The Disunited Way

I had seen reports a while back where the Kamen Foundation, the pink-ribbon breast cancer people, had contracted with Planned Parenthood to do some of the breast-cancer screening. Not to pay for any abortions, just for breast cancer screening. However, the association was enough to make Kamen persona non grata in certain quarters of the religious right.

In the news today was some fallout from that, where Lifeway, the Southern Baptist Convention owned publisher/bookstore chain, pulled some pink ribbon Bibles that had a $1 donation to Kamen as part of the package. They'll reuse the Bibles but ditch the promotional packaging. There's some good holy-hardware quip about blending the Word of God with cancer research fundraising, but that's another post.

The pink-ribbon brigade will of course castigate Lifeway-"the LifeWay move will hurt people who need breast cancer screenings", sayeth Darlene Jacobs. 

Yes, and the move of gay groups to boycott the Salvation Army over their orthodox view on sexuality will hurt the poor as well. The move of many United Ways to defund the Boy Scouts on similar grounds hurt boys as well.

Increasingly, communal efforts to do good will be shut down if the effort is seen to either be too conservative or too liberal in some way. Add that to the commercial boycotts, like Lowe's faux pas of this week, which merely gives oodles of publicity to an obscure show I hadn't even heard about prior to the ad-pull.

If there is no common society, there is no commonweal to defend and nourish. As we fragment into subcultures even within unhyphenated-American culture, those community institutions wind up becoming collateral damage in the disintegration.

 

Comments

[Alan]

The Boy Scouts and the Salvation Army are CHRISTIAN. But their work is general, as private can uphold God's Laws.

[Mark Byron]

The Boy Scouts are monotheistic, but not quite Christian. Jews and Muslims are welcome, as the Scouts want reverent boys, but the form of that reverence is up to the Scout and his family. They are old-school on Ten Commandments-style morality, including not liking homosexuality, which draws the ire of the left.

Many churches host Boy Scout troops; your First Methodist downtown had the troop I was in briefly before switching to Explorers.

They're private, yes, but folks are free to not give them money. To borrow from Yogi Berra, you can't stop them from not giving.