Who Cares What Charity Leaders Think About the Iraq War?

To the Editor:

Mark Rosenman (“Charities Are Paying the Terrible Price of War,” January 25) is a little confused when he makes his call for charities to become more partisan in the national-security debate.

For starters, it isn’t very smart. A recent study indicates that political conservatives give more money to charity than liberals do, so is it smart to stake out political positions at odds with some (or even a majority) of donors?

Secondly, it isn’t useful. Why would anyone much care what the head of a social-service charity thinks about the proper way to defend a country? It’s one thing if some rock star fancies himself or herself a geopolitical strategist. You patiently wait for the diatribe to end and get back to the music.

A nonprofit head, by contrast, needs to protect his or her credibility.

Whether the Iraq war is the best response to terrorism by “draining the swamp” and taking the war to the enemy, as an overwhelming majority of Congress (and the electorate) believed at the time, or whether it only creates more terrorists and makes us less safe, is a political issue, not a charitable one. If it keeps us safe, which, since we haven’t been hit since 9/11, would seem to be the case, it doesn’t matter what it costs. Mr. Rosenman didn’t make the case that the policy is wrong, merely that it is unpopular.

Hardly an intelligent analysis.

Next, the premise that we don’t have enough money to fight a war and have social spending is silly. One of the reasons the Republicans lost Congress was that they spent too much on non-Iraq stuff, although not the items Mr. Rosenman would have preferred. Instead, money went to “bridges to nowhere,” pet projects of legislators, and all those roads in West Virginia named after Robert Byrd.

If Mr. Rosenman wants charities to fight for the little guy in Congress, here are some better places to start.

• Steps to supposedly prevent global warming will disproportionately hurt the poor, in this country and elsewhere. Given that no one really thinks these half measures will change the climate much and given the overhyping of this issue, shouldn’t charities be fighting the global-warming fad?
• The federal government gives billions of dollars for things that are politically popular with middle- and upper-middle-class voters that are less used by lower-income taxpayers — college subsidies, PBS spending, many arts grants. Why should the poor subsidize the rich in this manner? True, the working poor don’t pay income tax but their payroll taxes go, in part, into the federal government’s general fund. That money can be diverted into the causes Mr. Rosenman seeks to fund.
• In California the biggest threat to the environment is illegal immigration, which causes traffic, pollution, and the need to convert open space into housing and more roads, and stresses the social safety net. Should Mr. Rosenman encourage the Sierra Club to fight illegal immigration to save the environment, rather than tilt at windmills?
• Ethanol is bad for the environment, is more expensive than gasoline, and, if more widely used, will drive up the cost of corn and trigger higher prices throughout the food chain. These are terrible burdens on the working poor. Doesn’t it make more sense for charities to fight such alternative fuels that make the rich feel good but harm the poor, and instead fight to open up the Arctic Reserve?

If charities are going to enter the political debate, let’s at least get them on the side of the working poor and not take sides in how best to defend a country.

George Turk
President
Millennium Housing Corporation
Newport Beach, Calif.

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To the Editor:

If Mark Rosenman’s shrill commentary and the public stand he urges us all to take against the war are not political, as he claims, then why do his tone, his words, and the timing of his plea clang in unison with the campaign pitches of a half-dozen tax-friendly presidential candidates? He would have us in the nonprofit world set the old “don’t get political” axiom on its head because, after all, now “the war has little popular support.”

That reasoning sounds to me like the end justifying the means.

But, okay, suppose we are to speak out about issues with profound financial and human cost. Would Mr. Rosenman encourage me to speak out if I share neither his world view nor his grasp of the facts?

If Mr. Rosenman’s concerns are about funding, why not celebrate that, in the thick of the war in Iraq, charitable contributions rose 13.6 percent, as you reported in the same issue (“Charitable Deductions Rose Sharply, IRS Says”).

Maybe money that doesn’t pass through the hands of government employees doesn’t count in his book. If his angst is over human suffering, cannot a rational keeper of nonprofit flames be just as concerned for the human suffering a war is waged to curb?

There is an agenda in his column that is all too transparent to eyes that choose to see, and it is not for funding programs or to relieve suffering.

Mr. Rosenman opines that “today, silence is an abdication in the face of an abomination.” Abomination, indeed. This is simply the in-season language of politics. Mr. Rosenman should either come clean about his agenda or stop presuming a) that everyone in the nonprofit world sees things his way, and b) that our communities would hear such ranting as something other than political partisanship.

William Smith
Bill of Writes
Nashville, Tenn.