Conservative Christian groups heroically rallied to boycott World Vision — a Washington-based non-profit Christian relief organization — after a company policy change on March 24 was announced to allow the hiring of legally married gay and lesbian employees.
Aleya Ericson | Argonaut
According to World Vision president Rich Sterns on Thursday following the announcement, approximately 5,000 sponsors withdrew sponsorship for needy children across the globe to protest the change. Monthly sponsorship of a child costs $35 a month, so it is estimated that the loss of sponsorship could cost World Vision $2.1 million a year.
World Vision’s child sponsorship program provides needy children across the world with access to clean drinking water, nutritious food and education. The Christians who chose to object to World Vision’s decision by removing funding from the program emulated one Jesus’ most famous miracles — the attempted feeding of 5,000 with few loaves of bread and some fish, which immediately stopped at 2,000 when a gay couple was noticed in the crowd.
Starving children who would have otherwise received food can now sleep easier with the comforting knowledge that their empty stomachs mean a Christian lesbian couple can’t get a job. Because a mere two days after the policy change, World Vision buckled under pressure from donors and reversed the decision.
Now the company will go back to a much more familiar “don’t ask don’t tell” policy in the hiring process. As Sterns pointed out, employees of World Vision are only required to believe in the Apostle’s Creed and statement of faith, so it is likely that there are gay and lesbian employees on staff already.
Threatening the welfare of impoverished children to achieve one’s goals represents an important ideological shift for America. Far too often, the rhetoric has been to “think of the children” when any issue surfaces. Since children are cute and something everyone agrees on, they have been used as the “poster child” for everything from climate change to the failing economy.
Now with the brave action of some, we can put that ideology squarely in the past. Instead of thinking of the children, we can now discard them as collateral damage.
For example, instead of worrying about childhood obesity, the country should adopt a modified version of Jonathan Swift’s central idea in “A Modest Proposal.” In the infamous essay, Swift proposed that the impoverished Irish sell their children as food to the rich to help them out of poverty. Modern parents of obese children can easily benefit from selling their fattened morsel to America’s upper class. After all, if cuts to the food stamp program and poor economic gains continue, parents may soon not have another choice.
Even before the boycott of World Vision made throwing children under a bus acceptable, the Idaho Legislature was an important trendsetter in this movement. Despite Idaho being ranked second to last in education spending per pupil in the U.S. by the Census Bureau in 2010-11 for the sixth successive year, the Legislature has chosen to ignore this data for more important problems. Problems that have been correctly deemed more important and worthy of attention than the education of Idaho’s future include: allowing guns to be openly carried on campus, permitting discrimination based on religion and increasing the interstate speed limit to 80 mph.
Children may be the future, but that doesn’t mean that we have to treat them like it. It is more efficient to continue the current status quo of disregarding future citizens and policymakers in favor of agenda pushing. After all, disregarding children teaches them an important lesson that Christians such as I hold dear — Jesus may say the kingdom of heaven belongs to the children, but the kingdom of Earth belongs to the cruel.
Aleya Ericson can be reached at [email protected]