heinous and evil, but it is a small and localized evil. In comparison to a group of people that are trying to wipe out our society, it is not an evil worth drawing the attention of all of society.

John Stott, in his seminal work "Basic Christianity" mentions the inability to have a viewpoint beyond one’s own as one of the three primary consequences of sin. I think this little episode points that out with a vengeance. Turkey is outside of most people’s experience. Great Britain is outside of many people’s experience. Everyone has heard a song by the freak. Everyone has children in their lives. This media coverage is an expression of narcissism, and thus an expression of sin, as Stott as identified it.