• @[email protected]
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    56 months ago

    I don’t get your point. They give food away for free and they choose what and when. What’s wrong with that, exactly? That their choices correlate with their religion? Well, duh.

    • @[email protected]
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      376 months ago

      The story is illustrative of the failure of private charities as public institutions.

      We’ve got two sets of dietary restrictions, one of which the Catholics disregard and the other they faithfully apply. This makes their charity functionally inaccessible to the chunk of their neighborhood that’s Muslim.

      This recalls another common instance in church charities, wherein recipients are pressured into prayer before receiving aid. As many of these charities - particularly in the wake of the Bush 43 era “Faith Based Initiatives” charity privatization initiative - obtain their aid from the federal government, what you have is secular aid filtered through sectarian institutions as a means of cultivating particular ideological views.

      What’s wrong with that, exactly?

      Set aside the generic legalist “Seperation of Church and State” 1st amendment guidelines, wherein residents aren’t obligated to hold religious views in order to access government services.

      The fundamental problem with a state sponsored religious charity is that it polarizes the community into economic haves and have-nots, based on religious beliefs. And that foments discord, bigotry, and ultimately violence.

      • @[email protected]
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        136 months ago

        For the record, the charity I was talking about does also receive funding from the government, due to the religious institutions pressure through their media and their own preachers, so these criticisms are also appropriate for that situation.

      • @[email protected]
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        96 months ago

        This reminds me of the term “rice christians.” When Christian missionaries would go abroad and offer aid to people only if they converted.

    • @[email protected]
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      76 months ago

      They’re imposing their customs based on dogma on vulnerable people with little to no capacity to choose, with no larger basis than “it’s what I was indoctrinated to believe”. It’s doubly shameful because this is a country that has been trying to unshackle itself from the legacy of a Fascist Catholic dictatorship, the Inquisition, and the forced expulsion/conversion of Jews and Muslims.

      • @[email protected]
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        66 months ago

        Halal/kosher is basically a “farm to table” supply chain requirement. Especially if you’re relying on donations it wouldn’t be simple to source. I wouldn’t expect any charity really to refuse supplies or try to source a ‘duplicate’ set of supplies for a minority of the people they serve. If they were in a Muslim majority area it would make sense to go to the effort.