Melissa McCarthy apologizes for donation to group with history of anti-LGBT

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/13/melissa-mccarthy-apologizes-for-donation-to-group-with-history-of-anti-lgbt.html

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Oops. Their charity looks good at a glance, but I’d dig deeper for anyone I’d give substantial money to.

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A decent person acknowledges when they mistakes, especially those which harm people and makes amends.

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What a civilized, gracious apology. And throughout it she gave credit and thanks to her followers for calling it out. Class act.

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I’m going to go out in a limb and say that any “charity” called something as patently idiotic and obviously Christist Mad-Libs as “Exodus Cry” is a bad place to put money.

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I bite. How is a mistake like this actually made?

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Wouldn’t any charity that is related to a religion be suspect because they implicitly support backwards, magical thinking?

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I used to have this mentality, until I visited communities with either 1) inclusive religious leaders / organizations and/or locations where religious orgs are the community outreach groups for a community.

I’ve since changed my stance some. I reject local organizations who push for divisive, intolerant or similar policies, and choose to support those that instead promote inclusion and diversity instead. Sometimes the latter is a religious org depending on the community. Being religious does not make one automatically divisive and exclusionary, it turns out!

It takes due diligence and effort, but IMHO we would all be better off paying closer attention to the destination of our philanthropy in general.

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Clearly it depends on the group. Some religious organizations consider everybody in group, and are pro-social towards people in general. But many, many religious groups consider only members of their group to be in group. And any prosociality engendered by the group’s morality tends to be aimed specifically at in group members to the exclusion of outgroup.

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This.

Some of the best people I’ve known have been deeply religious. Mainly because they read their core literature, and saw it as a call to be a better person and serve humankind in general.

Also, out of the 4 people I’m thinking of specifically, one is a buddhist monk, one is a retired catholic pastor, and two are regular joes who live and breathe the bible, and have been kicked out of multiple churches (separately…).

One of them got a letter asking him not to return due to “philosophical differences” when he insisted that the church not spend money on a building addition for storage (that was really a luxury and not necessary), but should take the money and help the homeless (of which there are many in his city). Started breaking out bible quotes to support his side. Was told to leave the meeting, then received the letter a couple of days later. I couldn’t be more proud of him.

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In a world where we could expect perfect alignment on beliefs, sure. But we live in a much more messy world. Without a local church my LGBT parent group would be out of luck. The Catholic Workers have anchored a ton of social services in the neighborhood for a century. If you start looking at who provides any number of services you usually can’t get that far without running into a religious group.

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If you can rescind a donation you haven’t made the donation. The only time donations can be clawed back is if the money came from illicit sources (e.g. Madeoff Ponzi).

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[me, watching insta video:]

“don’t read the comments don’t read the comments don’t read the GAH I READ THE COMMENTS”

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image

(Not assuming any gender for you, the sentiment of the gif was too good to pass up.)

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This sounds more like an opinion through local experience that may not be the case in many cultures.

It is hard to find a human culture that doesn’t have a religion and personally I would not like to judge others through the same lens that is common to my culture.

No judgment here on your comment… just wanting to expand religion and spiritual beyond reductive perceptions.

Eh, might just be shorthand for “we had announced the donation but not transferred the money yet, and now we won’t”.

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It’s an opinion based on pro-sociality research studies specifically looking at the effects of religion on pro-sociality, but admittedly I heard them summarized second hand and do not have citations to link to - hence why I’m only calling it an opinion, and not as verifiable fact even though it is based on actual research.

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