William Warren wrote: [snip]
And they were caught. Donations that go to Russia have NO oversight and NO possible audit trail: every charitable organization uses some funding for its operations, and there are lists of which charities are more/less efficient than others. The point is that people who want to feel good about giving away money can give it to U.S. institutions with at least some assurance that most of it will go to worthy causes.
The Red Cross is homophobic because at the start of the AIDS epidemic, it continued to agressively solicit blood donations from the gay community despite mounting evidence that AIDS was spread through blood. The San Francisco gay community was very hard hit, and the community was also a major source of blood, based on its efforts to limit the spread of hepatitis through blood donations.
Disaster relief gets the headlines, but the Red Cross is fundamentally in the blood business, and someone decided to keep soliciting blood from gays and thereby speeded up the spread of AIDS.
Needless to say, the Red Cross does not talk about this chapter of its history, but that being said, if I had to choose between donating money to the Red Cross or to an anonymous name on an email from a foreign country, I'd choose the Red Cross.
And, *that* being said, I'd give it to the Salvation Army first.
William Warren
(Filter noise from my address for direct replies)
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: None of what you say is news to me. Red Cross was deeply involved on account of the politics of San Francisco and the gay community therein during the early 1980's. But I do not think Red Cross was hurt as badly from that backlash as was Glide Memorial Blood Services. Have you read the book by Randy Shilts (former reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and gay man [now deceased] entitled _The Boys in the Band_. That sad story told how, among other things, the politics prevalent in the 'gay liberation' movement at the time prevented (or so it was thought) any better way of handling things. One of his quotes, which I remember quite well was his statement that ... "the idea of socially quarentineing the AIDS/HIV carriers is almost unthinkable ... and by the time in a few years when it becomes 'thinkable' it will then be too late." 'Social quarentine' as opposed to 'physical quarentine' meant not so much removing the person from mainstream society [i.e. prison or hospital] as it meant to mark the person in an inconspicuous way [for example, a tiny almost invisible tatoo in a place on one's body where no one would have any right to look except for a physician or a potential sex partner, the two persons who would have every right in the world to know the truth.] Shilts was an excellent writer who died from AIDS several years ago. By the way, I would also tend to give my money and efforts to the Salvation Army. PAT]