The Right’s Grifter Problem

Having followed the far right for over two decades, one phenomenon has been constant: groups of bogus experts and supposed lobbyists who are little more than leeches who enrich themselves by fleecing the gullible and ignorant.  Evangelical Christians (who typically have the lowest levels of education) seem to be among the easiest marks for these grifters as exemplified by both scamvangelists - think Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Jr., Franklin Graham and a host of others - who live the lives of multi-millionaires as they cajole those struggling financially to tithe to their organizations and "ministries." In the far right political realm, things are little better.  The ignorant and gullible are played time and time again by appeals to their bigotry and/or extremism to hand over money so the scammers and con-artists can live the good life. This situation existed long before Trump, but he has played upon the ease with which much of the so-called conservative base can be suckered.   A piece in National Review and another in New York Magazine look at this ongoing phenomenon of the right.  The National Review piece begins by providing a list of political action committees and groups that have one thing in common: they take in tons of money and very little of it ever gets to the supposed cause. Here's a sampling of what follows:

Politico didn’t specify which 33 PACs they reviewed; if their list overlaps entirely with the RightWingNews list, then the total sum listed above would be $127 million; if they don’t overlap at all, it would be $177 million. That is money that could have gone directly to candidates’ campaigns or other actions that would have advanced the conservative cause in recent cycles. But instead it went into more fundraising expenses, more overhead costs, or into the pockets of those running these PACs.

Why is the conservative movement not as effective as its supporters want it to be? Because day after day, year after year, little old ladies get called on the phone or emailed or sent letters in the mail telling them that the future of the country is at stake and that if they don’t make a donation to groups that might as well be named Make Telemarketers Wealthy Again right now, the country will go to hell in a handbasket. Those little old ladies get out their checkbooks and give what they can spare, convinced that they’re making a difference and helping make the world a better place. What they’re doing is ensuring that the guys running these PACs can enjoy a more luxurious lifestyle. Meanwhile, conservative candidates lose, kicking the dirt after primary day or the general election, convinced that if they had just had another $100,000 for get-out-the-vote operations, they might have come out on top.

What’s more, most of these PACs thrive on telling conservative grassroots things that aren’t true. Clarke didn’t want to run for Senate in Wisconsin, Laura Ingraham wasn’t interested in running for Senate in Virginia, and Allen West wasn’t running for Senate in Florida. The PACs propagate a narrative in which they’re the heroic crusaders for conservative values, secure borders and freedom, up against corrupt establishment elites . . . when they’re in fact run by those coastal political operatives and keeping most of the money for their own operations.

We can apply this beyond the realm of politics, as well. Why is America not enjoying a widespread revival of Christian values? There are a bunch of reasons, but we can start with televangelist Kenneth Copeland attempting to justify his purchase of a third private plane, a Gulfstream V.  Copeland’s excuse was that flying commercial “like getting into a long tube with a bunch of demons.” I’m pretty sure I’ve sat next to the passengers he’s describing, and we all got through it okay.

Progressives ought to be cheering the ease with which those on the right get fleeced literally daily.  The New York Magazine continues the examination of this reality and the fact that the right complained about Obama era efforts to stop the frauds:

Republicans have long complained, usually in private, that their fundraising apparatus is overrun with fraudsters. National Review’s Jim Geraghty has a column, “The Right’s Grifter Problem,” saying what many of them have been whispering. Many of President Trump’s most publicly strident loyalists are in the business of raising money for political projects that spend virtually all their funds on operating expenses. 

An unstated irony behind Geraghty’s complaint is that there is an agency tasked with overseeing the kind of misconduct he denounces: the IRS. When the first wave of tea-party scam PACs appeared, the IRS did look into them. Republicans insisted the agency was “targeting” the right for political reasons, probably at the behest of the Obama administration. While they spent years investigating the agency and making wild charges, a series of investigations by the agency’s inspector general, the Senate Finance Committee, and the Department of Justice refuted all their claims. The Obama administration had no involvement in the IRS’s enforcement priorities, and the agency was not even targeting the right at all — its criteria for regulating donors included keywords to search for activists on the left as well as the right. It was in fact clear all along the tea-party fundraising apparatus was rife with grifters. Stephanie Mencimer reported a clearheaded analysis of this in 2013, at the height of the “targeting” hysteria. But Republicans did succeed in their goal of harassing the agency into leaving political donors almost totally unscrutinized. The ironic result is that it has left their own party vulnerable to the financial parasites they rallied to protect themselves from.

The fact Republicans have rejected the conclusions of all these investigations and clung to their targeting theory tells you a lot about the intellectual environment that has proved so welcoming for grifters.

Geraghty’s column lacks any operating theory as to why Republican politics in particular has attracted so many grifters. Such types have exploited two long-standing aspects of conservative thought: a tendency toward Manichaean thinking and a rejection of neutral expertise.

Every victory for the Democratic Party or incremental extension of the welfare state is a twilight struggle to safeguard the last flickering hopes for freedom from the ravages of socialism.

These predictions are not just scare tactics. They reflect the authentic ideology of the American right, which treats liberalism as either indistinguishable from, or an unstoppably slippery slope toward, Bolshevistic central planning. But these beliefs are also very effective as scare tactics. Conservative fears that Democrats will usher in total societal collapse are good ways to scare conservatives into buying gold (an especially lucrative Obama-era conservative grift) or guns.

The right hardly has a monopoly on fearful predictions, of course. But their impact is magnified by the conservative distrust of the intellectual elite. Conservatives have spent decades training their supporters to reject the authority of bureaucrats, professors, the media, or any institution not explicitly committed to the right-wing agenda. Thus kook notions like the Laffer curve and climate-science denial have become cherished precepts of Republican Party thought.

The most supreme unstated irony of Geraghty’s complaint is that Trump himself is a grifter. This is true not only in the general sense of Trump’s lying constantly and exploiting his supporters’ loyalty, but also in the specific sense that Trump ran fraudulent business enterprises.

So it seems a little strange for Geraghty to complain that Republican grifters are letting down President Trump. Donald Trump grifted his way to the presidency and has kept on grifting. It seems positively unfair that his fellow grifters should have to stand down while he keeps wetting his beak. Geraghty complains that many tea-party groups are a “pyramid scheme,” but the essence of a pyramid scheme is that they connect a partnership of con artists with the greatest share of profits flowing to the person at the top.

The fact that the conservative media can publish a column entitled “The Right’s Grifter Problem,” and that the column will depict Donald Trump as a victim rather than a perpetrator, tells you most of what you need to know about why the phenomenon exists in the first place.

Let's hope the right never wises up! 

Foreign Dark Money Is Threatening American Elections

I close a great number of real estate transactions every year and know first hand how easily such transactions done as "cash purchases" without bank confirmation of identities could be used to launder money.  Indeed, there have been numerous stories on Russians buying Trump properties as a likely method to launder dirty money from questionable sources.   In addition, since I set up numerous limited liability companies each year, I also know that in many states - Virginia being one of them - there is no public records that identify the actual owners of the company.   All that is shown is the name of the registered agent and a physical address - which may in fact be a UPS store "office."  A piece in Politico looks at the threat foreign money routed through such entities and/or PACs' to circumvent bans on foreign campaign contributions is to the security of our election system.  Indeed, the NRA has been documented to have  received foreign funds during the 2016 election.  With corrupt politicians like Der Trumpenführer,  it is crucial that more be done to stop foreign interference in our elections by this so-called dark money.  Here are article highlights:

Whatever Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation ends up revealing about Russia’s efforts to subvert our democracy, one thing is already clear from the media attention this topic has received: America’s democratic institutions are highly vulnerable to foreign influence.

Foreign powers use three basic tools to interfere in democratic politics: cyber operations, disinformation and dark money. Thanks in part to Mueller’s indictments of members of Russia’s military intelligence agency (GRU) and the St. Petersburg troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency, we have begun to address election-related cyber attacks and foreign disinformation. But when it comes to foreign dark money – money from unknown foreign sources – we remain woefully unprepared.

The lack of transparency in our campaign finance system combined with extensive foreign money laundering creates a significant vulnerability for our democracy. We don’t know how much illicit money enters the United States from abroad or how much dark money enters American political campaigns, but in 2015, the Treasury Department estimated that $300 billion is laundered through the U.S. every year. While foreign funding of campaigns is prohibited by federal statute, the body that enforces campaign finance laws – the Federal Election Commission (FEC) – lacks both teeth and resources. Sophisticated adversaries like Russia and China know how to bypass the ban on foreign funding by exploiting loopholes in the system and using layers of proxies to mask their activities, making it difficult for the FEC, the FBI, and the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network to follow the money. One of the key loopholes is the ability of so-called super PACs to accept money from U.S. subsidiaries of foreign corporations. And while super PACs are required to file financial disclosure reports, non-profit 501(c) organizations (for example, the National Rifle Association or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) are not. So if a foreign entity transfers money to a 501(c), that organization can in turn contribute funds to a super PAC without disclosing the foreign origin of the money.

The last time Congress took on dark money was after 9/11, in the Patriot Act, when we made it illegal for banks to be “willfully blind” to money laundering and requiring them to verify their customers’ identities. But the lack of any requirement to disclose the beneficial (i.e. “true”) ownership of limited liability companies (LLCs) makes it easy for foreign entities to establish shell companies in the United States.

Fortunately, there are steps we can take to secure our system and shine a light on these murky transactions.

In August, two dozen state attorneys general asked Congress to pass legislation to disclose the beneficial owners of LLCs. A federal solution to this issue is necessary because individual states compete for incorporation revenue and therefore have little incentive to reform on their own. In Nevada, for example, the process of registering a company has been described as “easier than getting a library card.” A federal requirement to disclose the true owners and controlling interests of LLCs would allow law enforcement to scrutinize the “ghost corporations” that pop up overnight in states like Nevada or Delaware – and that could be used to funnel dark money into our politics.

Real estate deals are also susceptible to foreign money laundering because they are largely exempt from the “know your customer” rules that apply to the banking industry.

This allows foreign entities to use shell companies to park their wealth in the United States or to channel that money to U.S. political interests (for example, by purchasing real estate at above-market prices). Implementing more comprehensive disclosure requirements in high-end real estate and prohibiting all-cash sales above certain thresholds would help create transparency in this sector.

The fact that we don’t know exactly how much foreign dark money is being channeled into U.S. politics is precisely why we need to reduce our vulnerabilities. There is ample evidence of dark money penetrating other democracies, and no reason to believe we are immune from this risk.

[W]e can’t ignore the threat posed by foreign dark money. With a new Congress about to be sworn in, there’s an opportunity to finally end the permissive environment for foreign dark money in this country. Campaign finance reform is certainly a necessary part of the solution, but so too is disclosure of beneficial ownership and greater transparency in real estate transactions. As matters of national security, these are issues that should be of interest to both Democrats and Republicans who want to reduce our vulnerability to foreign corrupt influence.

False Churches - Focus on the Family Declares Itself a "Church"

FOTF founder and Trump BFF, James Dobson

I have long believed that all churches that are not putting the vast majority of their revenues toward true charitable purposes -e.g., feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, aiding the poor, etc. - should not be afforded tax-exempt status. Now, another glaring example of the manner in which taxpayers are being forced to indirectly financially underwrite non-charities is provided by Focus on the Family ("FOTF") which has annual revenues of over $89 million has declared itself a "church."   Where does FOTF spend its money?  One one, it is a leading purveyor of anti-gay lies and disinformation.  It also seeks to control elected officials who will push its Christian dominionist agenda.  And, of course, its leadership cadre laughs all the way to the bank. Very little of the moneys reach what most people would consider true charitable works.  Right Wing Watch looks at this latest abuse of the Internal Revenue Code and IRS rules.  Here are highlights:

Focus on the Family, the behemoth Religious Right organization founded by James Dobson, has declared itself to be a church, thereby avoiding a requirement that it file public tax documents, according to IRS records and a document available on the organization’s website.

Focus on the Family filed as a non-church 501(c)(3) nonprofit as recently as the 2014 fiscal year, submitting to the IRS a publicly available Form 990 as most tax-exempt nonprofits are required to do. But when the group posted a Form 990 for the 2015 fiscal year on its website—dated October 26, 2017, and reporting a massive budget of $89 million—it was emblazoned with the message “Not required to file and not filed with the IRS. Not for public inspection.”

On the part of the form on which it is required to identify the reason for its public charity status, the group indicates that it is a “church, convention of churches or association of churches.”

Focus on the Family declaring itself to be a church is puzzling. While the Colorado Springs-based organization has somewhat softened its image since it was led by the firebrand Dobson, it remains active in political debates and advocacy (even in a nominally nonpartisan way). A “social issues” section on the group’s website currently features information on a supposed threat to bathroom safety posed by transgender people thanks to LGBTQ activists fighting in politics, churches and popular culture, and contains an update on “cultural issues in the courts.” 

Gail Harmon, an attorney who has advised nonprofits on tax law for more than 30 years, said that she had never before seen a nonprofit organization declare itself a church. “I just found it shocking,” she said.

“There’s nothing about them that meets the traditional definition of what a church is,” she said. “They don’t have a congregation, they don’t have the rites of various parts of a person’s life. There’s a whole system for what a church is.”

The IRS lists a number of factors that it considers in determining whether an organization is a church, including whether it has a “definite and distinct ecclesiastical government,” “established places of worship” and “regular religious services,” but notes that an organization “need not have all of the characteristics” listed in order to be considered a church.

We have requested documents on the tax status change from Focus on the Family and from the IRS. Focus on the Family has not responded to our request for comment.

The Justice Department Bends Over Backwards to Craft Special Rights for Christofascists

Jack Phillips - the face of a bigot demanding special rights

I have previously noted how the Trump Department of Justice has intervened in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court that has the goal, if successful, of carving out an exception to public accommodation and non-discrimination laws for right wing Christian extremists - those I refer to as Christofascists.   While the effort is largely without precedent, it comes as no surprise given (i) Donald Trump's selling of whatever soul he has to Christofascists during a a June, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower, and (ii) Jeff Sessions' decades old racism and homophobia (Sessions and I were both in the Mobile, Alabama legal community decades ago and, in my opinion, the man has only become more foul with the passage of time).  Given the obsession of the conservative justices on the court with pandering to the myth of Christian persecution and "protecting religious freedom" (Gorsuch is particularly obsessed in this regard), there is a frightening chance that the effort will succeed and the civil rights of many minorities, not just gays, will suffer as a consequence.  The Washington Post editorial board rightly lets loose of Sessions - and by extension, Trump.  One can only wonder how long it will be before blacks - or perhaps Jews given Trump's seeming love for Neo-Nazis - can be targeted for discrimination as long as the bigots claim their religious beliefs justify the mistreatment and segregation.  Here are highlights: 

SHOULD A Colorado baker have the right to turn away a gay couple seeking a custom wedding cake if he disapproves of their upcoming marriage? According to the Justice Department, the answer is yes.

The Supreme Court will soon hear arguments over the conduct of this unwilling baker in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Though the federal government isn’t a party to the case, the Justice Department has made a point of weighing in on the side of Jack Phillips, the “cake artist” whose religious opposition to same-sex marriage led him to refuse to design a cake for a gay couple.

The Justice Department’s legal brief has — rightly — faced criticism from civil rights groups appalled by the government’s argument that Mr. Phillips’s religious beliefs grant him a constitutional right to discriminate against gay customers, despite a Colorado public-accommodations law prohibiting unequal treatment on the basis of sexual orientation. Indeed, the brief is a dispiriting signal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s priorities. The government went out of its way to side with Mr. Phillips, but it has been quiet on any number of other significant cases before the Supreme Court this term.

Masterpiece Cakeshop isn’t really a religious-freedom case at all — though Mr. Phillips’s attorneys do point to their client’s constitutional rights on that front. Because Colorado lacks legislation raising the standard for state infringement on religious belief — unlike many states and the federal government — Mr. Phillips is left with what’s likely a losing argument.

That’s why both Mr. Phillips and the Justice Department focus on the baker’s freedom of expression, arguing that crafting a cake for a same-sex wedding would force Mr. Phillips to celebrate a ceremony of which he disapproves.

The Justice Department’s effort to craft a narrow exception to public-accommodations law risks blowing a hole through the fabric of that law entirely. Mr. Phillips is providing a service to his customers for pay. While he does so, he should be subject to anti-discrimination laws like every other business is.

Two years after Obergefell, cases such as Masterpiece Cakeshop have been relatively unsuccessful and few and far between — a sign of a nation moving forward. The Supreme Court should now resist the Justice Department’s effort to turn back the clock.

The take away?  Fundamentalist and evangelical Christians are not nice or decent people and the mainstream media needs to start facing the reality that these people are self-centered bigots who think that they are above the laws.  Perhaps while exposing their nastiness, an effort should be made to repeal the tax exempt status of churches - the rest of the citizenry should not be forced to indirectly financially subsidize these foul institutions. 

Salvation Army Drug Clinics Rejecting Transgender People

Every year when the holiday season arrives I encourage people to walk on by the Salvation Army kettles without putting in even a dime. Why, because the organization continues to be stridently anti-LGBT despite many mealy mouthed statements aimed at hiding the truth that the organization remains a right wing religious body that is in some ways little better than the "family values" hate groups.  As Think Progress is reporting, in New York the Salvation Army has been caught discriminating despite that state's non-discrimination laws.  There are plenty of worthy charities to which contributions can be made.  The Salvation Army is not one of them.  Here are highlights on the situation in New York:

The New York City Commission on Human Rights (NYCCHR) announced last week that it was charging four different substance abuse centers, one of which is run by the Salvation Army, with discriminating against transgender patients in violation of city law.

[T]he violations found included:

·        Refusing to accept transgender people as patients or tenants
·        Assigning trans people rooms based on their sex assigned at birth instead of their lived gender identity
·        Unwarranted physical examinations to determine if trans people are on hormone therapy or have had surgery
·        Segregating transgender patients into separate rooms.

The discrimination was found through a testing process after the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF) tipped off the commission that mistreatment was happening. One of the clinics told the testers outright, “No, we don’t [accept transgender patients].” Another clinic’s representative said, “People with moving male parts would be housed with men.”

The NYCCHR has the authority to fine violators up to $250,000 and can also require trainings, policy changes, community service, and mediated apologies.

Two of the clinics found to be violating city law have religious affiliations. The Addicts Rehabilitation Center was founded by a church, operates a gospel choir as one of its programs, and is currently run by Rev. Reginald Williams, a baptist preacher.

The Salvation Army is itself a church with a long history of discriminating against LGBTQ people. While that history has mostly focused on its rejection of homosexuality, a Salvation Army-run homeless shelter in Texas was also accused of anti-transgender discrimination in 2014. Their public relations campaign to improve their LGBTQ image has rung rather hollow.

The recent U.S. Trans Survey found that 22 percent of trans people had been harassed or denied treatment when trying to access services from a drug or alcohol treatment program.

Churches Steal $71 Billion From Taxpayers, Spend Little on Charity

As I have noted many times before, I very much support the concept of taking way tax-exempt status for all religious denominations.  By granting churches tax-exempt status, every taxpayer in the country is being forced to indirectly subsidize churches they don't belong to and which may actively oppose the civil rights of many taxpayers - e.g., the Southern Baptist Convention which is anti-gay and anti-black.  The First Amendment right of freedom of religion by no means requires tax-exempt status for houses of worship.  Indeed, by forcing taxpayers to indirectly support churches that  attack and denigrate them, I would argue that such gifts of tax-exempt status actually violate the First Amendment.  So how is this exempt status justified?  Through the myth that churches are charities.  Unfortunately, most spend a pittance on charity work as a piece here demonstrates.  Here are article highlights:

[W]hat always slips right through the cracks are the tax benefits to religious organizations, which overwhelmingly support Republicans, and are estimated to cost taxpayers nearly double those of hidden off-shore havens. The Secular Policy Institute estimates:  

“If religious organizations (ie. churches, synagogues, mosques, etc.) were taxed like for-profit agencies, it was found that this could generate upwards of $71 billion per year in tax revenue…even if churches were merely held to the standards of other non-profit agencies, this could generate $16.75 billion in tax revenue per year.”  

According to Pew, folks affiliated with ties to religious organizations also overwhelmingly support the Republican Party: “Republicans lead in leaned party identification by 48 points among Mormons and 46 points among white evangelical Protestants, with younger white evangelicals (those under age 35) having similar partisan affiliation as their older counterparts.”

What is particularly egregious about the tax benefits going to religious organizations is that they receive these benefits, ostensibly, because they are charities. Researchers at Secular Humanism have calculated:  

“The Mormon Church, for example, spends roughly .7% of its annual income on charity. Their study of 271 congregations found an average of 71% of revenues going to ‘operating expenses’…Compare this to the American Red Cross, which uses 92.1% of revenues for physical assistance and just 7.9% on operating expenses. The authors also note that Wal-Mart, for instance, gives about $1.75 billion in food aid to charities each year, or twenty-eight times all of the money allotted for charity by the United Methodist Church and almost double what the LDS Church has given in the last twenty-five years.”

Religious organizations are not non-profits, and if they conduct charitable activities, those activities should be separated out from their normal finances, which should not be financed by the government. However, we know the Republican worldview is all about distorting religion to support their bizarre vision of science and reality – supported by a tax policy that enables their wealthy constituency to support their political efforts.

 Republicans talk about tax code reform.  A starting point would be to end this rip off of taxpayers by churches.  Only true charity operations should be tax-exempt.  Let churches start paying taxes on their revenues and on their properties.  The give away that tramples on the rights of non-church goers needs to stop.

How the Knights of Columbus Bankrolls Extremism

For the record, I am a former member of the Knights of Columbus ("K of C") and once was a member of its 4th Degree (the highest level).  That all changed when I came out and left the anti-gay Roman Catholic Church.  But what clinched my exiting from the K of C was the organization's refusal to demand that members of the Church hierarchy who aid and abetted predatory priests and who threatened and intimidated victims and their families be disciplined.  Rather, the K of C leadership had its collective nose so far up the ample asses of the hierarchy, its a wonder they did not smother.  All of this is in stark contrast to the goals and motivations that were behind the K of C's founding: to aid widows and families and to provide a social organizations for immigrants facing discrimination. Now, the K of C has gone on to bankroll discrimination and other right wing causes as examined by a piece in Think Progress.  Here are some article highlights:

In 1882, a group of Catholic men gathered together by New Haven, CT pastor Father Michael J. McGivney incorporated an organization to provide for the families of its deceased members. More than 125 years later, the Knights of Columbus boasts of more than 1.8 million members and of “donating more than $167.5 million to charitable needs and projects” in 2012. Among its members: presidential 2016 hopeful Jeb Bush (R), Speaker of the House John Boehner (R), and Justice Samuel Alito.

But while much of the Knights’ charitable efforts in recent years have supported purely altruistic causes such as the Special Olympics and Habitat for Humanity, millions of their charitable dollars have funded a very socially conservative ideological agenda: opposing abortion, LGBT rights, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, and pornography, while supporting public funding for religious organizations. 

The Knights also operate a legally-separate but affiliated charitable arm called the Knights of Columbus Charities Inc. That tax-exempt non-profit organization made about 57 percent of its annual grants in 2013 to efforts to “promote matters affective life family, marriage and similar priorities in building a culture of life.” More than $1 million of that went to support “Crisis Pregnancy Centers,” a network of facilities that dissuade women from choosing to terminate their pregnancies, often by sharing misinformation.

Beyond just the “culture of life” initiatives, the Knights of Columbus have also spent a large sum of money on other controversial political issues. 

With at least $250,000 in contributions since 2010, the Knights of Columbus are among the most generous donors to Morality in Media, likely the nation’s loudest voice against adult pornography, and its efforts to curb “the ravages of the pornography pandemic in America.”

And since 2010, the Knights of Columbus have given at least $100,000 in support of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies — the nation’s leading force for a more conservative judiciary . . . 

[T]he Knights of Columbus also sent more than $625,000 to another conservative legal group, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. . . . . In addition to its work against the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate and against LGBT rights, Becket has worked to erode the separation of church and state required by the First Amendment. This has included defending prayer at government functions, religious symbols in public spaces, and public funding for religious schools.

the group’s annual resolutions continue to endorse efforts to make sure governments at all levels embrace a “definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others.”

And they followed their words with money. In 2012, the national organization sent $450,000 to the ballot committee pushing to block Maryland’s marriage equality legislation, $300,000 to block marriage equality in Washington, $100,000 to oppose same-sex marriage in Maine, and $250,000 to support a proposed constitutional ban in Minnesota. All four efforts were unsuccessful. The national group and local chapters also contributed more than $1.3 million in 2008 toward the passage of California’s Proposition 8, $100,000 to Arizona’s 2008 constitutional amendment, and $100,000 to Kansas’ 2005 amendment effort.

Although most Catholics in the United States support marriage equality,” it concluded, “the best known U. S. Catholic fraternal organization has used its considerable financial strength and its political connections to mount aggressive campaigns against legislation that would permit lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people to be treated equally under the law.”

Peter Montgomery, a senior fellow at People For the American Way who follows the organization, told ThinkProgress the group is not being transparent about its aims: “Many Catholic parishioners who support the Knights of Columbus might be surprised and dismayed to know that the money they gave at the pancake breakfast is being used to deny equality to their LGBT friends and family,” he observed. “The Knights of Columbus do a lot of good work. Unfortunately, they also contribute millions to culture war battles against LGBT equality and reproductive choice.”

I suspect that today's K of C is not exactly what its founder had in mind back in 1882.

The Salvation Army's History of Anti-LGBT Discrimination

As we move into the beginnings of the holiday season, it is again good to be reminded that not all charities are worthy of support by the LGBT community.  One charity to be avoided is the Salvation Army which has a long history of anti-gay bigotry.  In short, there are many much more deserving charities that do not make LGBT discrimination one of their cornerstones. Here are highlights from a post at Huffington Post that merits a revisit as the holiday season nears:

In recent years, the Salvation Army has come under fire for its lengthy history of anti-LGBT political maneuvering and other incidents. The church has publicly articulated its belief that homosexuality is unacceptable, stating:

Scripture opposes homosexual practices by direct comment and also by clearly implied disapproval. The Bible treats such practices as self-evidently abnormal. ... Attempts to establish or promote such relationships as viable alternatives to heterosexually-based family life do not conform to God's will for society.

While such statements were recently removed from the Salvation Army's website, the church has yet to repudiate any of its explicitly anti-gay beliefs. And though these positions may seem to be limited to the group's internal doctrines, they've become a persistent element of the church's overtly political activities -- activities which have negatively impacted the Salvation Army's ability to provide charitable services, and have aimed to limit the rights and benefits of LGBT citizens in multiple nations.

"Without discrimination" -- myth or fact?

The Salvation Army has recently attempted to counter this perception of the church as homophobic, scrubbing explicitly anti-gay statements from its websites and issuing missives purportedly "debunking" the "myth" of its anti-LGBT stances.

Yet these efforts at cleaning up their image still fail to address the most substantial criticisms of the church's policies. The Salvation Army states that numerous clients at its soup kitchens and homeless shelters are members of the LGBT community, and that these individuals are served without discrimination. They further add: "The Salvation Army embraces employees of many different faiths and orientations and abides by all applicable anti-discrimination laws in its hiring."

These statements completely ignore the reality that the Salvation Army continues to maintain anti-gay theological stances, and continues to discriminate against its own employees and their partners. They also neglect to mention that the organization historically "abides" by anti-discrimination laws by way of shutting down services in areas where such laws apply. The Salvation Army has given no indication that it intends to change any of these anti-LGBT policies.

Supporting the Salvation Army this season, whether by tossing your change in their red kettles or donating your used goods to their resale shops, means assisting an aggressively anti-gay church in furthering its goals of discrimination. Would-be donors should consider whether "doing the most good" might mean supporting one of the many other effective and reputable charities that provide for the needy without engaging in anti-gay beliefs, policies, or political activities.

The Secret Antigay U.S. Money Behind The Global Evangelical War on LGBT Rights

I and - others - increasingly believe that supposedly religious "charities" that blatantly violate the ban on political activities under the Internal Revenue Code need to lose their tax exempt status.  Many of the organizations under close analysis do little or no charitable work and instead funnel huge amounts of money into anti-gay (and sometimes anti-minority) political activities.  American taxpayers should not be forced to indirectly underwrite the activities of what are little more than hate groups.   The piece in TwoCare.org looks at the money flowing from supposed "Christian" charities to fund a global war against LGBT rights and which, in the process whip up hate and homophobia that often leans to anti-gay violence.  Pieces kike this one underscore why conservative "Christians" need to become social pariahs in America. They are anything but nice and decent people.  Their mindset is separated from ISIS only by the degree of violence they use on those who refuse to conform to the ugly version of religious belief.  Here are article highlights:

Note to readers: this is the first installment in a Twocare.org/Center Against Religious Extremism series that will examine extensive ties - both financial, organizational, and ideological - between the community of philanthropists, evangelical leaders, and Christian organizations that revolve around the event known as The Gathering and evangelical promotion of anti-gay hatred and anti-LGBT rights activism on a global scale, from Uganda to Russia.

"The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today" (B&H Publishing Group, 2003), which states "[homosexual] activists have followed a strategy akin to what Hitler used back in the 1920s and 1930s to take over Germany” and is currently distributed by the Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the top American organizations participating in WCF events. The ADF is linked to anti-LGBT rights activism in nations spanning three continents, from the United States and Belize to Russia. In 2012, ADF received over 25% of its funding from the National Christian Foundation; . . . . .

A Twocare.org analysis shows that out of the 101-odd American speakers featured at major World Congress of Families congresses from WCF I, held in Prague in 1997, to WCF VI, held in Madrid in 2012, 48 of those speakers, almost half, were attached to organizations that have been funded by the National Christian Foundation, the biggest foundation at the yearly event known as The Gathering (featured in the April 2014 Twocare.org special report The Gathering: The Religious Right’s Cash Cow) – an event at which leaders of top Christian right anti-LGBT groups such as the Family Research Council, Focus on The Family, and the Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly the Alliance Defense Fund) frequently mingle with billionaire financiers of the religious right, representatives from the right-wing DeVos, Coors, Friess, Ahmanson, Prince, DeMoss, and MacLellan families and the rapidly growing National Christian Foundation – now America’s 12th biggest charity according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy and which funds multiple “ex-gay” ministries.

By its own description, the event known as The Gathering – whose attending nonprofit foundations give out, according to a Twocare.org analysis, over $1 billion dollars a year in grants – was launched in 1985 from a meeting at the Arlington, Virginia headquarters of The Fellowship, which hosts the annual National Prayer Breakfast.  

Speakers scheduled this year for The Gathering 2014 include NYT columnist David Brooks,  . . . . . Among those Joining Brooks at The Gathering 2014 will be Terry Parker, co-founder and board member of the National Christian Foundation, which since 2005 has given over $1.5 million dollars to the His Servants ministry of Don Schmierer, producer and vendor of a Fieldstead & Company-commissioned line of “ex-gay” books and curricula translated into dozens of languages . . . 

In 2006 Family Research Council head Tony Perkins told The Gathering that the “second greatest threat:” to America, besides “radical Islamists” was “radical homosexuals”. 

Despite ongoing critical media coverage of the World Congress of Families, that over the past decade has come to the fore as a leading U.S.-based initiative which has helped export the culture war agenda of the American religious right – including anti-LGBT hatred and hostility to reproductive freedoms – to Russia and Eastern Europe, one transcendent question has largely been neglected: who funds the American nonprofits that have comprised the dominant presence at WCF events ? And, are the efforts of these nonprofits uncoordinated or are there traceable strategic and leadership connections between these groups ?

The answer to both questions points directly to the elite annual event known as The Gathering and to its biggest nonprofit foundation, the National Christian Foundation, exposed in an ongoing Twocare.org investigation of NCF 990 tax forms from 2001-2012 as probably the biggest – and without a doubt the most prolific – anti-LGBT rights funder in America.

$10,065,726: that’s the amount of funding that the Alliance Defending Freedom – whose leaders have spoken at and helped organize four major World Congress of Families events, and is “easily the most active antigay legal group” according to Human Rights Campaign Vice President Frederick Sainz – received in 2012 from the National Christian Foundation . . . . 

Consider the following quotes, from the Alliance Defending Freedom’s top leaders: . . . . “[Homosexual] activists have followed a strategy akin to what Hitler used back in the 1920s and 1930s to take over Germany… The very future of our nation is at risk if the homosexual agenda continues to advance unchecked.” — from pages 27-28 of The Homosexual Agenda, a 2003 book by ADF President Alan Sears and Craig Osten currently offered for free by the ADF to contributors who donate over $10

[A]s detailed in the Twocare.org special report The Gathering: The Religious Right’s Cash Cow, from 2001-2012 the National Christian Foundation provided $163,384,988 in funding to the ADF, FoF, FRC, and five other major anti-LGBT rights activist groups: the Alliance For Marriage, the American Center For Law and Justice, the American Family Association, Campus Crusade For Christ, and the National Organization For Marriage.  

In a column in the Summer 2012 The Gathering newsletter, President of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit The Gathering Fred Smith discussed the results of a survey done by a private consultant hired to ask Gathering participants “what makes them reluctant to recommend people they meet to The Gathering.” More than a few participants, it seems based on Smith’s column, considered The Gathering to be a “secret society”. 

But judging by a survey of audio recordings from The Gathering, it is not hard to understand why participants might hold such a view; Gathering speakers often describe the need to “infiltrate” secular society: the use of stealth and deceit to further the dominionist “Seven Mountains” mandate, the goal of bringing the seven major spheres of society – government, business, education, media, arts and entertainment, religion, and the family – under the influence of control of “the kingdom” and its ranks of “believers”.

Such an anti-democratic and anti-pluralist, religious supremacist ethic – which has influenced disturbingly wide swaths of the global evangelical missions movement – is interwoven through the culture of The Gathering. 

There is more and readers should read the entire piece.  These organizations not only further a global war against LGBT individuals but ultimately, would overthrow the U.S. Constitution.  In my view, that is tantamount to treason and should be dealt with accordingly.  These are not decent organizations.  They and their agenda are frightening.