When I was in Seminary, I had a part time job at Target. The parent company of Target, Dayton-Hudson Corp., had a relationship with The United Way. All employees of Dayton-Hudson Corp. were encouraged to contribute to The United Way. As with most corporations, there was a push to engage the employees with the company culture, and part of that push was to encourage 100% participation in the company charity. Federal law and company policy prohibited mandatory participation in the charitable giving, but there were contests between the Company Divisions, and the Divisional Managers were pushing the Store Managers hard to solicit contributions. At the time, the United Way was advertising on all NFL games. Their spokespeople included (I believe) such NFL stars as John Elway. Their commercials would show children with Spina Bifida or Down Syndrome; ostensibly, these children were helped by funds collected and distributed by The United Way.
My manager came to me and asked why I wasn't participating in the charity drive. I beleive that my primary reason for not contributing was purely financial--I was a poor student, a part-time employee earning minimum wage, and I thought that even a one-dollar contribution would have a detrimental effect on my household budget. But I didn't want to tell the store manager that I was cheap--the Bible encourages giving alms to the poor. So what I told my manager was that I couldn't support The United Way, a charitable clearing-house, because one of the organizations that they supported was Planned Parenthood. And one of the "health services" that Planned Parenthood provided was abortions. As a seminary student, I announced piously, I could not contribute to any charity that funded abortions, no matter what other good things they did.
I was reminded of this experience this week when I heard the controversy about Susan G. Komen defunding Planned Parenthood clinics. As you know, Susan G. Komen is a charitable foundation dedicated to treatment of and finding a cure for breast cancer. Much of the money they receive from donors to their cause are channeled directly to clinics that do screenings for breast cancer. Many of these clinics receive their primary funding from Planned Parenthood. The clinics probably offer abortions as well as other services, like breast cancer screenings, well woman exams, inoculations and infant formula for babies, and much more. You would think that the money they get from Susan G. Komen probably offsets the cost of x-ray machines, mammography machines, and lead aprons for the radiology techs to wear. But you'd be wrong: 90% of the Planned Parenthood clinics do not have the capacity to do breast cancer screenings, because they don't have a mammography machine on site. So Komen decided they didn't want to subsidize the rest of Planned Parenthood's services, including abortions.
Don't get me wrong. I believe any non-governmental organization (NGO) is free to give whatever they want to whomever they want, just as the donors to these NGOs are free to contribute or not to contribute. The problem I have is the government taking my tax dollars and giving grants and aid to countries, organizations, charities and directly to people that I do not personally support. And yes, that includes Planned Parenthood. But as Paul Harvey used to say, here is the REST of the story.
A chain of bookstores called Lifeway Christian Stores (formerly known as Baptist Book Stores) used to sell Bibles with pink covers. A portion of the sale of these pink Bibles was given to Susan G. Komen for breast cancer research. When Lifeway Christian Stores found out that Susan G. Komen sent a portion of their funds to Planned Parenthood, they pulled all the copies of their pink Bibles and stopped sending proceeds to Komen. That was their right. As a religious retailer, they probably would have lost customers if they hadn't. If their customers found out that they were indirectly supporting Planned Parenthood, Lifeway Christian Stores would have likely lost sales, not just in pink Bibles, but in other items that they sell, like music CDs, books by Christian authors, and church supplies and vestments (like offering plates and those little plastic communion cups). As they say, follow the money. So for their profits as well as their principles, they stopped supporting Komen.
In turn, the Susan G. Komen foundation looked at their internal audits, and decided to stop supporting Planned Parenthood clinics. This was a more courageous act than the bookstore pulling pink Bibles. This was acting more out of principle than profit. Think about it. The total annual Bible sales from Lifeway may be $1 million. The portion of those sales specifically linked to Komen had to be less than 10%. That's $100,000. In retail, the profit margin on books is generally 40%; so now we're talking $40,000 profit. And you know that not all the profits went to the charity; if the portion of the profits was 10% of sales, then that was only about $4,000 annually. If Komen had lost the funding from Lifeway, they surely could have made it up in other areas. They could have sold more pink wristbands at their Race For The Cure events. They could have gone to Barnes & Noble and made a deal to sell pink covers of their best-selling books. They could have done the "safe" thing and not made a big deal of the lost revenue from pink Bibles.
But they didn't.
As much as the World criticizes public officials and businesses and charities for "Follow the Money" policies that end up being unpopular, you would think this would not have made the news. Other companies, like Green companies, are often lauded for holding on to principles over profits. A national shoe company gets lots of media exposure, because for every pair of shoes they sell in America, they give away a pair of shoes in a third world country. But, as it turns out, the World is fickle. The media has accused Komen of being political, not principled. Someone has found a link between the chairwoman of Susan G. Komen and George W. Bush. Apparently they are friends, and any friend of the Bushes has to be an enemy of the media.
My hat is off to the Susan G. Komen Foundation. They chose not to forego the few thousand bucks from Lifeway Christian Stores, and instead stopped funding an organization that funds an abominable practice. (By the way, a woman I work with told me, "I am not a proponent of abortion, but I think that women should have the choice in cases of rape and incest; just not as a means of birth control." I asked her, out of the 3 million abortions performed last year, how many were a result of rape or incest? Why isn't there a law that says in order to have an abortion approved, a police report must be filed accusing some man of rape or incest? If everyone who said "I support it only for rape and incest" really meant what they said, then there should be just such a law. The woman I work with was not amused; she walked off without saying anything.) If the media wants to paint this as political, that is their business. It may sell newspapers and increase ratings for talking heads on CNN, but it has little to do with reality.
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