So, not only is Rick Warren a homophobe, he's also a fraud when it comes to charity...

Solon

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Wed Dec-24-08 09:47 PM
Original message

So, not only is Rick Warren a homophobe, he's also a fraud when it comes to charity...

Edited on Wed Dec-24-08 09:49 PM by Solon

Thanks to lwfern for the excellent post found in the GLBT forum:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=221x108141

With permission, I'm x-posting it here, with some other research I found pertinent to this discussion.

Here's the original post:

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Rick Warren's "Acts of Mercy Foundation"

From someone who did some research on that last spring: http://nogoofyzone.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/rick-and-kay-warren-and-their-acts-of-mercy-foundation

I went on their and found Acts of Mercy 990 forms from 2004 and 2005. Under the Organizations Primary Exempt purpose it states.
� Acts of Mercy foundation will conduct activities in furtherance of the purposes of the Global PEACE Fund to advance the Christian faith. Specifically, the Foundation will work under GPF to fund among other things,Christian ministry and outreach activities to the poor, the distressed or the underprivileged, micro enterprise, church planting, caring for the sick, Christian education and evangelism and promote awareness of HIV/AIDS.

Looks like advancing the christian faith is a higher priority than caring for the sick, but hey, maybe they just wrote up their statement of purpose wrong.

You can look through their tax forms from 2006 here: http://dynamodata.fdncenter.org/990_pdf_archive/200/200393297/200393297_200612_990.pdf

I am not a tax expert, so correct me if I am reading this wrong, but it looks like this to me:

revenue for 2006: $2,161,442 - about 900k in donations, the rest in interest and dividends for the year.

expenses:
Employee salaries: $231,631 (plus another $37k in benefits)
Travel $300k

That's more than half the donations for the year right there.

And here's their "achievements" according to their tax forms:

1. Partnered with OAFLA Uganda (Organization of African First Ladies Against HIV/AIDS) in an Abstinence Training Program for Young People in Schools

2 Gave funding and personnel assistance to Saddleback Church in the development of their HIV/AIDS program

3 Took the lead role in organizing, coordinating and running the Saddleback Church HIV/AIDS Conference

4 Paid for the printing of the Purpose Driven Life in the native language of Rwanda and presented a large quantity to the church leaders there for distribution

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This is additional information I found from this source: http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2008/12/19/untold-consequences-rick-warrens-aids-activism

How that flawed policy plays out can be disastrous. As journalist Michelle Goldberg noted at Religion Dispatches, one of Warren's prot�g�s in Uganda, the rabidly anti-gay pastor Martin Ssempa, has interpreted Warren's faith-driven solutions to the HIV/AIDS epidemic by burning condoms at universities and offering faith-healing to disease-stricken congregants. Other PEPFAR grantees, as Jacobson's colleagues in the global AIDS movement have witnessed, use their funds to promote fundamentalist interpretations of marital roles, advising women that if their husbands beat them, they should try harder to please them.

In addition, apparently there's very little evidence that Rick Warren's poverty program actually fights poverty. The evidence, as Max Blumenthal illustrates in an interview with Amy Goodman, seems to be lacking.

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/23/max_blumenthal_on_rick_warrens_double

Beyond that, you know, Rick Warren says he�s for the environment. Rick Warren says that he�s for fighting poverty, which is great. But what has he actually done? You know, I�ve spent hours scouring the internet, calling around, trying to find some results that Rick Warren has produced in Africa against AIDS, results he�s produced against poverty. And all I can find is that his peace programs, which he calls them, are sort of recruitment vehicles for the churches that he�s planning in Africa and that he is using these programs actually to evangelize, and there�s no real way of measuring his results. And there are Christian groups that are doing good work, you know, in the third world, that are fighting poverty, and they measure results, groups like Medical Teams International. Even World Vision measures results. But we have no way of knowing what Rick Warren is doing. It looks to me like he�s going around to the Aspen Institute and to these big elite festivals and telling people who expect evangelicals to be retrograde and who expect evangelicals to be draconian, that he�s doing something different. And he speaks the language that people want to hear in the media-manufactured age of post-partisanship. But it�s unclear what he�s actually doing, beyond fighting the culture war with a velvet glove.

It seems to me that, even in the interest of finding common ground with Rick Warren, that there is little common ground to find in the first place. Indeed, if all this information is accurate, he's doing more damage with his so called "charity" than anyone imagined.