bjturk.commentary: political charities

bjturk.commentary
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this bjturk.commentary:
political charities

When you give to disease-related charities, you expect that money to do some good. You expect that it will go to research and the development of cures and that lives willl be saved as a result. Let's face it: the possibility that your dollars may make that cure possible makes you feel good. It does for me too, and there's nothing wrong with that, but how would you feel if that charity used those dollars for political reasons? Would you still feel so supportive?

This has become an issue for me here in Arizona, where three major charitable organizations have thrust themselves into a campaign to push one initiative on the ballot and kill another. Here is the circumstance: threre are three anti-smoking measures on this fall's ballot. One adds an eighty-cent-per-pack tax to fund early childhood programs (misguided, but that's another story), and two separate propositions restrict where people can smoke, with one going further than another. It is these where the charities have come in.

The American Lung Association, the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society are jointly buying commercial time and putting up posters supporting Proposition 201, which is the more restrictive. The commercials are running in prime time, obviously expensive, and the posters are plentiful along our roadways. You can't tell me that I'm wrong about the source of the funding because in this state, such major donors must be listed on the posters and in the commercials, and there they are. In fact, their famous logos appear on the posters as well so there can be no doubt. So spent are some of our donations.

This is not to say that these charities have no right to urge the passage of the proposal that limits smoking to a greater degree. They most certainly do. In fact, I think that most of us would be horrified if any of these organizations failed to announce their support of either or both issues at hand. However, that does not mean that we would be equally thrilled to see them spending hundreds of thousands of donated dollars, if not millions, to ensure its approval.

To be fair, the competing measure, Proposition 206, is notably being supported by tobacco giant R. J. Reynolds. Of the two, this would allow bar owners to permit smoking if they chose, so long as such an area was completely separate from the non-smoking area. Clearly, RJR is trying to protect its market to the degree they can, and no matter how you feel about their product, one cannot argue that it is entirely proper for a business to do what it can to ensure that people can still use its products.

It seems likely that all three measures will pass handily, but millions will have been spent that could have kept someone from dying. That bothers me. I'm not saying that there's nothing wrong with smoking. If there wasn't, I wouldn't have quit earlier this year after almost thirty years of smoking a pack a day. My problem is that these charities should not have spent donated funds on a political campaign. Because of what I believe is a misappropriation of funds, I am sorry to say that I cannot support them any longer. They will no longer get anything directly from me. They have voted with their dollars, and I'm voting with mine, for something else.

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. You can support the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation at http://www.komen.org. Whether they share with the American Cancer Society is up to them.

October 2, 2006

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