The Salvation Army is the world’s largest social services provider, serving 23 million individuals a year. It is a venerable organization here in Seattle, active for at least 50 years, with bell ringers all over the city and surrounding suburbs.
Lately, it’s been clashing with the department store empire Nordstroms; it too a Seattle institution that was founded in 1901.
The Army’s been having a bad month PR-wise after the fast food giant Chick-fil-A announced it would no longer donate to them, ostensibly because both organizations have gotten a bad rap from homosexual groups. The Army’s been denying left and right that it discriminates, but the knives are out and what better place than liberal Seattle to wield them?
So The Seattle Times ran this on Christmas Eve:
For 19 years, 85-year-old Dick Clarke has raised money for The Salvation Army during the holiday season — 18 of them ringing a bell beside a red kettle for donations outside Nordstrom’s downtown Seattle store. He loved the conversations and the feeling of giving back through the more than $100,000 he collected. He volunteered five days a week, six hours a day.
“The best thing I like about Thanksgiving is the next day I go to work,” said the retired teacher and principal.
Or that’s how he used to feel. This year, Nordstrom told The Salvation Army it would no longer allow solicitation in front of its doors.
Beyond stating that policy, Nordstrom spokeswoman Jennifer Tice Walker did not answer questions about the change. But Clarke said he was told in a meeting last week with head of stores Jamie Nordstrom that LGBTQ employees said The Salvation Army’s presence made them uncomfortable.
Apparently this decision was made several weeks ago.
Why the Times didn’t get around to printing this until now is a mystery. Maybe it just had “Christmas Story” written all over it. And how many uncomfortable Nordstrom’s employees are we talking about here? One? Five? Ten?
The Salvation Army — an evangelical Christian organization that is one of the world’s largest providers of homeless shelters, food banks, youth programs and other social services — has long had a reputation of being unwelcoming to LGBTQ people. Leaders say their organization, like many religious groups, espouses a theology that sees marriage as between a man and a woman. But they say they do not discriminate when providing services or hiring staffers.
So, they’re not “unwelcoming” when it comes to boots-on-the-ground treatment; it’s just that their doctrines are unacceptable? Shouldn’t we be told that the Salvation Army not only employs same-sex couples but offers them health benefits like everyone else?
Fortunately, the story included a link to the Salvation Army’s LGBTQ page on its site.
Clarke is a local celebrity in terms of the tons of money he’s raised for the Salvation Army. King5 TV did a story on him in 2016. I am curious if any other Nordstrom’s stores are kicking out its ringers, including its new flagship store in Manhattan.
The city of Seattle, which like King County contracts with The Salvation Army to provide homeless shelters, will next month begin an “equity audit” in response to “concerns expressed by the community that Salvation Army is not a safe place for LBGTQ persons experiencing homelessness,” wrote Jason Johnson, acting director of the city’s Human Services Department, in a letter to Salvation Army officials in early December.
City spokesman Mark Reardon said he does not know if the concerns — raised initially to All Home’s coordinating board, which distributes federal funding for the county’s homelessness response — arose from any specific instances of alleged discrimination. County and All Home officials said they do not know, either.
So there are vague worries about the Army that aren’t attached to any one person or accusation but arise from “feelings” by anonymous people. Kind of like the “feelings” of the anonymous Nordstrom’s employees who as far as we know never experienced any unkind word from Clarke. All there are is “feelings.”
“Perception is reality,” one of my old editors used to tell me and of course I’d tell him he was full of it and that our job was to tell the truth, not perceptions. But here we have unnamed employees going after an 85-year-old man because of their perceptions.
But there is a larger ongoing debate about The Salvation Army, one that by implication extends to many religiously affiliated aid groups: Does an organization’s position on same-sex relationships color the work it does?
“Surely no one wants to see programs for those living in poverty eliminated simply because some disagree with the theology of those who provide them,” argued David Hudson, national Salvation Army commander, in a November op-ed in USA Today.
The Salvation Army is among 12 nonprofits that benefit from donations raised by The Seattle Times Fund For The Needy.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Emerald City, just know that we have a massive homeless problem here. We’re third in the country behind New York and Los Angeles even though Seattle is the country’s 18th largest city. (If you count our metro area, we zoom up to 13th or 14th place, but our homeless problem has sparked TV specials like this one.
One of the organizations that’s out there actually feeding and housing the homeless is the Salvation Army. I don’t see throngs of their liberal critics out on the streets handing out food, clothing and opportunities for shelter.
The article does give the Army folks space for their quotes, including that by a local commander who points out that a number of their employees are gay — including several of them (apparently) within a few feet of the reporter as she visited a holiday toy giveaway.
Nothing stops them from becoming managers, including department directors, he said, although commanders like him are ordained ministers who sign a covenant saying they subscribe to The Salvation Army’s theology. Other religious groups, including World Vision and CRISTA Ministries, have not welcomed LGBTQ people or those in same-sex marriages into the organization.
My pet peeve is that the theology in question here is basic Christian doctrine that has been in force 2,000 years. And to say that World Vision doesn’t “welcome” gay people into its organization isn’t really true. World Vision no doubt has plenty of LBGTQ folks there but they are required to abstain from sex outside of heterosexual marriage. But then again, so are heterosexual singles, many of whom, in a culture that increasingly rejects marriage, are unwillingly celibate as well.
This slash-and-burn-against-all-perceived-opponents attitude here in Seattle. is not just aimed at the Salvation Army. The Times recently ran a piece about trans activists slamming the Seattle Public Library for inviting as speakers a woman’s group that doesn’t recognize trans men as men, nor trans women as women.
No, this is not Concerned Women for America. This is the Women’s Liberation Front, which describes itself as a radical feminist organization. But the trans activists are calling them a hate group. There’s no religion involved in that cat fight, but it’s all part of the same oppressive climate in Seattle that denies First Amendment rights to those who don’t toe the party line.
Back to the Salvation Army, I wish the reporter had shown a lot more skepticism toward the anonymous complainers at Nordstroms who are more prejudiced than the man they’re against. It’s one thing if people had filed an official complaint or lawsuit, but for the corporation to expel a help-the-needy organization like the Army simply because some employees are miffed?