Del, the United Way in San Francisco dropped the Boy Scouts as the result of its discrimination against atheists, and homosexuals if I recall correctly. This is a very tough call, because they also do a whole lot of good, particularly for extremely small, local charities that cannot easily run big drives for donations.
San Francisco has very strict city rules about doing business with companies which discriminate in any way. The Salvation Army, which does an enormous amount of work with the homeless, feeding and clothing them, putting them through detox and getting some of them well enough to participate in work retraining programs, has lost its contracts with the city because its conservative Christian belief system is incompatible with offering health and other benefits to the domestic partners of its homosexual employees here.
There is a lot of discussion here about whether city policy has become too inflexible, and whether there was some compromise which could have been reached. Christian organizations do a lot of extremely important work that the City cannot do on its own. I'm not sure what the answer is to this dilemma, but it is very similar to the one with the Boy Scouts. There were some troops in the Bay Area which served mostly underprivileged boys from broken homes, and they did a lot of very positive work with these children. In particular, there was a Sea Scout troop in Berkeley which was threatened with losing its subsidized, city-supported berths because of the ban on atheists, and there was no other way to raise money to keep them going because the boys and their parents were mostly poverty stricken. In this case, although my memory fails me, I believe some compromise was reached because within this troop atheists were welcome.
Okay, so what happened with your son and Janet Reno? |
